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AI Unveiled: Transforming Events
35 Plays1 year ago
Leanne and Tanita catch up with Adam Baggs and Sydney Nolan after their AI focused session at the ICCA UK & Ireland Conference in Belfast. They talk about AI, it's impact on the sector, concerns around ethics and even take time to look back on Leanne's changing diet after episode 1!
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, and welcome to the second episode of Immemorial Encounters, our brand new podcast on thought leadership in the events industry. We're here at the ICC in Belfast for the UK and Ireland chapter meeting. Anthony to go with marketing manager from the Eastside rooms.
Insights on Gut-Brain Health
00:00:14
Speaker
And I'm Leanne Bladen, the director of sales for the Eastside rooms. The director of sales and marketing, I should add, from the Eastside rooms.
00:00:24
Speaker
So we just want to say on our last podcast, we interviewed Graham Tinsley, who was the... MBA. MBA, obviously, who was the executive head chef from Cardin Park Resort in Cheshire. And actually we both took on board
00:00:39
Speaker
and everything that we learnt. Definitely more so you than me. Definitely more so me yes I've taken it all on board but it was all about how the gut connects with the brain and actually if the gut's happy and healthy it really helps the brain to function well.
Lifestyle Changes Inspired by Previous Episode
00:00:54
Speaker
So I probably took this to the extreme and I have cut out. We went to Nando's and she ordered a salad.
00:01:02
Speaker
So I've cut out all processed foods, I've been having fermented foods, looking after my gut health, and actually my brain feels sharper than ever, even to me too. It's like, why are you not tired anymore?
Introduction of AI Experts
00:01:13
Speaker
So on today's episode,
00:01:16
Speaker
We want to now become specialists in a totally different area. So we've got Sydney and Adam with us that are going to talk to us all about AI, which we feel is the hot topic of the moment. We're both interested in it. We're both so keen to learn more. So can you both introduce yourselves to us and tell us how you kind of got involved in this field?
Sydney Nolan's Journey into AI
00:01:40
Speaker
Sure. Well, thanks for having an American turned Irish woman on your podcast. I don't even know what I am anymore. But I'm Sydney Nolan. I'm the account director over at Solnua, which is a strategy marketing and training events firm for the business events industry. Kind of a mouthful there. It's a nice name. I'm the only one with the non-painfully Irish name on the team and also the resident American there too. Oh, a lot of hats.
AI and Business Events Connection
00:02:06
Speaker
But I guess I think,
00:02:08
Speaker
Mine was an AI I'd say started and really just kind of diving in and and playing with these tools and seeing what they can do. I think, you know, you're both spot on and saying this is the hot topic of the moment and the last 12 months just exploded on the scene. I have a ton of questions about
00:02:22
Speaker
kind of how these companies run, the things that make them tick. I think there's so many interesting parallels to business events and the way that kind of the different motives of AI companies intersect with what we all do and just a really interesting world to dive into. So I've really just been reading, playing, trying these things out firsthand for
00:02:40
Speaker
probably the last, I don't know, four, six months, I'd say. I wasn't the first adopter, but it's just been a huge copy of the conversation that every industry event I've gone to, it's a weekly discussion in our office about what we're using, what we're doing. So excited to hear all your thoughts too.
00:02:55
Speaker
Brilliant.
Adam Bags' Passion for AI
00:02:56
Speaker
Fantastic. My name's Adam Bags from Soaring Worldwide. I'm a PR and I specialise in helping venues and destinations and suppliers get closer to the industry's buyers and organisers out there and work with a variety of great clients, including the wonderful Eastside Rooms. Absolutely. Favourite client, obviously. Absolutely. Certainly for the sake of this podcast.
00:03:21
Speaker
So I'm just a bit of a geek basically. Science fiction, science fantasy, all that kind of stuff. I love all of that. Listen to audiobooks that are about science fiction, all that. And AI and all that kind of stuff has just always interested me. So as it's come on more and more over the last couple of years, I feel more and more interested trying it out, seeing what happens. I tend to be quite an early adopter with
00:03:46
Speaker
with most tech just just giving it a go see seeing what happens and then using or discarding depending on whether i like it so like sydney i've been i've been playing with it finding uses for it finding some definitely bad uses yeah it's it's interesting tech and
00:04:04
Speaker
I've also recently worked with a couple of clients to create some research on the subjects. We've done some research into how the industry is already using AI, which is kind of, I think made me a bit of a go-to person on AI at the moment. I'm sure that'll last another couple of weeks. And then once this podcast is published, it'll all be over. So you both said you've been playing around with AI. What kind of applications have you been using?
