Trendsetter Tuesday: Getting to Know Meetings Tech Leader Jim Spellos
To celebrate our 2024 Meetings Trendsetters, Meetings Today launched "Trendsetter Tuesday," a podcast series of interviews with the 20 Trendsetters recognized in our July/August issue.
Jim Spellos, president of Meeting U., has always been in the top echelon of meetings industry technology educators and speakers. AI such as ChatGPT has further fueled his fascination of transformative tech.
Spellos was named a 2024 Meetings Trendsetter by Meetings Today for his arguably unrivaled understanding of AI as it relates to the meetings industry.
Meetings Today's Tyler Davidson sat down with this Trendsetter to get his take on AI and what may lie beyond.
[Related: The 2024 Meetings Trendsetters Paving New Paths in the Events Industry]
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[Related: How ChatGPT Will Impact the Meetings and Events Industry]
Transcript:
Editors note: The following transcription was facilitated by AI program Otter.ai and proofed by our editors. Although it is very accurate, there inevitably will be some mistakes, so please consider that when reading. Thank you.
Tyler Davidson
Hello and welcome to this Meetings Today Podcast, also our Trendsetters Tuesday podcast, it's like Taco Tuesday, but even more tasty. And on the menu today is Jim Spellos, who is the president of Meeting U. A long-time meetings and events industry, and hospitality industry, technology leader and educator. Thanks for joining us, Jim.
Jim Spellos
Hi, always my pleasure. Great speaking to you, and thanks so much for the honor. It is always just wonderful to get that sort of feedback from our community. So, I do appreciate it.
Tyler Davidson
For sure, and, you know, well deserved, I mean, and really it definitely hinges on the topic we're going to be probably talking about the most today, which is AI.
When ChatGPT first appeared on the scene and it lit up the world, you were definitely like the first person I called to say, “What's this whole thing about what are you hearing? What does it do? Should we be running for the hills?” And I have got to give you a lot of credit, because a lot of people, you know, just had sort of dire predictions, and it's going to take all our jobs and etc.
You are very out in front of it, about the benefits of it. What are you talking about in regards to AI right now, and what have you learned just in the past couple years, now that you've really been focusing on it.
[Related: Top 7 AI Uses from Event Profs in the Know]
Jim Spellos
Well, what I'm talking about now is pretty much the same thing, or very similar to, what I was talking about a year ago, which is getting people to understand that it's nothing more than a tool, that it's like how we looked at smartphones and iPads and the internet and all the technologies that come across our way.
It is a tool that has a lot of implications. It has an awful lot of potential, both good and bad. There's no question about it. We don't want to ever sugar-coat anything.
But what we want people to understand is what they oftentimes hear is the click bait. They hear what is that gloom and doom scenario that'll get you to watch or listen to a particular podcast or a news story, or whatever it might be, you know, reading online, and you see these industries are going to have their jobs taken by AI as the headline. And then even the article doesn't say anything about that, but it gets you in and gets people worried.
So, I'm teaching, essentially, a commonsense approach to this, which is what it can do, how it works, in layman's terms. Because, quite frankly, it's all I know as well as anybody else you know. And then you know what's out there and what can it do for you right now and what it's going to do down the road.
So, the question of what I'm teaching hasn't changed much in the past year, although the specifics have, and really what's interesting is the change that has gone on since ChatGPT came on board in November of ‘22 It's phenomenal, not only within OpenAI, which is the company that has created ChatGPT, but how all these other companies have tried to figure out how to build a large-language model that's better, quicker, faster.
What has happened in the video and the image space, which truly is even more revolutionary in the past year, you know, from consistent pictures of people with nine knuckles and six fingers and stuff like that, you know, to pictures that really, you can't tell the difference. In fact, in one of my sessions that I do, I show side-by-side pictures of something by a human, something that was created by AI, and I have the class try to figure out which one's AI, and it's a 50/50, yes for the most part, you know? So that change is amazing.
And also, the concern that that change drives, Tyler, because the concern with deep fakes is what do you believe anymore? And I think we need to give people in our industry, heck, in all industries, with the kids that are growing up, a real good sense of having your, shall we say, your Spidey sense up at all times, because you can never completely believe you know what you see unless you're really doing your fact checking. It's why you know good old journalism still is so important because you're hoping that there's a level of credibility and fact checking to make sure that what's being put out there is consistently accurate with what the reality says.
So, lots of stuff, and hopefully we impact a little bit right there, but there's so much that it makes it interesting just to follow it every day.
[Related: 10 Tips for Using AI to Radically Improve Meetings and Events Tasks]
Tyler Davidson
You're out there on the road, constantly educating people about AI and other meetings tech issues. What questions are you hearing and what sort of examples of maybe successful implementations of AI from meeting planners, especially, have you been hearing about?
Jim Spellos
Yeah, well, what I'm hearing is the question, is it going to take my job? Now, it's not, but somebody who knows it better than you might is obvious….You know, I have a two-day conference on food sustainability and I need to brainstorm to get some good ideas for topics we haven't discussed before, and speakers that might be people I haven't thought about.
So, if we look at these tools, these large-language models, whether it's ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or CoPilot, doesn't matter, we look at it as a person that we could talk with to bounce ideas off of, brainstorm to get new thoughts about it. You know, how can I market this conference better? Give me 10 social media ideas to get this word out to our community, you know?
And that's a starting point conversation that's not even digging deep into what this can do. But I've heard a lot of people come back and say, you know, it wrote my session descriptions for me and gave me ideas as to the topics that we need to discuss. Then you get into really understanding how this works, which is, you know, if you then seeded it with information, whether it's your own writing style or information about your organization, your previous conferences, the clients you want to do research on, and then give it direction.
