#172: AI and the Human Touch

Speaker A: Kolya, great to see you. Thank you for joining us today. We're here at Event Tech Live in London, uh, November 20th. You've just come off stage and done a session about AI and tech trends, et cetera. So thank you for taking the time to be with us today. Um, I took a few notes so I want to jump into the conversation. One thing you mentioned was this idea of, uh, the attention span of a goldfish being seven seconds, but the attention span of a TikTok user now being, I think you said 0.4 seconds. That is interesting. Um, obviously I think when we're talking about live events, we're not talking about scrolling on TikTok, but that's the kind of experience that maybe we're expecting for a really streamlined, really fantastic event. How in your mind does that impact the design of your events?

Speaker B: I believe it is going to impact the design of events very much because no one is going to sit in a session that is an hour and a half long in a plenary session just watching someone speaking up on stage. So it's all about impactful shorts, bits and pieces that keep your attention. And therefore I do like these 20 minute formats here very much.

Speaker A: Okay. Now I think, you know, Ted was the pioneer with the 18 minute sessions, I think quite a few years now, maybe 15 years ago. So I definitely see a trend to shorter sessions. And I've been through way too many dark room keynotes where you spend way too long in there. However, I do sense some pushback from people that saying, well that's great, but I also would like to see some depth to the presentations.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And maybe um, there is an argument that says events are really top of funnel, that sort of introduction to topics rather than going deep. But some people do want that deep kind of going into topics, masterclasses, whatever you want to call them. How do you see balancing of that? Is it about expectations or is there more to it?

Speaker B: You're absolutely right. I do believe you need both. You need the short form content that gets people interested and then you need to offer the deep dives in like masterclasses, breakouts or whatever and really see what you're targeting to your audience comes together to um, ask your attendees, um, before you put together an event, to really generate um, an attendee centric event concept instead of just putting stuff together.

Speaker A: Makes sense. So what you're talking about there is really personalization, right? It's about creating or offering the content that people are really looking for, I think. Do you see AI, uh, as key in really being able to develop that personalization, being able to offer what people are looking for, I believe.

Speaker B: So AI can help in the process and is going to be a tool that will be incorporated in all our workflows. But I believe that curation is even more important, like what you are doing with your podcasts and um, offering um, what the classical meaning media did in the past, but helping me navigate an event because there is a downside of um, too much personalization that I may be feeling overwhelmed, looking at hundreds of sessions in different buildings, on different stages. And now I do need support, um, helping to put the optimal program for me together in a fraction of time. Because the idea that most attendees have hours to spend in researching and going through programs before attending an event, a lot of times they look at it in the last, um, hour before hitting the registration desk for sure.

Speaker A: But are you then saying that the part of the personalization process may not be AI driven? Is the human curation is still an important factor?

Speaker B: We do see a rising demand, um, also for our clients, where people like to be led by a human over trade shows, over festivals, giving them the recap in like one day experience instead of doing it all by themselves and not just by an AI created agent that um, puts together a list of presentations I should watch.

Speaker A: Very interesting. So that human touch is invaluable. Let's say. Is that then a VIP version of event? Uh, because I imagine that's not very scalable. Right. Would you then be able to say certain attendees get a human curator to help them with their experience? Is that where you're going?

Speaker B: It's basically an event in an event. And um, this then can be taken down to specialized target groups like corporate buyers, um, CMOs or different attendees that only have a limited amount of time, but they appreciate the event, but they want to take the maximum out of this limited amount of time.

Speaker A: And the human touch is very important, very interesting. In your presentation you mentioned that AI has provided a lot of hammers, a lot of tools, uh, and you're still looking a lot of those tools don't seem to have a problem. Right? So maybe they're funding blips. Maybe there's just a lot of excitement about AI and these companies create these things. But thinking back to the problems, what are the problems that you think AI should be fixing? Or what would you, what problems would you like to see an AI product, an AI tool help you solve?

Speaker B: I believe AI and automation go well together. And there are a lot of problems helping or there are a lot of solutions that can be created or that we are just creating from scratch right now, that is providing a data basis because um, data driven event management is going to be the future. All decisions based on data in the entire from strategy conceptional up to the um, showroom floor like we're on right now. And AI can help you with gathering this data, also gathering data from um, previous events that can be used to delivering a baseline that you can improve upon.

Speaker A: So what does that look like in practice? Is that um, a sort of AI tool that replaces a number of existing tools? Or how do you see that in an ideal world kind of developing?

