It admittedly breaks my brain trying to understand the pathways and plug-ins powering artificial intelligence (AI) and the chatbot offshoots that entered our lexicon this year like ChatGPT. 

But I’m still fascinated, if only because every tech conference ever this season — be it HubSpot’s INBOUND meet-up out East or Dreamforce rejuvenating the Bay Area on the West Coast — have turned into full-on cheerleading forums for the power and potential of AI. Dreamforce, in fact, billeditself “the AI event of the year.” 

Right now, anyone who claims to be an absolute AI expert is almost certainly inflating their credentials to at least some degree. But there are still plenty of questions worth asking as we all discover how and where AI might fit in our lives. 

Who’s got the “right” answers about AI? 

The answer to this one genuinely is that it’s personal — and depends on what answers you’re seeking. Whether it’s the back-end operations that light you up or end-user solutions, you can definitely find content that matches specific inquiries, and that’s a good place to start.

Voices I’ve found enlightening include the aforementioned HubSpot, a company that’s augmenting their original CRM product with custom AI tools. HubSpot also streamed their September INBOUND mainstage content on YouTube and are now chunking it up and re-releasing it, as one place to start. 

I’m also always curious to see what Scott Galloway, a leading academic/investor/founder has to say on the subject in general, and credit Skift with plenty of good reporting on the technology from a travel industry-specific lens. IMEX America 2023 also has plenty of AI sessions programmed of course, featuring in-the-know MICE voices. 

Breaking up the monotony of (mostly white) male voices, I’m also trying to engage with more targeted interest groups (BlockW, which promotes women’s equity in tech, was a great Culture Night find for me the other week, for anyone else based in Ireland). 

Is it really worth my time to try AI chatbots?

In a word: yes.

I might be a millennial and thus more prone to the newest, shiniest tech, if generational stereotypes are anything to go off of. Ever a study in contradictions though, my iPhone is about five years out of date at this point (#TeamRediPhone8+ForLife) and I take 90 percent of meeting notes by hand still. 

But take a page from the experts and give chatbots a try to at least understand what they can do and see what outputs match your own intellect. ChatGPT is an easy one to practice prompting with, and PCMA’s Project Spark is tailored to the events industry — though it seemingly lacks incentive travel-specific features at time of writing.  

Pro tip for Project Spark: the “reveal the hidden” analysis tool yielded great feedback when I fed it a set of brainstorming notes taken over two days of internal meetings. Other studies have fielded similar results, after bots analyzed board books or high-level planning documents.

Is your data and IP being protected and respected?

AI is only as good as the information it’s fed, with questions about data and where it’s sourced from popping up with increased frequency and urgency. We all need to know where our data is going and, more importantly, what model(s) might it now be informing. 

Many media companies now include code on their websites to prevent AI programs from scraping articles to be used as training material for bots, at least without credit and/or compensation. Similar protections were also one of the HUGE victories the Writers Guild of America won in the strike negotiations that concluded largely in favor of screenwriters at the end of September — despite, notably, many executives and business leaders labeling protections the writers were asking for as a long-lost cause. 

Your ideas and insights are exactly that: your intellectual property. Clients trust the planners and suppliers they partner with to keep their information safe, too. Keep playing with tools and trying new ideas, but stay wary of what information you’re feeding to programs and make good decisions that respect the origin of your ideas and information first. 

Will I still have a job? 

We’ve all likely heard the line about someone with AI taking your job rather than AI itself ruling the world; but if there’s one thing the AI buzz has reaffirmed for me right now, it’s that human connection is still astonishingly critical — but we have to recommit and double-down on efforts to build a shared humanity. 

This is what makes AI most exciting, even for those who still place themselves somewhere on the curmudgeon end of the tech adoption spectrum. Imagine, just as a start, what might happen if you outsource some of your drudgery work and routine tasks to AI during an offsite meeting, trade show, or site inspection. 

Leaving these tasks to a bot would give you more time to connect face-to-face instead typing endless email replies in an isolated corner away from the main onsite hubbub.

You could focus instead on building connections that allow you pepper and augment whatever results an AI bot spits out with personalized touches that ultimately are what win you business. 

Embracing AI then, helps clear headspace so you can think more cleanly and creatively and bring exciting ideas to life in ways that only human beings can. 

AI in some ways feels might feel like it’s coming for us all; but only to the extent we let it. By understanding the technology, road-testing it, and committing to staying human-first, we can be empowered by these platforms rather than let them place concentrated power into just a few major players. 

Much like life itself, AI is what we make it. Let’s commit now, as an industry with huge socio-economic power, influence, and impact, to making AI a means to a more enlightening, exciting end— and not the end of our immensely inspiring industry itself.