Log In
Nick Borelli made the wow factor part of his Spark demonstration at edUcon 2024. (Whatever Media Group)
Nick Borelli’s LinkedIn tagline reads “Empowering Event Pros with AI,” an umbrella description of the event technologist’s multiple roles. Borelli is marketing director for Zenus, an AI-powered facial analysis startup, and the designer and instructor for the “Enhancing Events with AI” certificate course for PCMA Event Leadership Institute. He also, he told Convene, makes a “ton of presentations” on using AI tools, including PCMA’s Spark, to groups every year.
One of the things he looks to build into his presentations on Spark are “aha moments” around the platform’s features and capabilities, he said. “Some of them are obvious and some are not.”
Here are three that stand out to Borelli.
‘A Wow Thing’
One of the obvious wow factors is Spark’s ability to build agendas, Borelli said. Unlike ChatGPT, where users begin by facing a blank line, Spark offers users pre-programmed questions about, among other things, the type of event, its goals, and target audience. They’re things that event organizers already know to ask themselves, Borelli said, but having them included takes away the intimidation factor of starting from scratch. As users fill in basic event information and Spark almost instantly generates an agenda, Borelli said, “It’s a wow thing.”
And it gets better, he said. Spark’s first version is serviceable, but still a skeleton, and the platform gives planners the ability to keep adjusting an agenda by adding more context and providing feedback. “You’ve got an excellent B+ start, and now it gives you the time to create some A+ work,” he said. Users can stay in dialogue with the platform, asking for changes like longer breakouts or more evocative session titles. Each iteration takes 30 seconds, Borelli said, compared to the three days it could take an intern to map out a new version of an agenda with conventional tools. Using AI is not about eliminating a planner’s job, he said. It’s about providing planners “with ideas that get their juices going and that they can have conversations around.”
Demystifying Contracts
When Borelli demonstrates in Spark’s legal section how easy it is to upload a legal contract and then ask questions in plain English — “something that seems like it wouldn’t be exciting at all” — his audience is impressed “10 out of 10 times,” he said.
For example, a user may ask: “Is there anything in this document that would hurt our intellectual property?” and Spark will respond, “Yes, Section Three is actually saying this…” Borelli said. Or planners can ask, “I need to be able to protect us in case the speaker doesn’t show up. Can you add an addendum to this contract that protects us as much as possible?” And it does, Borelli said. It’s not the same as hiring a lawyer, or getting legal advice, “but it’s pretty damned good,” he added. “And [users] don’t feel like they’re winging it. It makes them feel less vulnerable.”
Nick Borelli said he tries to build “aha moments” around Spark’s features and capabilities into his presentations about the platform. (Whatever Media Group)
Mining Post-Event Surveys
Creating agendas and generating contracts are routine tasks for most event professionals, but what about those projects that many event professionals haven’t had much time to get their arms around in the first place?
Almost every event organizer will readily admit that they barely look at post-event survey data, Borelli said. It’s a time-consuming task to manually dig through Excel spreadsheets trying to unearth meaningful feedback, he said, and “there’s so much dirt in what [event organizers] get back, it’s hard to find the gold.” But “sorting the dirt to get to the gold,” he added, “is what AI is exceptional at.”
To demonstrate how AI can reveal missed opportunities, Borelli uploads post-event survey data to Spark’s analysis feature, adding data not just from one recent event, but collected in surveys stretching back five years or more. Looking manually through multiple years of Excel spreadsheets to mine year-over-year trends is too burdensome a project for most planners, he said — “AI does it instantaneously.” Borelli then asks Spark to look through the collected reports for a complaint that comes up every year. “And it tells you,” he said, “every year [participants] ask for this, and you never do it. And they’re still asking for it.”
When it comes to specific events, AI allows planners to easily separate feedback into actionable categories, he said. For example, a planner can say: “I want five times where, based on feedback, we violated our mission, vision, and values. And I want five examples of something that gives us an opportunity to fix something and that costs us little to no money.” Or “I want you to come up with the five pieces of feedback that give us the biggest opportunity for revenue growth.”
Then, “at the post-con, you can say: ‘Here is what we accomplished. Here are five issues that are easy to solve. Here are the five things that matter the most for our brand. And here are the five things that [have the potential to be] jumping-off points to create more revenue,’” Borelli said. “That one sheet becomes what you do next year.”
Planners can then take things a step further, by prompting Spark to rewrite that core report into language tailored to each of the organization’s various stakeholders — producing separate reports for the CEO, chief marketing officer, chief finance officer, chief sales officer, and others. The result is that an organization’s CFO, for example, can open an email, and “finally see the outcome of an event in language that they care about,” Borelli said. “And the event organizer gets listened to by every stakeholder.”
Barbara Palmer is deputy editor at Convene.
On the Web
- For information on how to access free and for-fee Spark tools and online AI education, go to pcma.org/spark.
- How Fair Is It to Compare Generative AI Tools?