AI Is Creating Winners & Losers In Events: Which Will You Be?

Welcome to Event Business Intelligence, weekly deep dive insights on growth, strategy, measurement, innovation and M&A for owners of event businesses and executives responsible for event P&Ls.

In today’s newsletter:

• The 40% AI Productivity Mandate Is Coming

• Winners and Losers in AI Adoption: Corporate & Agency

• 3 AI Productivity Personas

• How to Conduct An AI Workflow Audit

• Weaving AI Adoption Into Your Team’s DNA

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Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It . . .

Scenario: You’re the leader of a large corporate event team. A new MIT study finds that highly skilled workers using AI are 40% more productive than workers who don't use it. Shareholders are aggressively pushing companies to use AI to extract significant efficiencies and productivity growth. That pressure has now made its way to your desk: with events being so labor-intensive to plan and produce, your department has been identified as a prime beneficiary of AI. You’ve been given a mandate by your CFO to examine your team’s workflow and identify specific areas for efficiency improvements.

Assignment: Present a detailed plan for how you will capture a 40% productivity gain across your department. This can be achieved by doing the same amount of work (e.g. number of events) with 40% fewer resources, or taking on 40% more work (e.g. more events, or enhanced service offerings for existing ones) with the same resources, or some combination of both. Nothing is “off the table”, as you should consider both practical and out-of-the-box ideas. You have 30 days.

The scenario above was one of several war-gaming simulations I’ve run for industry leaders last year, one at the Executive Leadership Forum at PCMA’s Convening Leaders, the other at a Future-Proofing Your Event Agency session during the Partnership Summit at Cvent Connect. In both cases, participants workshopped a broad range of ideas to achieve the 40% productivity gain, but acknowledged that the top challenge would be how to get all their team members to adopt them.

AI Is Creating Winners & Losers

If I had a dollar for every article or post extolling the virtues of AI, I’d have enough money to . . . I don’t know, buy the New York Jets and turn around that ailing franchise (trust me, I have a plan). And as ubiquitous as it is, AI keeps evolving, and at an increasingly rapid pace. Notwithstanding the non-zero probability that AI could eventually destroy humanity (“a 10-20% chance it ‘goes bad’”, according to Elon Musk), this is truly one of the most incredible productivity boons of our lifetimes.

But while everyone is talking about it, very few leaders are actually leveraging it to drive and quantify productivity gains, particularly in the events industry. Of the 25 or so business leaders I’ve spoken to recently, all claimed that their teams use AI in some capacity, but only a small handful have truly transformed their workflow to become AI-first organizations. Fewer still have made a practice of tracking the cost savings extracted from using AI, or monetizing the enhanced capabilities it delivers to clients.

Most think of it as a cool toy that helps here and there with various tasks, but they’re not demanding to see it impact their bottom lines. Those people are playing with fire, because the leaders that do insist on leveraging AI to improve profit margins are going to leave them in the dust very soon.

This can be achieved by doing the tasks you normally do (e.g. searching for venues, writing agendas, creating production timelines, etc.), only much faster and with higher quality output. Or you can provide new services entirely (e.g. high-level survey data analysis, aggregate insights and summaries from dozens of session decks, extracting buyer sentiment for different exhibitors by mining app transcripts, creating visualization graphics to explain event ROI, etc.)

The ramifications of this are staggering, yet few leaders are actually measuring this impact on the bottom line.

The Corporate Impact: Career Growth

Using the scenario at the top of this post, let’s say you lead a team of 10 people that produces 50 events a year. Any day now, your boss could demand that you do the same volume of events with 7 or 8 people, or keep those same 10 people but take on 10-15 more events a year. You don’t have to use AI to achieve this, but it’s certainly the best tool you have to do so.

If you don’t have a plan in place to make this happen, it behooves you to get cracking on one right away. Better to be proactive and control the process than to have changes made for you without your input. And if you are already leveraging AI efficiently, then you need to codify what you’re doing and be able to demonstrate those productivity gains.

The people who take the lead on this will build a competitive advantage over their peers, and see their careers soar. The ones that don’t, risk falling victim to the consequences of disruptive change. You don’t have to be super tech-savvy to be a winner in this new world; all it takes is a curiosity to explore AI tools and a desire to integrate them into your workflow. Some examples:

Kara Franker did such a bang-up job leveraging AI to transform the Visit Estes Park DMO - in this report they detail how they integrated 3 AI tools for content development and custom tour development - that she was soon whisked away to lead Florida Keys & Key West, a DMO roughly 10 times the size.

