[00:00:30] Today, I want to showcase the updates we have with our suite of AI-first initiatives that we’ve been working on. But before that, if you’re still not convinced of the transformational power of AI, here are a few stats.

[00:00:46] Today, 72% of organizations globally have adopted AI in at least one business function. That’s according to a global survey on AI done by McKinsey in March this year.

[00:01:00] But that wasn’t always the case. In fact, just a few years ago in 2017, that percentage was only 22%. Then we saw a gradual increase in the adoption of AI that hovered around 50% for quite a few years.

[00:01:17] Then something happened that is causing the adoption of AI in general to dramatically increase. And this, as you can see, is generative AI.

[00:01:26] Last year, 2023, was the breakout year because generative AI is so accessible and affordable. Organizations are now adopting AI at a faster rate.

[00:01:39] Here you can clearly see the impact of Gen-AI on the overall adoption of AI itself. If you look at the trajectory, this is bound to go even higher in the next couple of years.

[00:01:55] But why are companies adopting AI? What’s the benefit? As you can imagine, cost savings is the number one reason.

[00:02:00] AI brings about productivity gains in virtually every function at an organization, ranging from marketing, sales, human resources, product development, IT, software engineering, and more.

[00:02:14] As you can see here, within marketing and sales, 37% of companies are getting cost savings, with 4% seeing over 20% savings. Within human resources functions, it’s even more. 50% of companies are finding cost savings there.

[00:02:37] But the adoption of AI also brings about revenue increases. In fact, in marketing and sales, more than half of the companies are seeing an increase in their revenues through adoption of AI.

[00:02:48] You can imagine how better prospecting brings about better quality leads, which in turn convert into more sales. And that’s already what’s happening today.

[00:02:57] So this AI transformation that we are living through now is here to stay. And we are just at the beginning. As I mentioned, that’s why in our case, we’re investing a lot in AI-first initiatives that we think will make your life easier.

[00:03:14] Today we’re going to cover four of them. I’m going to share with you updates on EventGPT, Spark, Snapsight, and the partnership that we’ve recently done with WeMeet.

[00:03:28] So let’s get started with EventGPT…

[00:03:32] As a recap, you can think of EventGPT as a personal concierge that is available to every attendee at an event, to every speaker and exhibitor. Think of it as a bot that is available on your mobile phone, on the web, or integrated on the Gevme mobile app or even your own event app.

[00:03:54] EventGPT is trained seamlessly on your event information with things like agenda, speakers, support information, FAQs, venue information, and also the destination information. In fact, any other documents you have can be used to feed into EventGPT.

[00:04:14] At the last CONNECT, we demonstrated how easy it was to do the whole training process. Once we have all of this information in place, EventGPT can be used not only to get information about the event, but a business traveler who’s traveling can ask about extending their stay at the destination.

[00:04:37] EventGPT will respond with a curated personalized itinerary that can give recommendations about unique dining places, restaurants, local events, off-the-beaten-path tips, and more.

[00:04:52] We’re currently working with destinations to build this information so that we can provide this out-of-the-box experience with EventGPT. So more on this soon.

[00:05:00] But the biggest improvement we’ve made to EventGPT is around inclusivity. We now support questions in over 20 plus languages. So you could be asking the same question in Mandarin in EventGPT and it will respond to you in Mandarin.

[00:05:20] Suddenly you have the possibility of creating your event in one language only and make it accessible in many others.

[00:05:31] Next, let’s move to Spark. We’ve come a long way with what started off as an experiment. Today we have close to 8,000 users on the platform globally already.

[00:05:43] But before I go into more details, let’s take a look at what users are saying. In fact, let’s take a look at what Annalisa Ponchia has to say.

[00:05:58] Annalisa was previously in the role of Director of Innovation and Customer Experience at AIM Group International. And AIM itself is a large PCO based in Italy.

[00:06:09] “AI tools and platforms will be our best friends in the next period to come. They will be so helpful, support our competencies and skills to deliver a better level of services to the client. How? For that we have to ask the right questions to this platform and then we can facilitate any day-to-day tasks.

One of the best examples that I like, one of the best usages is for instance, analytics or as a content creator, agenda creator. In this kind of sense, they can really speed up our daily tasks. They can take the burden of hours and hours spent on tasks that we can really solve and deliver in a few moments.

Social media, content creator, video capturing and summarizing of the video content. I could go on forever, but AI platforms are not your enemies. They are, and they’re going to be your best friends. Use them.”

[00:07:27] So here you go. AI platforms are not your enemies but your friends.

[00:07:32] Annalisa has been a lovely adopter of Spark, and the use cases she spoke about, that’s exactly what you can accomplish with Spark.

[00:07:41] We look at Spark as your ultimate tool that can maximize your events teams’ productivity. Over the past few months, we have been engaging with many of you through workshops, big and small, one-on-ones. I’ve personally enjoyed being in many of them and learning from all of you.

