< PreviousSAFETY AND INCLUSION ARE A MUST WWW.EVENTPOINTINTERNATIONAL.COM 10 OPINION FACING THE EVENT PLANNER’S NEW NORMAL In the dynamic whirlwind of events, planners manage a multitude of tasks and defuse potential crises. They face a myriad of challenges that would test even the most seasoned professionals. Yet, they stand tall, demonstrating a truly commendable resilience. Looking at the challenges ahead, let’s first and foremost talk about the minefield of sustainability. Rising tides and raging wildfires are transforming once-predictable event landscapes into arenas of adaptation and urgency. Event professionals know that lugging a©endees across continents in metal birds don’t exactly sing ‘green.’ Meanwhile, every uneaten canapé is a tiny reminder of the potentially wasteful nature of business events. Add to this the increased need for repoing ESG metrics, and you have some choppy waters to navigate. But it’s not all negative. There’s plenty to be said for the positive social impact that business events can and should have, but measuring impact is challenging at best, and the planet can’t wait. Moving on to the political chasm, planners must now navigate the labyrinthine politics of geopolitics. Booking a venue has become a sign of endorsing a destination’s political ethics. When the destination does not align with the organisation planning the event, there is always the tough choice to boyco©. Does the GPS need to align with a moral compass, or should every destination be considered? There are constructive options for those with moral conundrums who choose not to boyco©, but can they make a difference? Many are not even considering a destination, the silent boyco©, which won’t show up on any statistics but is quickly becoming the elephant in the room. Cost-cu©ing is needed with economies stagnating. Events are feeling the pinch as costs climb to veiginous heights. Budget belts are tightening while expectations balloon. Client visions of grandiose galas crash against the reality of shrinking resources, and planners must pull off a magic act to keep the show on the road without breaking the bank. One aspect affecting all business areas is remote work, the modern genie released from the bole cou esy of a global pandemic. While remote work has meant that professionals may be more keen to interact with fellow humans at in-person gatherings, it’s also made it harder to turn distant aendee pixels into engaged and present pa icipants. Meanwhile, safety and inclusion are a must. Creating environments that aren’t just physically secure but also suppo emotional safety is on page one of the modern planner’s playbook. It’s imperative to keep a©endees safe from harm. If you want to get the best out of people and have them truly engage, your events need to foster belonging, and that is only possible if people feel that they are safe spaces where everyone is welcome to share openly. When it comes to innovation, all eyes are on aificial intelligence (AI), paicularly with its promise of streamlining event marketing. However, caught in the undeow of algorithmic efficiency, creativity risks being le adri. The seasoned event marketer knows that the secret to a©racting people to events lies in the human touch—the splash of ingenuity that AI can’t mimic. Creative event marketers stand tall above the AI-generated fog by craing narratives that resonate with real people. Speaking of AI, data has become the noh star for event planners to suppo informed decision-making. With severe limitations to other data sources, marketers now appreciate events in all their high-touch, high-reward glory. With a li©le AI to help, planners now cra events and customize experiences with the precision of a Swiss watch by mining the digital depths for a©endee insights and preferences. Let’s not forget about the digital tightrope walkers who are turning hybrid events from pandemic stopgaps into fully-fledged live TV-style productions. A©endees demand flexibility and to join in whatever way is most convenient for them, sometimes even swapping throughout an event. The result is a tough balancing act of producing both live and viual components while trying to keep one from cannibalising the other. So, as we step back to appreciate the jigsaw puzzle that is today’s events industry, it’s clear that each piece is as crucial and complex as the next. With their creative tenacity, event gurus are pa Cirque peormers, spreadsheet wizards, AI tamers, eco-warriors, diplomats, and psychologists. Here’s to the lotus poised atop a pyramid of champagne flutes — fragile, fabulous, and a testament to the industry’s brightest stars. May the challenges be ever in your favor, dear event planners, as you continue to inspire us with your adaptability and creativity. Miguel Neves Editor-in-Chief | Skift Meetings WWW.EVENTPOINTINTERNATIONAL.COM 12 OPINION DEADLINES ARE GETTING SHORTER AND SHORTER WWW.EVENTPOINTINTERNATIONAL.COM 14 OPINION TECHNOLOGY AND THE EVENT? OR THE EVENT AND THE TECHNOLOGY? What is the precedence? Has technology become so essential that it will dictate the rules for the events market in 2024? Technology has become increasingly essential for event professionals. And its use has become so vast and pervasive that it encompasses everything we do, whether as individuals or companies. On a daily basis. At every moment. It is also present at every stage of an event (pre, during and post) and is constantly revolutionising the way we plan, publicise, promote and produce them. Meanwhile, all technology tools and solutions are geared towards human beings, who seek to be enteained, empowered, thrilled, educated, connected, involved, delighted and to do business, among many other objectives. Despite the