Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to intelligent behaviour exhibited by machines and has emerged as a fast growing trend in 2017. AI offers a lot of potential for events and has been gathering significant pace within the industry. So, we take a look at some of the ways AI is having an impact on events:

Improving customer engagement

AI can have a big influence when it comes to building customer engagement. AI enhanced systems and assistants, similar to Siri and Alexa, offer meaningful interaction for attendees and exhibitors. Chatbots are becoming increasingly sophisticated and can be adopted for a number of functions at events. These automated assistants can be used for customer service, acting as a concierge answering simple queries and providing all the information attendees need.  With the use of voice activation, Chatbots can respond to questions and voice commands, suggest potential sessions that attendees might be interested in based on their personal preferences and offer language translation services for international attendees.

Personalising the event experience

One of the biggest advantages of AI is the ability to provide greater opportunities for personalisation at events. Thanks to the ability for computers to learn and recognise patterns when exposed to new data, AI systems can interpret data from attendee’s social media profiles like LinkedIn and Facebook, to recommend the best sessions to attend, networking opportunities and even point attendees in the direction of relevant suppliers. This type of intelligent matchmaking can even work in the favour of exhibitors. Having access to information that tells exhibitors what potential customers are interested in enables them to maximise their pitching efforts.

Driving event attendance

Artificial intelligence can also be used to help drive event attendance, enabling event planners to identify and engage with their target audience. AI can help event professionals identify ideal customers as well as discovering new, potential audiences. AI can also be used to monitor behavioural patterns and common characteristics from existing attendees. Event planners can then build a profile of what an event’s ideal attendee looks like and direct event marketing efforts to target the most promising audiences.

It is important for the events industry to ensure it is continuously keeping up with new ideas and technologies. AI offers a number of benefits that event professionals can take advantage of in order to build and improve customer engagement, add personalisation to the event experience and more efficiently organise and manage events.

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