Creative Uses of AI Tools
00:04:29
Speaker
What's your favorite? What doesn't work so well?
00:04:32
Speaker
It's my current favorite. And I know Adam and I have talked about, you know, the uses of AI go beyond just sort of these message marketing generators. But as of December, I've really started playing with Anthropic's Claude bot. So it's very similar to kind of OpenAI's chat GPT. Except again, if you want to go on a Google deep dive, kind of how and why Anthropic was founded is fascinating, especially from more of an ethical point of view. That's sort of what they go to market on or what they position themselves as. It's a bit more of a guardrail.
00:05:02
Speaker
solution out there in the kind of world of AI tools. But I find that I like Claude as a bot because he's very friendly. He's fun to talk to. I like his name. It's very cute. It's so personable. But I think it's Claude.ai. I think it's the URL there. But I'm in front of that just to kind of, and it's a really good kind of thought partner role play tool, I think. So I'll often feed it prompts of, okay, pretend you're
00:05:25
Speaker
a sales manager, pretend you're managing a venue and then answer my questions in that form. And then it will spit back, okay, here's how I understand that job. So you can kind of tweak its understanding and really set up those boundaries of what you're looking for from its response. And then it'll, you know, you can be at questions if you want to practice for a conversation you're going to have with a client, if you're trying to bounce ideas off of them, and just kind of, it's a really nice scenario building tool almost. So that's my favorite right now. And then I also will say, love mid-journey.
00:05:54
Speaker
It was a struggle to figure out how to use that. I have no programming, no coding experience, but in terms of kind of the image generators that are out there, but having a lot of fun with that one as well. You did some fantastic images for a session we ran here today. Yeah. Really interesting. We were so confused by the end. That actually was quite scary. So just to put it into context, Sydney ran a session with Adam.
00:06:19
Speaker
where they were showing us different images that had been created from stock imagery, that was a genuine original image, and then that was AI created. So I think we got one out of the five, correct. It's hard. It's really hard to give away. And actually, that's when sometimes I think, oh, this is actually quite scary, what it can and can't. But that's what we don't want to be. We don't want to be scared of AI because we know that we need to embrace it. And I feel like,
AI in Daily Life and Privacy Concerns
00:06:49
Speaker
probably like what Adam was saying earlier when you said you know you're a bit of a geek and you're into sci-fi and you're into sci-fi and I remember you know growing up kind of the thought of AI you know it was kind of like
00:07:06
Speaker
totally, you know, you would never believe that actually it's part of our day to day interaction now. But that's exactly what we don't want to do is that we don't want to be afraid of the technology, we want to embrace it. And actually, you know, we don't believe that it will replace people or will replace roles, but actually make people better at their roles.
00:07:27
Speaker
We've used it a few times and it's made us so much more efficient. We can churn things out quicker. Get so much more done. Yeah, definitely. But all I had and said earlier, so many people are using it without realising. Yeah, exactly. Like Amazon recommendations, all of those kind of things are AI generated. Yeah, there's so many different parts of our daily lives where it's
00:07:45
Speaker
where it's showing up and that. So often you don't know what's going behind there. You're doing a shopping, someone asked a question and I gave the lovely example actually of a well-known shopping site where someone found out that their daughter was pregnant because the recommendations they were being given for Christmas presents. They're like, why is all this big? Because it knows you're related. Well, my decision was deliberately didn't shop on that site.
00:08:13
Speaker
she was pregnant so that we didn't know before she announced her pregnancy. Yeah exactly so and it's like you know you'll be having a conversation I do it sometimes with my husband we'll be talking about something and then all of a sudden it does start appearing in your feed and I think oh you know or you know our tech in our kitchen will start spinning and we think oh you know you know with people
00:08:36
Speaker
Is it listening or is it learning from what we're talking about? So it is interesting, but we do definitely need that. Silk pillowcases, remember that? Yeah, silk pillowcases. We were both looking at silk pillowcases and then we both kept that they were following us every hour. There's a book, I forget the name of it, by Johan Harry, where he was talking about the impact of social media and the algorithms and all the information, the data that sits behind all this and saying a lot of people do have this kind of this sense or this feeling that
00:09:05
Speaker
These devices are listening to us. They're not. They're just so clever. And we're giving them so much about ourselves that they can tell that because you're this age and your friends are doing this. This is what you're interested in. Yeah. So I'm going to be interested in sort of showcases because I don't want to get wrinkly.