advances and improvements it has made, the reason for its existence and development lies in people. In order to choose the best tool or solution, the answer lies with the event’s stakeholders, be they people or companies. This intricate and indissoluble marriage of the event and technology is present in all the needs and trends pointed out in all the studies and aicles on the national and international events market. And they point to: The essential ‘tripod’ Tripod implies three legs, right? It would be: Technology - Experience - ESG But if we consider that technology is essential, as well as dominating and giving absolute suppo to our daily lives, we can consider that the events sector will continue to be anchored to two vectors: Experience - ESG Event Experience Experience = involvement? Yes, but not only that. Involvement means ge©ing you out of the passivity of just listening to speakers and into active paicipation. It’s offering the WOW factor. It’s ge©ing the paicipant positively and emotionally involved. It’s ceainly what all stakeholders are looking for. It’s in the top three of all national and international trend surveys. But this topic comes up again when the main difficulties are pointed out (it takes several factors, in several areas of the event to achieve this goal). The checklist of options and even duties is almost endless. The strong demand and wide scope of the experience favour the use of technology as an impoant paner to help deliver personalised experiences. It’s no longer just about offering personalised content, but about creating relevant moments of involvement. Meeting and interacting with people who have something to do with each other. Quality networking. The kind that creates lasting personal and/or professional ties and, when necessary, business. The search for experiences, especially tailor-made ones, also involves engaging and personalised formats, fuelling the choice of technology tools such as VR and AR, live-streaming, engagement and interaction plaµorms and Aificial Intelligence (AI) solutions.AI The exponential increase in interest in and use of solutions and tools involving Aificial Intelligence - AI - is unprecedented in history. The reason is quite simple: the wide application in all economic segments, corporate areas and in people’s daily activities, as well as the enormous gain in productivity in tasks, especially repetitive ones. This is the upside of using AI. But it comes up against serious legal and financial problems and vulnerabilities to companies’ security and reputation, which are essential, very complex issues whose solution still seems far from being resolved. What about events? Today, deadlines are ge©ing shoer and shoer between request and execution, budgets are ge©ing smaller and paicipants and brands are looking for more creative, innovative and personalised events. It’s a scenario that strongly requires the use of tools that can improve the productivity of event professionals. They are becoming increasingly necessary in order to deliver the aforementioned tripod. In other words, the applications for the sector are also numerous and can be found at every stage of the event: - A single prompt can deliver email marketing, posts, presentation scripts, generate content for the event; - Optimise programming; - Improve planning; - Anticipate paicipants’ preferences; - Improve data analysis for matchmaking and networking; - Send personalised suggestions for session agendas and exhibitors, etc. Sustainability Sustainability and ESG are similar, but not the same. Created in 2004, ESG is an acronym in English (Environmental, Social and Governance) related to the production and demonstration of information and metrics resulting from the measurement of corporate pe¶ormance in environmental, social, transparency and efficiency issues. It is strongly linked to the financial market in analysing sustainable investments. It is correct to say that ESG is pa of sustainability. Sustainability ‘is linked to the term sustainable development, which means meeting the needs of the present without affecting future generations. Its meaning is broader and does not only refer to environmental issues, such as the rational use of natural resources (…) It is the company’s strategic vision of a business model aimed at generating a greater impact on society.’ The more relevant the topic is for the company, the more impoance it will give to event suppliers. It’s a direct and intense relationship. That’s why the relevance of sustainability continues to grow in the sector. And there are countless applications and implications: Water; Energy; Waste; F&B; Travel; etc. Just one of the aspects most in evidence today, DEI - Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, has many implications for events, offering equal oppounities for all, regardless of ethnicity, gender, age, abilities, religion, language, place of bih, etc. Among the impacts of sustainability on the events market is: delivering an event that reflects the varied experiences, needs and constraints of all paicipants, whether in the curation of sessions and speakers, the planning of engagement and networking activities, food, access, etc In sho, experience and sustainability are nothing new for professionals in the field. What will change in 2024 is the step forward that everyone will need to take in order to satisfy the growing relevance of these aspects for paicipants and brands. With each event held, new levels of expectation are set, requiring more experienced professionals who are up-to-date with trends and news. Did you know that technology is the means, not the end?!!! Despite this, it has already become essential and indispensable for the events market. But