Speaker B: Um, um, I believe it's all open tools. It's not about creating your own tool. ChatGPT is so powerful and with your own GPT in a matter of minutes you can create your own sandbox to do stuff in. And combining this with automation, like looking into, going through like the programs in the last years, if you have a combination of data in what has been successful, what has not been successful, there is amazingly output that you can learn from to create even better events in the future.

Speaker A: Super interesting. Um, one of the things that you talked about in your presentation was this Berger model, right, where you have AI do certain tasks, but there's always a human element at the start, prompting maybe, and the human element at the end of the product or end of the process where you have this sort of um, editing function, where you sort of check etc. Now there are these AI agents which seems to be the next level of AI where prompt engineering is quite common these days. But AI agents seem to take this further. And my understanding with AI agents is that you can ask AI to figure out how to solve the problem rather than have a prompt that sort of indicates how you're supposed to do the work. So it's more independent. That sounds quite exciting. And are you already experimenting with this? And are any areas that you think this is going to be real game changer?

Speaker B: It's going to be a total game changer. But um, it also comes down, um, I always like to compare this to um, iPhone photography. I can take a picture, everyone can take a picture with their smartphone. It just may not be the best picture that you can possibly take. Then the technology itself can help you with lighting, with all kinds of technical stuff, but um, composition and creating the picture that really counts. You do need human input. And this is exactly what this Berger model is about, that you know how to prompt. Even if you have an assistant helping you create this super prompt, you're still the one giving the input. And if um, that is not the best you can do, the output is not going to best that can get out of there.

Speaker A: Excellent. So, uh, does that in some way level the playing field? Because I know that VO Dams, um, is investing a lot in AI, you know, and doing a lot of research. You have a team dedicated to this. But if these agents are able to, you know, kind of do half of that work for you, is it then harder to differentiate or do you feel like the human input will still make all the difference?

Speaker B: I believe the human input is going to be making all the difference. And we do see what AI's magic right now is super helpful. But if you just take AI delivered products out of it right now we are coming to what we call the age of average. So it's very, very medicore. Um, and to move this to the next level you need to people, I believe AI agents because um, all the tool developers see this issue and they try to make it super easy. But as you can tell from your smartphone, it took them now 10 years to develop this super AI supported camera app. And still the pictures a professional photographer is going to take with your iPhone, they're going to be looking way better than the ones I take.

Speaker A: Now. One of the things that I've spoken to numerous event agencies about is, you know, some sort of fear that AI replaces at least some services or some actions that agencies take. I find these largely unfounded. A little bit like, you know, it's technology, you figure it out. But there is an element of, for example, um, venue selecting. Right, venue sourcing, if I can do that for events. What parts of, I guess agency work do you think are in danger or are none of them in danger?

Speaker B: I don't think any of them are in danger. But, um, agency work is going to shift. I can extreme your help you to do redundant, stressful and extremely boring jobs and therefore get the fun into events. Again, like an example, um, we're doing for a client, um, between 800 and 1200 events a year for the last 10 years. Now we want to analyze how many of the speakers have been male and female and how's the development over time. So you can now, um, put a team of people and have them go through 10,000 program guides of the last year's events. Or you just combine AI and automation and just get the information out of there. Of course this is not going to be. Maybe in the old days you could have sold this as an agency fee, but today I'd be Losing people who is going to have fun going through thousands of papers and making, um, notes and, uh, collecting this stuff, that is not a fun job. While people choose to be in events

Speaker A: makes sense, I guess. It still assumes that you have the programs from all those events in one file, right? Because if you ask AI to go and find all these things that's probably

Speaker B: not publicly available, um, M. It actually works into. Of course, of course. Um, we are extremely lucky because we have a good setup in our, um, server setup where to find them. But you're absolutely right, they are, um, not in one place. And this is where automation helps you with AI can look into the stuff and then automation gets you, um, this one zip file with all the programs. And to do this for a person sitting on your Apple Finder or Microsoft, I'm not even sure what it's called on Microsoft, uh, File thing where you click on File Explorer on folders. This is a nightmare until you have all the stuff together by yourself.

Speaker A: Interesting. Okay, so changing topics a little bit, um, you recently partnered with Cvent, and in your presentation you also mentioned some of the Cvent, uh, AI. Um, I had Reggie Agrawal on our stage at the Skiff Team Meetings forum and I asked him about the Cvent, uh, AI capabilities and he admitted that cvent's not really where they want to be when it comes to CVENT when it comes to AI. But they're obviously working on it. They just released, I think, 20 different applications. I was at Cvent Connect, as were you, and saw some pretty interesting advances. Tell me a little bit about your reasoning. Why this partnership with Cvent? Maybe it's got nothing to do with AI. So maybe I'm connecting the dots in a different way. But why a partnership with circumstances? And where do you see the real kind of potential of this partnership?