Janette Raush eagerly leaned into AI in her role as EVP, Marketing & Digital at NYC Tourism & Conventions and is now SVP, Innovation and Chief AI Officer at Brand USA, the DMO for the Unites States.

Colja Dams, CEO of German event agency powerhouse Vok Dams, has been an avid explorer of AI tools and possibilities, and created a dedicated 5-person AI design team within the firm that is helping separate Vok Dams from their competitors.

The Agency Impact: Higher Valuations

Most event agencies I spoke with over the past year report having net profit margins of 8-10%. That’s not bad, but it’s also not great. [By contrast, trade show businesses average 20-40% margins.] While an 8-10% margin can provide owners with a nice income, it doesn’t leave much cushion: losing a large client/event or two can mean the difference between turning a profit and breaking even, or incurring a loss.

If you can bump the margin up to 15-20%, that not only gives you the aforementioned cushion, it also makes your business more attractive to potential buyers, who put a premium on higher margin companies. And by far the biggest expense with almost every agency is labor. Traditionally, there were very few opportunities to make a serious dent in our labor costs. Until now.

AI offers agencies a unique opportunity to drive up those margins by making labor far more productive, and smart owners and leaders are already taking advantage of it. Let me be clear: I’m not talking about just using AI. I’m talking about being laser-focused on using AI to drive quantifiable profit margin increases.

3 AI Productivity Personas

There are a ton of AI tools out there, and the list is growing every day, so it’s easy to get overwhelmed, but they tend to all fall into certain categories. Section’s AI Crash Course breaks their functionality into these three areas:

1. The Assistant, to automate tasks like scheduling appointments and meetings, taking notes and creating follow up emails, researching prospects or venues, etc.

2. The Strategist, a thought partner to analyze and interpret data, capture insights from slide decks and reports, write articles, provide writing feedback, etc.

3. The Creator, for designing a pitch deck, drafting a project plan, creating images and graphics to explain ideas, etc.

Each role in your team will likely utilize a different combination of these functions to leverage AI, or entail building custom GPT agents. And in order to do so, you’ll need to conduct a workflow audit.

AI Workflow Audit

Before determining where and how to apply AI to improve productivity, you need to get a handle on where everyone’s time is going.

1. Documenting Processes for Recurring Tasks

The best-run (though for sure not most) organizations have clearly documented processes for most recurring tasks. This not only makes it easier to train new hires, but also ensures that key procedures are done in a uniform manner. If you already have this in place, it will make the next step much easier. If not, this is as good a time as any to start. It may seem daunting and cumbersome at first, but trust me, it will pay enormous dividends down the road.

2. Tracking Time-Consuming Tasks

It will also help if your staff track their time. Many agencies bill on time, and already have time-tracking software integrated into their workflows, enabling them to identify key time-sucks in the planning process. If you don’t currently track time, I’m not necessarily recommending that you start now, but you will need your team to identify which repetitive tasks in their workflow took the most time, which is a big first step in making everyone aware of where their time goes.

3. Categorizing Task Type

In addition to tracking how much time is spent on common tasks, it will be helpful to indicate what type of task it is. Is it robotic and repetitive (a solution for The Assistant AI role), or does it require deep thought and ideation (The Strategist or The Creator).

NOTE: While everyone does need to perform a workflow audit, not everyone needs to come up with an AI solution to make their work more efficient. Once the workflow audits are completed, the next step is to work as a team to identify the tasks that could best be improved with AI, and brainstorm solutions for how to do so. At this juncture it may help to form an informal AI Task Force, comprised of the people on your staff that are most immersed in AI. You may also want to explore bringing in an outside expert, reaching out to industry colleagues and vendors to share their best practices.

Adoption & Integration: The Secret Sauce

Ultimately, the companies that have had the greatest success in this area are the ones who’ve made AI adoption and integration everyone’s job. Leveraging AI to boost productivity should be a “need to have” not a “nice to have.” And that starts at the top; if leaders make it a priority, the message filters down.

The key is to have AI become embedded in the DNA of your organization. E.g. Have people share how they’re utilizing AI when providing updates at staff meetings, make AI adoption part of performance reviews, celebrate the best prompts and shortcuts, set up monthly or quarterly reviews of AI productivity progress against the time tracking charts you established in the workflow audit, etc.

The pace of AI innovation is only getting faster, meaning that the gap between winners and losers will keep widening. It may not be that apparent now, but it will be very soon. Get serious about extracting your AI productivity dividend from your operation before it’s too late.

Here’s to taking your event business to the next level!

Howard Givner

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