Personalization or generalization: Is Big Brother taking over the event industry?
The center of any business is the customer. Understanding customer behavior and finding the most effective and appropriate way to accommodate their needs and expectations is the single most important aspect of business planning. Event management is no different. As event managers, we put the attendee in the center of any planning strategy and do in-depth research of methods to engage them through every touchpoint.
Managing to please and engage the event attendees results in high satisfaction rates, and, ultimately, in good ROI and profit. And what a more secure way to engage someone than by making them feel like the event is specifically crafted for them. They feel acknowledged, you have saved them time, and have directly addressed something that they are interested in.
A decade ago, such levels of personalization were a tale of fiction. But as we have officially entered an era of commonly used artificial intelligence systems, personalization is not only possible but expected.
What can AI actually do for your event?
Here is what the industry experts say.
1. Personalized recommendations
The biggest victory of AI in almost every industry, including events, is personalizing recommendations based on users’ preferences, background, etc. In the event context, that feature allows events to offer a much more effective networking experience. AI is offering personalized recommendations for attendees, exhibitors, and products on a colossal scale.
An application that connects attendees is nothing out of the ordinary and is very standard for most exhibitions and conferences. However, scanning through thousands of people, selecting the ones that you want to connect with, and reaching out to each one individually proves to be time-consuming for the attendees and expensive for event planners to manage, says Tim Groot, co-founder, and CEO at Grip, a UK-based event networking platform powered by AI. Some applications, on the other hand, allow the user to fill a form with main interests and be matched with others based on similarities, but that match is not always a good fit.
So how is an AI matchmaking engine any better? Well, as soon as you give it access, it creates an in-depth profile of your activity on social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook, and based on the information it extracts, it recommends people to meet, sessions to attend, or products to buy that best suit your business interests. You can then indicate whether you are happy with the recommendations or not, and the machine will know what it needs to improve on.
2. Emotional recognition
Yes, it is just as scary as it sounds. In an interesting article on the topic, EventMB explores this emerging trend in the event industry. Although still shaky and quite controversial, emotional recognition, powered by artificial intelligence, is already happening. What is it exactly? It is an AI engine that uses facial recognition to analyze your facial expressions, and, based on the data, determines how you feel at any given moment.
Scientists have developed techniques to try and replicate the way humans detect and analyze emotions. They have then fed an AI machine with their algorithms, and allowed it to observe people using facial recognition software, much similar to the one we use to unlock our phones. It even goes one step further by attempting to predict behavior based on detected emotion.
In the context of events, that would essentially indicate that event managers have the opportunity to understand people’s feelings not only through a survey at the end of the event but at any given point throughout.
Image courtesy of Zenus. Source: EventMB
3. Mapping events through computer vision
The technology behind emotional recognition is computer vision powered by an AI machine learning engine. It is essentially one camera that can access images of the whole event, and use them to draw conclusions on various event aspects. Here are some examples of how the technology could be used in an event context, summarized by Zenus.
· Computer vision allows event managers to maintain an accurate real-time count on attendance. That would effectively show the strongest and weakest points of attendance.
· Through computer vision, event managers can assess dwell times, and create accurate reports on how much time people spend at any given area. This can then be very valuable to sponsors, as well as allow improvement of event layout.
· Computer vision also provides accurate real-time data on demographics, which can later be used for more targeted marketing and event design.
The general idea is personalization for the attendee and data for the event organizer. Ideally, that should be a ground-breaking technology that changes the industry radically. And, admittedly, to some extent it is.
But is it really personalization or generalization?
The AI knows algorithms. To explain it to a five-year-old, it knows that if X and Y happen, then Z is a fact. It is likely that an IT professional would confront that statement with a much more complex explanation of the processes, but the reality is, the biggest barriers for AI have been and still are cultural and situational nuances. According to research, facial recognition is prone to misidentifying people of color and people who’s gender representation doesn’t quite fall under the binary norm. In other words, despite its efforts to be as human as possible, the AI struggles to recognize the beauty of human differences in appearance.
That inevitably brings another question. If the technology is not advanced enough to recognize our most human features such as our gender or the color of our skin, then could it really succeed in identifying how we feel at any given moment? By referencing new research on emotional recognition, conducted by The APS, EventMB is pointing out that using facial analysis alone to detect emotion could prove highly inaccurate. Our emotions are nuanced, and most importantly, expressed in various ways depending on the human’s personality. Analyzing someone’s emotional state by simply looking at their facial expressions and running the data through a list of possible conclusions such as “smiling = happy” is naive.
And then, on a simpler level, as EventMB put it, “What if I am sneezing? Does that mean I am not enjoying the session I am attending?”. What happens when our face reacts to something that is out of context? I see a picture of my ex on Facebook during lunch, for example. Does the AI know my expression is not a result of the way I feel towards the food?
Finally, what about privacy? If you are into conspiracies or have recently watched any CSI series, you have already asked yourself “But what do they REALLY use all this data for?”. Yes, some people are concerned about where all of this data is stored and don’t find joy or comfort in knowing their emotions are being so carefully observed by a Master Computer.
Others worry about a more tangible issue: being spammed with offers based on an inaccurate analysis of their feelings. Similar to that one time your 14-year-old daughter played a Justin Bieber song from your YouTube account, and now you get countless suggestions for make-up tutorial videos. The AI read the data, but it didn’t know the context.
The event industry is fighting back to protect digital human rights
40 of the world’s largest music festivals, including Burning Man, Coachella, and Lollapalooza, have declared war against facial recognition technology. The movement, initially started by musicians and activists, is now supported by many famous performers and has resulted in the largest event ticket distributor, Ticketmaster, taking a step back from its strategy to develop a facial recognition event entrance method.
Amanda Plamer, amongst many others, invokes on her Twitter account:
“People should feel safe & respected at shows, not subject to surveillance, harassment, deportation, or arrest.”
Source: https://www.banfacialrecognition.com
In conclusion
Part of the joy of being an event manager is the dynamics of the industry combined with the creative nature of designing experiences. The ultimate goal is to create stronger and more positive experiences for event attendees, boost business opportunities at conferences and exhibitions, and bring communities closer together. In a sense, the event industry’s ability to impact, unite, and benefit societies is truly unparalleled.
This is why it is easy for event organizers to be tempted to use new technology in order to do better. But as incredible as it may sound, and as intriguing as it is to incorporate the latest piece of technology to your event, the attendees in their most human form should always be in the center. And, as of today, AI cannot yet catch-up with our complexity. And maybe, it shouldn’t.