00:09:26
Speaker
As she said, that's also what AI is doing though, right? It's linking all these data points in new ways that this data hasn't been linked before. So like I've had, you know, we've all had these examples, but, and you know, I was in, in Minnesota where I'm from originally over Christmas and talking to my mom about, Oh, I might go to this industry event. I might not a couple of weeks later, you know, my, my, my plans weren't forever at that point. A couple of weeks later when I'd gone back to Ireland, I told her, Oh yeah, I'm going to go to, you know, Turkey and it's going to be great. She started getting targeted ads.
00:09:56
Speaker
And I had not Googled anything there that was not linked, but something connected something that was relevant for you.
Enhancing AI Interactions with Prompts
00:10:08
Speaker
when we were using chat GPT earlier this week, you know, we found that actually it's the questions that you ask the AI as well, isn't it? So, you know, it churn out an answer. I think, no, that's not what I want. So actually, the more sophisticated I was getting with my question, the better it was getting at responses. And the more I'm using it, the more it seems to get my total language. So actually, you see the news that the OpenAI just announced last week that they're now going to make it
00:10:38
Speaker
And this is again, I think, you know, we talked a little bit this morning about sort of the ethics and what is the state of being used for and how is it being stored? But OpenAI announced they're going to start enriching the memory of chat GPT and it's kind of latest versions of it. Yeah. So if you tell it, okay, I know I sound like this, I want this, I do this, it'll remember that for days and months after that conversation. So these things are evolving and growing so quickly. But that does come back to the other point this year as well, your
00:11:04
Speaker
we're teaching them. We are providing our information to teach them. And this was a big part of this morning's conversation was around, was around the ethics and the data usage and just making sure you protect yourselves. It's about us making choices actually. In a commercial sense, you have to obviously abide by data laws and that kind of thing. So you've got to remember these are third party
00:11:28
Speaker
apps, organizations, companies that you're sharing information with. Exactly. So if you wouldn't share an
Technology for Personal Health Monitoring
00:11:36
Speaker
Excel spreadsheet, if you wouldn't send them an Excel spreadsheet, then don't put it into the AI. It's the same for us, though, as individuals, though. If you're not going to, you know, you wouldn't give someone your bank details, so why would you put this information on there? So think about what you're providing. And I think, you know,
00:11:57
Speaker
For me, I'm quite a, you might call yourself geeky person, I call myself a tacky person, Adam. So for me, I... She is not tacky. This is how I like to use tech. So I'm not tacky in the sense of equipment as such, but in my personal life,
00:12:17
Speaker
I wear a smartwatch and it's really important to me. I'm constantly checking that I'm moving enough on there that, you know, I am... It's great you count my steps as well. I count Anita's steps because she doesn't wear a smartwatch. She really needs to get one. But I count her steps too when she's with me and keep her informed of how many steps we've done, how much exercise we've done, how many calories we've been. But, you know, technology can be really great, you know, in kind of monitoring
00:12:44
Speaker
our lives, but also enriching them and making them better.
AI in Event Planning
00:12:48
Speaker
So if you are planning an event, because that's what we were trying to help with our podcast, you know, with people within the events industry, how would you embrace AI to kind of enrich your event or to help with the planning process? Just on that, actually, we've even done that, haven't we? So when I've been out and about on agency appointments and my geography can sometimes be a little bit questionable.
00:13:13
Speaker
You know, my sales exec said, actually, let's pop this into AI and let's get them to plan the logical route. And in fairness, it was a little bit out of time. It was a little bit out of time. And it said, you know, it'd take me an hour to get from one place to the other, probably if I was traveling at very illegal speeds or, you know, Yeah, it was definitely like three days journeys until one day. But
00:13:37
Speaker
It was logical and actually it saved us all time. We wouldn't happen to kind of look at the map and think, right, okay, or keep messing around with maps to try and figure it out. So that helped me in my journey planning and actually making that day really efficient. So just that as an example, you know, how would you kind of advise people to use AI and use the tech to kind of help them support within the events industry? And what would your top tips be? Wow. Yeah, I think you sort of have to
00:14:07
Speaker
You have to start by breaking it down and thinking about AI in terms of some of the different things it can deliver for you. So we mentioned earlier about this, you know, this obsession with the content generation, the GAI, generative AI. So the chat GPTs, the bards, the beautiful data, all those, and that's great for content on that side of things. And that can help with one element of the event. On the flip side, there's all this incredibly powerful
00:14:36
Speaker
usage and manipulation of data, which can help our events be more effective. So that's another thing. So it depends on what information we've got. There's so many different ways it can be broken down. And I think, to be honest this morning, we asked how many people in the room used AI and what.
