
The Spark AI Innovation Challenge pushed teams to new levels. (Whatever Media Group)
The Spark AI Innovation Challenge, which was introduced at last year’s Convening Leaders, brings event participants together to compete in teams in a race to complete event-planning tasks using Spark, PCMA’s AI platform for meeting professionals. And at this year’s Convening Leaders’ challenge, the list of tasks was a long one. Participants were asked to:
- Craft a memorable, relevant, and standout event theme — in this case, for the upcoming Convening Leaders 2026 in Philadelphia.
- Design and outline three meaningful content pillars that would both captivate and educate event professionals.
- Create an innovative sustainability strategy that would span the event’s lifecycle.
- Draft an RFP for event activations that would leave a lasting impression.
It was the final part of the challenge that was the kicker. The six teams were to complete all of the above — plus create a presentation for a panel of three judges — in 40 minutes.
“We just went into panic mode immediately,” said Bradley Burroughs, a Ph.D. student at Texas A&M, who was part of a team made up of two other Texas A&M students, Kimberly Long and Mabry Herrmann; professors Donna Lee Sullins and Robert Gip, from Texas A&M’s Department of Hospitality, Hotel Management and Tourism; and Robin Costello, CMP, director of conferences and events at the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology.
Of the six people on the team, only Long and Sullins had used Spark before, said Burroughs, who is writing a dissertation on volunteer tourism. It didn’t take long, however, for Burroughs, an experienced user of ChatGPT, to see Spark’s time-saving potential, he said. “What I saw instantly was, wow, I don’t have to write: ‘Can you create this proposal for me?’” Writing RFPs, along with tools for brainstorming event themes, refining content, and other functions, are included on Spark’s menu of built-in event planning tools. “When you click on that RFP tab, the Spark tool knows exactly what you’re asking for,” Burroughs added. “You don’t have to do extra steps to teach it [anything about event planning] — it’s designed to know how to create a proposal specifically without me having to explain to it what a proposal is.” He also appreciated that while the platform has many features that are beneficial to event planners, the interface isn’t overwhelming, he said. Spark “kind of just jumps in with you.”
Long, an experienced Spark user, was calmer about the time pressure — at least at first. She was introduced to Spark, she said, when she and three students came in as replacements for a team of Texas A&M students who had to drop out of PCMA’s 2024 Global Student Competition just two weeks before the deadline. The contest rules had encouraged students to use Spark as a tool in developing a detailed proposal for a mock convention, conference, and trade show for an association or corporation. “Four of us got together and” — with the aid of Spark — “put a multi-day conference together to meet the criteria of the challenge in two weeks,” Long said. And, her team — competing against 45 other teams — was one of five finalists. “Finishing something of that magnitude in two weeks was amazing,” she said, “and we were able to just knock it out of the park.”

PCMA CMO Traci DePuy (in white) and Gevme’s Jonathan Easton, right, were among the Spark AI Innovation Challenge judges. (Whatever Media Group)
Long, who runs a “mom-and-pop” event company, enrolled at Texas A&M because she wanted to further her education and produce events beyond weddings and parties. “I don’t have the luxury of having a team of people,” she said. “A lot of the things that I do, I do on my own, and then I pull in resources as I need, depending on the size of events.” Long now uses Spark for everything from creating client proposals to figuring exactly where to place the chairs when executing events. What once “would take me weeks to do, I can literally do in a couple of days,” she said.
Because of her experience with Spark, Long wasn’t worried about the sustainability piece of the challenge — sustainability had been part of the student competition entry — or about creating an RFP. “What I was more worried about was taking all of this information and compiling it into a legible presentation that didn’t look like it was thrown together,” she said. “Our team sat around afterwards and talked about now we know how they feel on the cooking shows when they tell you: ‘You have two minutes left.’ We were literally panic-stricken that we were not going to be able to finish our presentation.”
But they did. And the team — which nicknamed themselves “The Rev,” after the Texas A&M mascot, a dog named Reveille — was declared the winner by a team of judges that included Joe Heller, CMO of Philadelphia Convention & Visitors Bureau; Jonathan Easton, vice president for design of Gevme, which has partnered with PCMA to create Spark; and PCMA CMO Traci DePuy. Each member of the winning team will receive complimentary registration to Convening Leaders 2026 in Philadelphia.
“I was surprised,” Heller said in a follow-up email to Convene, “at just how quickly the winning team was able to generate not just one, but two full RFPs. They didn’t just stop there — they also incorporated a tagline, a sample logo, and expressed key sustainability ideas. They scored high marks from the judges for covering a lot of ground in a short time, which really sums up how an AI-powered partner platform should work best for any user.”
It was evident to the judges that there were varying degrees of experience on the teams, he said, but if the competition proved one thing, it is that “it’s not about how much you know about AI, it’s about just getting started and seeing where it takes you.”
Same Time Next Year?
During the sessions that Texas A&M student Kimberly Long attended at Convening Leaders 2025 in Houston, the “constant message that I heard was that there’s so much to do and not enough time to do it,” she said. “And every time, I wanted to raise my hand and say, ‘Well, Spark is there for you to use — with all the information that you need for whatever you require.’”
But Spark and AI, she said, “are like anything else — acceptance is really slow at first and then it just explodes.” Her hope, she told Convene, is that if “we have an opportunity to circle back around this time next year,” after Convening Leaders 2026, “we’ll be talking more about how [Spark] has taken off and [from developers that] ‘we’ve enhanced this and we’ve introduced that.’ And it’s phenomenal.”
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.