How to make AI tools your silent partner at work

For events company owner Valerie Sumner, using PCMA’s Spark and other AI tools to enhance her company’s operations is “almost like having another person in the office.”

When it comes to incorporating AI into her 19-year-old events company’s daily operations, Valerie Sumner, co-owner of Falls Church, Va.-based VRS Meetings and Events Inc., couldn’t agree more. “I feel like if you’re not interested in AI, you’re missing out,” she told Convening“It’s an evolution, and I’d rather be on the bus than off it.”

But Sumner’s embrace of AI goes beyond a desire to keep her skills up to date. Spark, a generative AI platform developed in partnership between PCMA and Singapore-based event technology company Gevme, has saved her so much time and provided so much valuable feedback that she considers it “almost like having another person in the office.”

Sumner, who previously served as president of the PCMA Foundation, began experimenting with Spark when it was in its early stages and has used the tool more and more as its capabilities have expanded. In addition to Spark, Sumner uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT to assist with event-related tasks such as writing meeting descriptions, crafting scripts, marketing emails, proposals, brainstorming, and more, she said. Both offer free and paid versions; Sumner takes a paid subscription to Spark “because it’s focused on our industry and is staffed by people in our industry.”

Here are two ways Sumner saves time using Spark:

Create an event proposal

Sumner, who had a wealth of experience and ideas from writing “huge” proposals for clients and had a deep understanding of how strategic plans worked, said she had a good idea of ​​what the client wanted, “but I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss any steps.” She went into the Spark platform and typed in all her ideas in detail, “being very specific about the activities and what I was doing,” she said. “Within a few minutes, I had a complete outline for how to create a strategic plan.” Sumner edited and customized the plan, adding things she had forgotten and removing things she didn’t need, she said, “but it saved me hours of time.”

Analyzing survey data

Survey tools excel at tabulating the digital data collected in post-event surveys, but Spark’s strength lies in analyzing event attendees’ responses to open-ended questions about what they liked and didn’t like, Sumner says. “You can put all those comments in, and with the click of a button, Spark will tell you the overall theme of the meeting, how people received it, how people liked it—the five things they liked, the six things they didn’t like,” she says. “Then you can modify it to share internally or give it to your board for future planning,” she says. What used to take a long time to read through and think about “is now all in one place and takes just minutes.”

She said it “can seem a little scary” that AI could so quickly do things that many event professionals once did themselves. “Maybe you’re a marketer and you’re thinking: ‘Wait a minute, that’s my job. My job is going to go away,’ ” she said. “Well, no, it’s not going away — and if you embrace AI and figure out how to use it, you can even do it better.”

“We are very transparent”

Not only is Valerie Sumner looking for ways to use AI to improve business operations, many of her clients are doing the same. “We don’t hide anything,” Sumner said. “We’re very transparent about when we use AI and when (clients) use it.” In fact, she said she sometimes uses it with clients to brainstorm ideas for campaigns.

When a client recently wanted to discuss hosting a new sales meeting, Sumner pulled up the Spark platform to help kickstart the conversation. After Sumner entered information including the expected number of attendees, the client’s industry, and the purpose of the event, she checked a box and the platform began generating ideas. “There were a lot of ideas we didn’t like,” she says, “but it gave us a starting point.”

Barbara Palmer yes convened.

On the Internet

For information on how to access free and paid Spark tools and online AI education, visit pcma.org/spark.