Today, conference organizers cater to a wide range of interests by creating complex, multi-track agendas that appeal to a broad audience. The sessions are as diverse as they are plentiful, and conference organizers generally tie them all together by a common theme in the keynote and spotlight sessions.
This strategy enables a level of event personalization — the conference becomes configurable by providing attendees with options such as concurrent sessions and problem-based or role-based tracks — however, the level of decision-making it requires on behalf of attendees can be overwhelming.
The demand for curated, personalized content presents a great opportunity for conference organizers to improve the overall event attendee experience. Instead of leaving attendees to make their own decisions by trawling through hundreds of session summaries, organizers can leverage new AI-powered event technology to make intelligent content recommendations directly within the conference app.
Personalizing the conference agenda with AI
An attendee’s decision to choose a session is influenced by a variety of factors including session descriptions, speakers, and recommendations from other attendees. It is also greatly influenced by their demographics and can be predicted based on behaviors, preferences, and previous actions.
With AI-powered recommendation engines like TurnoutNow, conference organizers can help attendees discover sessions related to their interests using an individual’s pre-existing data alongside sophisticated machine learning algorithms. Once the event starts, real-time behavior data, tracked via wearable beacons in each attendee badge, is added in for hyper-targeted recommendations with 90%+ accuracy. The wearable beacon data comes from a variety of sources, like session attendance, dwell time, and exhibitor booth visits.
The TurnoutNow system learns and understands each individual attendee’s needs and helps organizers and exhibitors make the conference all about them. These curated session recommendations can greatly increase session participation, audience engagement, and feedback scores by ensuring the right people attend the right session.
Going a step further with an event chatbot
Surfacing relevant content for attendees is one thing, giving them their own personal assistant is another. Chatbots can act as digital event concierges capable of making content, session, and networking suggestions tailored to each individual attendee. An event chatbot — delivered within the conference app — uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand contextual questions and surface recommendations from a recommendation engine, when asked questions such as, What demos are recommended for me? and What session should I attend next?
Chatbots not only help attendees make decisions about session content, they free up time for the event team by answering a variety of other event-related questions like: How do I get to my next session? What’s the wifi password? Where do I eat? Who are the keynote speakers?
Delivering personalized recommendations via the conference app
At the center of this personalization is the trusty event app. It places the power of personalized content and session recommendations directly into the hands of each individual attendee. With a conference app, attendees’ minds are put at ease as they can plan their days, navigate venues, connect with peers and change their agendas on the fly.
Supercharging the conference app with AI for events, like recommendation engines and and a chatbot will only help drive app adoption and give your attendees the personalized experiences they’re looking for.
Since millennials plan to attend more events than Gen X or Baby Boomers in the future, the conference app will become a key differentiator for event organizers among this digitally-savvy cohort.
To learn more about personalizing recommendations, download our ebook: The Attendee Journey: Creating Personalized Experiences for Conference Attendees.