00:14:55
Speaker
30%? Third half, yeah. Half being generous. That was. I was talking to someone afterwards and that person suggested that perhaps there were a few people in the room not willing to admit to doing it. Maybe. Do you think it's that or do you think it's just that people are a bit scared of it? Scared to embrace that. I don't know what your thoughts are Sydney, but my first thoughts are just try it. Try some element of it and just have a go.
00:15:24
Speaker
I think that's a great place to start too, is not only just try it, but we talked a little bit this morning about how essentially any piece of software that you're already using in your tech stack, whether that's your mass email client, whether that's your CRM system, whether that's whatever hosts your website, these tools all kind of went gaga for AI last autumn. And most of them have introduced some kind of smart AI assist feature. So I think a really nice, easy place to start is just use the tools
00:15:53
Speaker
use the tech that you're already familiar with and that are already part of your work routine and just see what those features do. You know, like we've played around with the kind of PowerPoint feature when we put our deck together for this morning. I've used it with our, our email client for different, different groups we work with. Um, you know, it's an easy place where you kind of, you understand what you need and what you're trying to get out of it already. So when you kind of add that AI layer or that AI tool on top, you can start to understand pretty quickly where it's useful, where it's in line with what you need and want, what, what we've, what you've historically done.
00:16:22
Speaker
and where it's maybe misguiding or obstructing you a little bit. So I think start with what you have. I think a really interesting one. And I'm 100% talking from the position of no knowledge here, because I found out it existed about two o'clock yesterday afternoon. As we were finished preparing. So I haven't even looked at it. But I went into Adobe Acrobat on my laptop. Oh, yeah, you mentioned that too. Now, I used the paid version, run the free version. So I don't have to delay on the free version. I haven't even looked at that.
00:16:51
Speaker
And it asked me if I wanted to reboot with their AI feature enabled and the literally 10 seconds of research I did flicking through news stories and that, because it only launched a day or so ago, is that you can view huge PDF documents and it will gather together summaries for them. It will pull out interesting information for you and all that kind of thing.
00:17:15
Speaker
I think that when you consider the, particularly on the association side, with these huge bits of research that you can send over, someone wants to gather together and just, my God, someone sent me 25 pages of stuff. I just need to summarize that. I can see that as being a really efficient and quite an easy step into it, because actually you're potentially not even then having to worry about learning how to prompt, learning how to do any of this. I genuinely don't know. Tell me what the summary of this document is, click.
00:17:44
Speaker
Wow. Yeah. It would be amazing if that's how it works. Yes. Adam will get back to us on that one. But yeah, we would say exactly that as well, like where we've used it in the past to kind of, you know, mainly with chat GPT, that's what we've been using. Yeah, that's amazing. You can't with where we said, you know, AI will not replace people.
Ensuring Accuracy in AI-Generated Content
00:18:09
Speaker
You know, it's like we had an amazing session in the
00:18:13
Speaker
conference earlier, where there was speakers, and we said, you know, when you were saying, Adam, in your session, actually, you know, we could probably get AI to write, you know, you said perhaps even 67% of that speech already, but it's a human element that will, you know, will never be able to replace that. And we were saying that,
00:18:33
Speaker
when we're putting things into chat GPT, it is still learning itself, isn't it? So there are things that are factually incorrect, so there's absolutely no way you could just copy and paste something across, you know, you need to look at it, divulge that information. Well you definitely need to spellcheck it. You definitely need to spellcheck it. Hey there, hey there. Just change the zest to S's. Exactly. But you know, it works a lot.
00:18:58
Speaker
So, you know, it still needs that human interaction with the tools at the moment. And I guess that over time, they will progress and they will get better. But for now, we still need to kind of interact with them, don't we? Just you talking about that learning and over time and improving, actually, I just thought of a, I suppose, quite a comparable example. It's Wikipedia. Do you remember when Wikipedia first launched?
00:19:21
Speaker
don't look at Wikipedia because it gives you absolute rubbish. And now it's like the go-to. It is considered now to be just about the most accurate encyclopedia. It's on Wikipedia but it's right. Yeah and I'm sure there are still errors in that but a friend of mine was recently trying to set up a Wikipedia page for someone and the level of fact-checking you go through now versus what it used to be like is incredible.
00:19:45
Speaker
And these tools will evolve, get to that stage. They will improve through this, through usage, because we're all feeding them all this information. Definitely. Okay, so moving the conversation on there.