[00:08:01] In fact, in May we ran our very first event accelerator workshop in Washington DC. We held it at AGU’s building, the very first net-zero renovated building in DC.

[00:08:13] This was a really good one, where we engaged with many of you. What was cool to see there was everybody with their laptops getting their hands dirty.

[00:08:24] It was amazing to see how people, even those who had no experience with Spark and were using it for the very first time, were just amazed with the kind of things that the tool could do.

[00:08:37] So if you haven’t tried out Spark yet, I urge you to do so.

[00:08:44] Let’s go through some of the product updates that we have now within Spark. We’ve been working hard on these.

[00:08:51] First, languages. In today’s global and connected world, inclusivity and global content accessibility is more important than ever. You might be planning and marketing an event in a foreign country or receiving delegates from various regions.

[00:09:12] That’s why we’ve done some pretty big enhancements to the language capabilities of Spark. You can now generate output in Spark in over 25 languages.

[0009:25] This language feature is available in all Spark tasks now. What we’re doing is not just simply translating an output from English to the language of your choice, but Spark fundamentally understands the context of the task and gives you the relevant outputs.

[00:09:42] But here’s the thing, it’s not just the output. You can actually now talk to Spark in any of the 25 plus languages and Spark will respond to you in the language of your choice.

[00:09:53] So what we have built is not just one language to multiple language translation, but it’s multiple languages to multiple languages translation. And this is pretty exciting.

[00:10:04] So join us in the next segment where Jonathan will actually go into more details about this one.

[00:10:13] Now, the next update is a really cool one. For those of you who have used Spark, you would be familiar with the custom task feature, which allows you to perform open-ended prompts with auto-generated fields. And then that can be reused.

[00:10:29] Well, we’ve been getting some feedback on custom task and while it has been heavily used, the way it was structured was not really ideal based on the feedback you’ve been giving us.

[00:10:41] That’s why we are extremely happy to announce an upgrade to Custom Task, and also rename it to Spark Chat.

[00:10:51] Spark Chat is meant to be an expert and an advisor on all matters related to business event management and planning.

[00:11:01] The interface you will see looks very familiar and pretty similar to how Custom Task used to look like. And right off the bat, chat will propose to you a few prompts for you to get started.

[00:11:16] Now, if you are on one of our paid plans, chat will be enabled with real-time information. So you could ask a question about the Top Medical tech conferences in 2024 and the emerging trends, and it will actually search the internet with real-time information and give you access to that information.

[00:11:38] And that’s something I’m very excited to see, what use cases you’ll come up with.

[00:11:47] And now we have an update with our pricing plan as well. This has been a long time coming actually just because of the requests we’ve been getting.

[00:11:56] In addition to the free plan, Pro plan and enterprise plan, we currently have, we are now introducing the new team plan, starting at $39 per month.

[00:12:12] The new teams plan comes with the following enhanced capabilities:

[00:12:19] Spark Chat with 250K input characters for your task, 25 files upload per user, up to one GB of file size upload, 10 custom tones for your organizations, and in fact, there’s more.

[00:12:36] And lastly, there’s also project sharing, team file sharing, which will allow you and your team to share resources under the same project. So a file can just be uploaded by one team member and it can be made available for the rest of the team.

[00:12:54] We believe that the comprehensive features under the Teams plan, along with language updates we went through earlier, make this an incredibly appealing option for even teams of all sizes.

[00:13:09] And our next update is Snapsight. We launched Snapsight about six months ago. It’s been really great to see the responses that we’ve been getting from both organizers and attendees.

[00:13:22] As a recap, Snapsight is a tool that you can think of as your personal AI assistant who attends all the sessions of an event on your behalf, and helps them make sense out of it all. And guess what? All in real time.

[00:13:37] We’ve deployed Snapsight at many important events so far in many different parts of the world. The Meeting show in Singapore, trip.com conference in Shanghai, UFI AsiaPac conference in Macau. And then we were in Frankfurt, Las Vegas, Washington DC and many more.

[00:14:02] And it’s been great to see the feedback from both organizers and attendees. It’s been energizing to see how people love the idea clouds that Snapchat generates and how it’s being used as a tool that promotes inclusivity at events.

[00:14:23] In fact, next, I’d like you to take a look at what Amy Hissrich, the Vice President of International Affairs at the ASAE has to say about Snapsight, but more importantly about the opportunities of AI platforms.

[00:14:50] “I think our industry is already using AI powered tools. So when we think about our staff, our staff are either coming up with marketing descriptions for events or analysis after the event, or getting content back to attendees more quickly. I think our staff are already using it.

So I think we can look at things in a multitude of ways. One is the opportunity that it provides and one are the challenges that it might also come with. Thinking through policies and ethics and copyright, we have to think those things through and we will think those things through. But we also have to recognize that there is value to be had in a lot of the benefits of AI. And so we don’t want to ignore the upsides by focusing just on the considerations that we will tackle as an industry.

