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When it comes to enlisting AI in the day-to-day operations of her 19-year-old events company, Valerie Sumner, co-owner of Falls Church, Virginia–based VRS Meetings and Events Inc., is fully on board. “I feel like if you’re closed off to it, you’re going to miss so much,” she told Convene. “It’s about evolving, and I’d rather be on the bus than off the bus.”
Valerie Sumner
But Sumner’s embrace of AI goes far beyond a desire to keep her skills up to date. Spark, a generative AI platform developed in partnership between PCMA and Singapore-based event tech company Gevme, has saved her so much time and supplied so much valuable feedback that she thinks of it “almost as having another person in the office.”
Sumner, a former chair of the PCMA Foundation, began experimenting with Spark when it was in an early phase, and her use of the tool has grown as Spark’s capabilities have expanded. Along with Spark, Sumner also uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT to assist with such events-related tasks as writing session descriptions, production scripts, marketing emails, proposals, brainstorming, and more, she said. Both offer free and paid versions; Sumner pays for a subscription to Spark, “because it’s focused on our industry and populated by people in our industry.”
Here are two ways that Sumner uses Spark to save time:
Creating Event Proposals
When Sumner was sitting down to write a “huge” proposal for a client, she had a lot of experience and ideas about how the strategic plan would work, along with a firm grasp on what the client wanted, she said, “but I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss any steps.” She went to the Spark platform, where she entered all of her thoughts in detail, being “very specific about what the event was and what I was working on,” she said. “And within minutes, I got a whole outline for building a strategic plan.” Sumner edited and customized the plan, adding in things that she forgot and taking out others that weren’t needed, she said, “but it saved me hours of time.”
Analyzing Survey Data
Survey tools are good at tabulating numerical data collected in post-event surveys, but where Spark excels is in analyzing event participants’ responses to open-ended questions about their likes and dislikes, Sumner said. “You can put all those comments in and with the push of a button, Spark will tell you overall themes of how well the conference was received, how well people liked it — the five things they loved, the six things they disliked,” she said. “From there, you can revise it to share internally or to give to a board for future planning,” she said. What used to take forever to read and think through “is all summarized in one spot, and it takes minutes.”
AI’s ability to so quickly do many of the things that event professionals once did themselves “can seem a little scary,” she said. “Maybe you are a marketing person who thinks: ‘Wait a minute, that’s what I do. My job is going to go away,’” she said. “Well, no, it’s not going to go away — if you embrace AI and you figure out how to use it so that you can even do a better job.”
‘We’re Very Transparent’
Not only does Valerie Sumner look for ways to use AI to improve her business operations, but many of her clients do, too. “We don’t hide anything,” Sumner said. “We’re very transparent about when we use it, and when [clients] use it.” In fact, she said, she sometimes uses it together with clients to brainstorm ideas for events.
Recently, when a client wanted to talk about launching a new sales conference, Sumner pulled up the Spark platform to help kickstart theconversation. After Sumner entered information including the projected number of participants, the client’s industry, and the event’s purpose, she ticked a box and the platform began generating ideas. “There were a lot of ideas we didn’t like,” she said, “but it gave us someplace to start.”
Barbara Palmer is deputy editor for 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.