Learning to Effectively Use AI Prompts
00:20:01
Speaker
Obviously you said that you're still learning about the tools, still trying to understand them. So give us your top tip then, Sydney. You know, it may be how you're kind of using AI now as a starting point,
00:20:13
Speaker
And what we need to do to start kind of understanding AI better, you know, what would be your top tip for somebody to start embracing this new software, this new era, really, I suppose. I think aside from just play with it, which I think we covered off earlier on in our discussion, just get your hands in, try it, see what works for you but doesn't. I do think the one kind of really good place to start with when you're using AI is learn how to prompt. So
00:20:40
Speaker
You can do that through trial and error. You can do it through just experimenting and figuring out, is it getting your voice? Is it not? Is it giving you content? Is it 20% there? Is it 60% there? Kind of figuring out that level of readiness. Explain what you mean by prompt, just for a second. Sure, sure. So by prompt, I mean kind of the, what are you asking an AI tool to do? So how are you phrasing your question?
00:21:01
Speaker
What language are you using? How detailed or not? Exactly. Yeah, because your questions, your prompts earlier on that image exercise we did were quite detailed, weren't they? Yeah. So mid-journey is a great example, which is what those images came from. You can put a prompt in that just says, you know, give me an image of Belfast and you have no control essentially over what you get back. It could spit out very, very different things.
00:21:25
Speaker
And then you can learn, which might be appropriate if you're truly just looking for a random range to fill somewhere, great. But it's kind of, yeah, it's learning those building blocks of learning, do I specify size, do I specify color, lighting, other details. And that's, again, learning, there's kind of a, it's almost like a bell curve type thing. If you think of kind of, there's the side that's too little information, there's a side that's way too much information, and it's just gonna scramble this tech and get it confused. And then there's kind of that just right sort of Goldilocks zone, right? So I think that's my number one tip is figure out kind of
00:21:55
Speaker
You know, what, what do prompts look like in terms of what language do you use? How do you phrase that question? How does it differ between tools? Because obviously if you're asking chat LGBT or clot or kind of a, you know, content generation bot to do something that's very different than I want an image or I want a video. So I think it's good, comfortable, prompting and understand kind of what, what language you need and what scenarios, if that makes sense.
Encouraging Experimentation with AI Tools
00:22:16
Speaker
Have a new item just before we run out of time.
00:22:18
Speaker
Um, yeah, I, I mean, I was just, I mean, for me, there's this big thing about AI is inevitable. So you've just got to get on, get on and start using it, whatever that whichever way that takes your fancy. And I quite just like experimenting with the different ones and that kind of thing. So, um, I was asked to speak at an industry event just before Christmas on, on AI.
00:22:39
Speaker
Um, it was quite short notice and I pulled it pulling together a presentation. I just had a bit of fun, you know, trying, uh, beautiful AI and a couple of presentation tools. Yeah. See what they can do. But I think, you know, I think the biggest thing, and this comes back to the conversation earlier about ethics and content and getting stuff right. And that is make sure whatever's created really, really examine it, whatever you're provided by these tools at particularly at the moment, whilst it's still learning.
00:23:09
Speaker
You know, it's, you mentioned the comment earlier, I said, 60, 70% accurate, you know, in another couple of years, you can ask it things, it'll be 95%, 97% accurate. But there's always going to be a bit of knowledge missing. Absolutely. That's what we're human element. Absolutely. So that's where we have to check it. So the example, Sydney mentioned earlier, when we, we talked about we used one of the AI tools to help build
00:23:33
Speaker
presentation we use today. However, shortly before this conference, we were provided content by new intent on speaker recommendations to make sure our content was accessible, to make sure we used the right language, spoken the right way, etc.
00:23:49
Speaker
You know what, it gave us a really pretty PowerPoint display that someone in the front row would struggle to read, let alone in the back. Yeah, of course. So the human element that needed to kick in for us to go, we love the idea. Looks pretty. But now let's increase that font size or whatever it was. So that was really, really, really effective.
Episode Conclusion and Next Episode Preview
00:24:12
Speaker
OK, so thank you so much to Adam and Sydney for your time today. Thanks, both. We have 100% learned a lot about AI. We've only just touched the surface. We've scratched the surface, barely. So we will definitely be looking at some of the different programs, especially that you mentioned, both of you, and having, like you said, Sydney, really, just having a bit of confidence in having a play around, because what's the worst that can happen? And if anything, it will just be because better at AI. If you don't have faith with that question of what's going on.
00:24:43
Speaker
Or when they were breaking earlier this week, weren't they? They were having a moment, the AI tools. But, you know, so please join us. Thank you both for you. But please join us, everyone, for our next episode where we will be speaking to our destination, which of course is Birmingham, and how to work with associations.
00:25:01
Speaker
You can catch Inventful Encounters on all your usual podcasts, platforms, Google, Apple, and Spotify. And to stay up to date with all things Inventful Encounters and these high rooms, follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Thanks! Thank you everyone, bye!