Speaker B: I'm extremely impressed by Cvent. CVENT is by far the largest player in our industry and they have created a turnkey solution for large multinational companies to really map their entire event workflow from venue sourcing to ideation to, um, everything. And they created a concept of integrating this into their SAP, um, um, business intelligence up into the marketing cloud. And they are by far the standard in this field. So for us, more and more of our clients are using Cvent and they have an issue. They need to support in implementing it into their paths, and they basically need manpower support that knows how to operate on a CVENT system. So we believe that CVENT already is like the SAP solution for multinationals when it comes to events and this is why we have now a very extensive team, um, supporting our clients with um, running their standardized Cvent projects.

Speaker A: And are you also helping Cvent to develop their products? Because I imagine now you have people that are quite deep into the CVENT product and you know you can see that the good and the bad. Are you also able to give feedback and kind of be part of the product roadmap?

Speaker B: Cvent is a very agile uh, company and you've met everyone here at uh, Cvent, CventConnect. It's an amazing company and this is actually what we are doing at the moment though a lot of people, a lot of companies do have a capacity issue. They in times where budgets are being cut, headcounts are being cut in some um, international companies, they need an agency to come in to support their standardized events based and run on Cvent. And this is what we are here for doing.

Speaker A: Super interesting. I've also noticed you've been traveling a lot to China. Uh, voams has a big team in China as well. Um, would love to just get your perspective on what's happening in China because it seems to be a little bit um, different from the rest of the world. I know you're working on a lot of things there, uh, particularly in this kind of AI side of things because I'm sure there's China only tools that we haven't seen yet. Have you seen anything interesting, exciting that your team is really experimenting with some of the tools.

Speaker B: I know they're controversial but um, we do get here from Kling, the um, video creation software, uh, up to everything from TikTok to Capcut. This um, is amazing technologies coming out of China. We've been celebrating 20 years in China now and we have three offices in Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai. And everything on the digitalization phase down to very simple workflows is amazing. And we can learn so much from China. As an example, payment, there's like no one literally paying with cash anymore. It's just everything on WeChat or AliPay and it's amazingly reliable, fast and secure system. Um, amazing.

Speaker A: So let's go a little bit further now. Um, not necessarily China, but what are you kind of really excited about? Obviously AI is a big topic and things that you're very excited. But when you look at an event like uh, this, you know, we're at eventech Live, so a relatively small scale trade show with boots, etc. How do you see that changing? Right, because we like to talk about all these things, personalization, etc. But how do you see this experience of being at an event changing, let's say, in five years because AI is moving so fast, we probably can't think further than that.

Speaker B: I believe there will be a switch into, um, what we call mindful events. While on the one hand, we have the trend into becoming more and more digitized, the personal connection like the talk we are having right now and with the added, uh, benefit of recording it. But this is what events are about. So I come to an event to meet people. I learn something through people that I'm meeting, Presentations I can honestly watch easier on YouTube and in the comfort of my office, take easier notes on these parts. But it's about the conversations we are having and generating this, coming back to mindfulness that people are enjoying the event in the moment and taking the most out of this interaction with other people. This is the gold standard for events in the future. And I believe all the technologies that we do see here and are, uh, up and coming, we do really need to see are, ah, they are driving this experience. Because if not, it's not. They're not going to be around any much longer.

Speaker A: Makes sense. So they have to really fulfill a purpose. They have to really achieve, uh, something. What does that look like in practice? Right.

Speaker B: So

Speaker A: what is a telltale sign of what's happening right now when it's not working? And how would you then transform that into the future? Something that is working, you know, uh, is it about your fitness? Um, is it about your kind of exhaustion levels? Is it about how you process ideas? What is it that. How is the practical kind of change going to happen around that?

Speaker B: I believe the practical change comes down to data. Again, because it's all data driven. And, um, if attendees, um, don't show up, you're looking into what's happening there. And this is where data helps you. And if the value is not there for someone attending, you need to figure out how you can change this. And I believe this value in creating these very personal moments like we're having right now, taking something out of a discussion and, um, see what could be the future. This is extremely helpful.

Speaker A: All right, so, uh, lots of positive thoughts there for the future events and personalization. Kolje, um, always a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. Anything else you'd like to, uh, share? All good.

Speaker B: Thank you very much for having me.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker B: Thank you.

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