How ChatGPT Will Impact the Meetings and Events Industry

There are numerous use cases for ChatGPT in event planning, many of which are still being explored. It can be used to generate content ideas, create session titles and descriptions, suggest activities, and find appropriate venues in a given city. In addition, ChatGPT can streamline poll and survey creation to make it easier for planners to get feedback from attendees and increase personalization at their events.

The key to using ChatGPT as effectively as possible is to continue to prompt it and tweak requests as needed until it provides the information you’re looking for. For example, if it generates longer session titles than what you’d like, you can simply ask it to shorten them and it will comply. In general, it’s best to be as specific as possible.

While helpful for certain tasks, ChatGPT is far from perfect, and it should be used with a degree of caution. Currently, one of its biggest limitations is its somewhat outdated knowledge — the data it was trained on only goes up to September 2021, so it can’t help with queries that rely on more recent information. Any list of venues it provides, for example, would not include those that have opened in the last year or so (and, conversely, may include spaces that have since closed).

In addition, some of its responses may be inaccurate or may not make sense for the given prompt, so it’s important to take everything it says with a grain of salt. It will still require a planner’s expertise to interpret its responses, vet them, and ultimately execute on them.

The events industry has been resilient through financial crises and a global pandemic, and it now faces another potential disruption in the form of AI. AI-driven innovation is still in its very early stages, and the full extent of its capabilities are unknown. ChatGPT will likely continue to learn and get better and faster at responding to different prompts — in fact, it has already gotten several updates and upgrades since it was launched.

A recent report by Goldman Sachs economists hypothesized that up to 300 million jobs globally could be subject to automation as AI improves. It’s unclear to what extent event roles will be impacted, but there’s no reason for eventprofs to be worried about their jobs in the very immediate future — AI still very much requires a human touch.

ChatGPT undoubtedly presents significant implications for the future of events, but for now, planners should regard it as a new tool to add to their tech stack. It will remain a bit clunky until more event management tools provide integrations, but it’s nonetheless a powerful tool that can help event profs become more efficient and design better experiences for their audiences.