Artificial intelligence, and more specifically machine learning, is the ability for computer systems to take tasks that normally require human intelligence. While for many people AI can seem unnecessary for the daily tasks they undertake, there are in fact many ways that it can enhance your conferences and events.

Chatbots

You may have had a negative experience with chatbots in the past, but they are getting more sophisticated rapidly. In the future, they will save you a lot of time in the run-up to your event. Unlike you, who needs sleep and a social life, chatbots can be available 24/7 to provide support for your presenters, vendors, and attendees. Given a small investment of your time to train it on common questions, the chatbot will save you far more time so you can focus on the bigger tasks.

Curated attendee recommendations

Today, as an event organiser you cater to a wide range of interests by creating agendas that appeal to a broad audience. The sessions are generally tied together by a common theme in the keynote and spotlight sessions.

The demand for curated, personalised content however presents a great opportunity for us to improve the overall event attendee experience. Instead of leaving attendees to make their own decisions by going through hundreds of session summaries, we can facilitate meetings by organising schedules and directing attendees towards certain individuals during networking portions of digital events.

Data from virtual events

Switching to online events has given us a vast amount of data to work with and analyse with ease. For example, we can see exactly who attended a particular event and when they arrived/left. We can then use this to inform who is interested in what and feed that into a machine learning application to curate attendee recommendations (or of course manually curate it).

Voice recognition – multiple languages

It’s likely that your event will be attended by multiple nationalities, and to promote inclusivity we can use voice recognition to, in real time, display subtitles in various languages. Apps such as Wordly facilitate this, which attendees can download to their mobile devices to have easy accessibility in the language they choose.

Video recap software

You can also save your attendees the hassle of having to take notes or photographs of slides by using video recap software such as CLIPr. This allows your attendees to have a batch of searchable and indexed content from your event. Machine learning techniques can even help us to identify key topics and highlight sections of relevant content dependant on the attendee viewing it.

Facial recognition

Many of us use facial recognition every day to unlock our phones, but we can leverage this technology to even greater effect in the event space in several ways:

• We can analyse the traffic flow of people in and out of the event, what stalls they are visiting and the ‘dwell time’ at these stalls.
• For both logistical and health reasons, we can track occupancy levels in various sectors and monitor social distancing where necessary.
• Focusing on faces, we can even monitor engagement with a particular event by tracking the emotions that play out on individuals’ faces as they watch, be it boredom, fascination, or agitation.

Of course, in all these cases attendees would need to be made aware of any monitoring happening and consent to its use. But having this data will give you a wealth of information to streamline your event offerings in the future.

In summary...

You don’t need to utilise all these techniques by any means in the future to run a successful event or conference, but as you can see even by adopting one or two into your workflow you can gain real benefits.

If you’d like some assistance implementing machine learning techniques for your event or conference, then watch this space; we are currently developing some exciting offerings of our own. We also have a bespoke matchmaking service to facilitate targeting networking for your attendees. Get in touch to learn more.