can it be said that it dictates the rules for the sector? Or do human beings dictate what is relevant to them and technology is geared towards satisfying them? It’s a topic that can still generate a lot of good conversation, don’t you think? Vanessa Main CEO | VM Consultoria e Pesquisas em Eventos WWW.EVENTPOINTINTERNATIONAL.COM 16 OPINION ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: THE GAME CHANGER? We’ve been talking about aificial intelligence and its impact on events for a few years now, but 2024 seems to be the year when the industry takes firmer steps towards utilising it. Aificial intelligence (AI), simply put, is a technology that makes machines capable of pe¶orming tasks that usually require human thought. Generative AI is the technology capable of generating content, be it text, images or other types of formats. It is a technology that discovers pa©erns, searches for data, translates, answers questions and makes predictions, and is capable of pe¶orming tasks with great speed and precision. These tasks are improved with the data collected. This technology, which is the subject of this text, can bring immense benefits and oppounities to the industry and, of course, some risks. In MPI’s (Meetings Professionals International) Meetings Outlook Fall 2023, a survey showed that the industry has positive feelings towards this technology and that it will be increasingly present in the ‘toolbox’ of event organisers. 22% of respondents use generative AI regularly, and 50% have positive feelings towards it. 30 per cent believe in AI’s ability to make experiences and events more interesting. AI was one of the top three defining trends of the year in The Eventex 2024 Events Industry Trends Repo . AI is expected to influence every aspect of an event, from planning and proposal creation to communication with aendees, maximising the impact of events. Back in 2019, Vítor Hugo, technical consultant at AVK, a Pouguese company, published an opinion piece in Event Point in which he stated that ‘the biggest change that AI is bringing to events is the personalisation of recommendations for event a©endees, exhibitors and products, on an unprecedented scale.’ Since then, much has been wri©en on the subject, including in Event Point, and it seems that the expression is now on the lips of (almost) everyone who works in events. In addition to the personalisation that Vítor Hugo was talking about, the optimisation of time (in administrative tasks) and the data-driven approach to events are clear benefits. In a major interview in 2023, also in Event Point, Miguel Carneiro, CEO of Shake It, a technology provider, went fuher and said that aificial intelligence will have an impact not only on WWW.EVENTPOINTINTERNATIONAL.COM 18 FOCUS ON events, but on society in general. ‘I think the leap forward, from the point of view of organising events, is going to be, first and foremost, in content. We’ve already seen demonstrations, in a very sho space of time, since the GPTs of this life arrived, of image creation, script creation, video creation, video editing. From logistics to technology, to audiovisuals, I don’t think any of these are exempt from the impact of aificial intelligence.’ In another interview by the same expe, he says: ‘At events, we’re already in a position to give a briefing on DALL-E to get inspiration for a KV and ChatGPT can be asked to propose topics for a scientific programme for a congress. All this in seconds,’ he emphasises. ‘It’s a very powe¶ul tool,’ which can be used by event organisers ‘to make their work more efficient,’ says Miguel Carneiro. In a recent interview, Miguel Pires, from the Nervo agency, pointed to AI as a challenge and a trend. He believes that AI ‘is no longer just something that arouses curiosity, but something that is being integrated into our work methodology and even into the proposals we put out on the street. And it’s no longer just about using the plaµorms that are available, where you pay a subscription and suddenly you’re going to generate some images or ask ChatGPT some questions. We’re going beyond that. We’re already working on the so-called LLM [large language model], in which we can develop specific things for the experiences we’re creating,’ he adds. “The next big thing” In a small survey of the sector, we found that the majority of respondents have already ventured into aificial intelligence and use it regularly in their work, namely in translation, content and image creation, research, scripting and summarising, and as inspiration. The vast majority use ChatGPT, but there are other tools mentioned: Canva, Stockimage, Deepl, Copilot, Grammarly, Bard, CopyAI or Midjourney. Among the concrete benefits they point out: design, content creation, time management, preparing proposals, saving time on day-to-day tasks, personalisation. In the future, these professionals believe that aificial intelligence will be ‘a major ally’ that won’t replace the human aspect, but can help in many aspects of the event. Including the following: Planning and logistics In this chapter, AI can help with contacting paicipants, sending automatic emails, creating chatbots and viual assistants, for example. These are increasingly sophisticated tools that can be used for different functions at the event. Automating answers to questions, providing personalised suggestions - in the a©endee’s language -, suggesting sessions, networking oppounities and real-time suppo, among others. AI can help decide which destination or venue to choose, predict the staff required or ideal for the event, the amount of food needed. In sho, it saves organisations time and resources, leaving time for what ma©ers most: strategy and the a©endee experience.Next >