For us, we used Snapsight for our AI summit, and it was amazing because it allowed us to get quick insights for our attendees with their key insights and key points with AI. And it allowed us to analyze through the tool at a deep level and go back to the community and say, this is what we heard you tell us, this is what matters within the association to you around AI. And it helps us plan future learning so that we could address how, why, what the implications were.

I think this is where the real opportunity with AI within the sector comes from. We’ve often said we want to get content and leverage content coming out of events, but it’s always been hard because we come to an event, we put all of our focus and effort into delivering a great event, and then we are onto that next event. And it has always been really challenging, even with the best of intentions to circle back and share what we learned and take that moment and that time. And AI just speeds that up, making that achievable for once. So we are actually able to take the content that we’re learning and distribute that back to the attendees or for those who weren’t able to be in the room so that they don’t miss out on upskilling, reskilling, learning that took place.”

[00:17:17] That was great. So now if you’re wondering how does Snapsight work again? Here’s a snippet showing Snapsight in action at the UFI European Conference in Zurich.

[00:17:29] As you can see here, as the speaker speaks on stage, the voice is captured through an AV system that will be there for pretty much every conference out there. And we simply plug into that AV system and then have the audio go to Snapsight.

[00:17:44] We listen to the session, transcribe it, and from there we do all the magic and generate the relevant key takeaways and idea cloud, all in real time.

[00:17:55] And we’ve been pretty much proud. We’ve been very proud to deploy Snapsight at the IMEX Frankfurt this year, an event where there were over 70 plus sessions like this happening.

[00:18:10] And as you can see here, these were how some of the rooms looked. And we plugged into the AV system. We covered all the 70 plus sessions and in some cases in the rooms that happened on Monday’s sessions, we were then showcasing the Idea Clouds right at the end of the session as well with speakers, moderators, panelists then commenting on them.

[00:18:41] And if you haven’t been to IMEX, you will see a QR code on your screen right now. You can scan this QR code. Or if you’ve been to IMEX, but you haven’t joined any session, scan this QR code. What you’ll get on your phone is basically access to all the sessions that happened over there, all the summaries, all the key takeaways, and even the visual idea clouds.

[00:19:06] And that’s how, in a way, you can take a look at the sessions and the content that was out there at the whole event.

[00:19:14] Now, IMEX was one. The next event that we worked on was Identiverse, one of the top conferences on identity security. And that was held in Las Vegas recently.

[00:19:28] So Identiverse is known for its focus on producing and providing high quality content to their attendees. Over the course of four days of the event, attendees had the chance to access top-notch content sessions, keynote panels, as well as hands-on masterclasses.

[00:19:46] In fact, at Identiverse, there were a total of 220 sessions and Snapsight was used across all the sessions and stages at the event.

[00:19:58] At the end of each session, a QR code was displayed on the screen. People who were there could just scan the QR code and then get access to Snapsight right on their phone. All they had to do was just scan the QR code.

[00:20:21] Within Snapsight, attendees could also get access to other sessions that were happening in real time or other sessions that happened during the previous days that they couldn’t attend. Or when they were going back to their respective places, they could access this and even share it with their colleagues.

[00:20:49] And now moving on to the updates that we have for you. It’s been a very busy time for us with the Snapsight team. We have built quite a big number of updates that we are rolling out now.

[00:21:02] We’re effectively making it easier for organizers to get started and to get the level of control needed, easier for AV teams to get the Snapsight going, and for attendees to get access to content.

[00:21:15] So take a look at all these updates that we are releasing now. There’s unified audio link, editing of key takeaways, attendee experience, support for locations. And later during the next session, Jonathan will go through in more detail. So stay tuned for that.

[00:21:36] And here you have it, the updates on our AI first initiatives that we are rolling out. But as you can see, we also have WeMeet. Our partnership with WeMeet that we recently announced.

[00:21:48] This is an important one for us where we expand Gevme to the Chinese market. In fact, we’ve recently signed a partnership agreement with WeMeet in Shanghai, and I’m very excited about this.

[00:22:01] This partnership allows us to cater for international organizers looking at expanding into China, but also to Chinese organizers looking at going international. And with WeMeet, we now have an ecosystem of AI-powered tools that will make this whole experience so much faster and smoother.

[00:22:21] So join me in our next session where I speak to Xuebin Gu, the CEO of WeMeet to showcase what we have in place and what you can be expecting.

[00:22:34] And with this, I’d like to thank you for joining us in this edition of Gevme Connect. At Gevme, we will remain on track to build the ultimate omni-channel event platform for you.

[00:22:46] We hope that these latest innovations give you the inspiration on how you can leverage AI to boost your events team’s productivity and to improve the experience of your events.

[00:23:00] Thank you.