What would we consider the meta prompt, or the prompt for the prompt? Then it starts to know even more, you really start to narrow the focus of the types of answers you can get from it. And that's when you know all positive stuff breaks loose, that you can get information analyzed, trends analyzed. Shoot, you can even put your Excel spreadsheet of your event up there with all of the registration information and ask you for trends that might be too wide ranging for you to even see visually.
So many good use cases, but it's a small number of people, I would say, still, that are taking advantage of that.
Tyler Davidson
I know one thing I've been looking at it for. You know what we do here, especially is analyzing maybe survey responses. And say you have 500 open-ended survey responses, instead of taking a day or days to have someone go through and look for themes, AI is perfect to kind of summarize that. And you even see, like, Facebook rolling out an AI function that summarizes comments at the top right.
Jim Spellos
You know it’s gonna be built in everything and the sentiment analysis, which I see a lot of organizations using this for, is amazing, because it can do a word cloud for it, which is really a neat, sort of a practical approach. Which is, take all those surveys, put them up there and tell it it's gonna give you a word cloud of what words have been used most, and all of a sudden you go, wow, you know, favorable or technology or something comes up that you weren't even aware of.
You know, I think what happens is that people, when they start playing with it and get past the fear, they find use cases that hadn't even been thought about before. And that's where I think this is going to. How are we going to use this?
For example, let's just take a look at design elements for an event. What if I was able to take a concept picture, even a sketch of an idea of what I want the ballroom to look like for this event, and give it to AI and say, you know, give me four variations of this theme as to how we might use this and how it could be situated, and how the room can be set up.
And actually, as I'm saying that, I'll tell you a great story. I was at a conference in Minnesota about a week ago, and one of the planners said she was using it to get table design, to give it really extensive prompts and have it show exactly visually what these different tables would look like with silverware and with, you know, floral displays and everything else.
It would have taken them days, weeks to find somebody who can do this, and now they have a proof of concept they can give to somebody and say, “Here, this is what I want it to look like. And how much time is that going to save that organization just by being able to use it that way?”
Tyler Davidson
Yeah, oh, for sure. I mean, and one kind of corollary, and I don't know if this is quite accurate, but I remember--and I'm dating myself here--I remember the first day Google came out, and I'm sitting at my desk and immediately I typed something in, and I'm like, “This is it!” I mean, it's just a light bulb goes off, and to this day, I don't hardly ever use any other search engines, right?
And maybe I'm wrong, but that was almost one of the first instances of AI, right?
Jim Spellos
Well, yeah, I guess you could call it AI. It really was more stack servers all around the place that was able to get answers, but it was able to process information. I think we need to really separate, though, the AI that has been around for 40, 50, years, the AI that you're using in Amazon and Netflix and all those tools all the time, and what we have the past 18 months, which is generative AI, which is the ability to, I call it desktop AI at this point, because that's really what it is.
It's like Google. It's this ability now to do everything just with your laptop or your phone, your computer, and then be able to ask the questions and iterate with it. And when people understand that it's not a one and done approach with AI, but it's going to be well, let's keep digging further into this. And maybe the first four room designs that AI puts out are all horrible, but if you keep asking it a few times, all of a sudden, because it's been trained on information, it's going to hit upon something. And you know, what's that really costing you about an extra two minutes to be able to run one of these a few times? But again, you don't know that's how it works, and you don't bother. You just go on. This doesn't work for me.
And by the way, the Google in comment is so interesting because we might be at the age and the era where Google is losing its impact, and that's because people are slowly using AI for Google-type searches, which I don't think is the right way to do it, but I do think the next winner in this game is the one that can best combine AI and search so that we have a single location to get either answer we want.
Do we want information and sources. Who won the Mets game last night? Did Simone Biles win the gold medal last night? Whatever it might be versus, you know, tell me about, you know, this organism. Tell me about the history of Meetings Today and their online magazine…so does Google win? Does Perplexity win? Does another company come along? Really interesting to watch that the next couple of years.
Tyler Davidson
And I think for sure, whatever it spits out right now, you need to double check and not expect that that's the gospel word. You know, the be-all, end-all of any definition you put in. I know, being part of editorial groups, we talk about what is the proper use of AI, say, for images. And right now we, most people, think, we're going to do an illustration, and you know, we identify it as being created by SEO.
That's probably a good use for it, but if you just start running photos, you're going to end up with the six fingers, perhaps. And that's a very negative thing, if someone kind of catches on to that. But you know, who knows in the future what are things people need to look out for? And have you heard of any sort of negative implications, horror stories around something like that?
Jim Spellos
Google had a horror story about a couple months ago when they rolled out their image generator, and because they were training it on and getting it to understand diversity, so much it was creating, you know, historical figures that, shall we say, didn't look like how they actually looked, that it was trying too hard to create a diverse feedback mechanism. So, it's really interesting that they had to take that off the market again to try to figure it out. So, we're trying to rein in how this, this tool, this, this brain works.
Now, it's so interesting that you talk about accuracy, and I think one tool in the prompting space that people don't know about is that they can ask ChatGPT or Claude or any of these tools, to fact check itself. And oftentimes, either in a single prompt or in a series of prompts, I will ask you information. It'll say, “Can you confirm this?”
Or, Can you look at what might be inaccurate about what you just said. I'm getting to do that more and more and showcase that more and more in my sessions where it goes, “Oh yeah, that section four doesn't sound right. So, it comes up with something else. You know, once you understand that this is all a prediction engine, that you still have to check the second approach, but you know, it could very well be a self-correcting mechanism, and I do believe the next iterations will do a lot more in the space. And you'll hear people talk about the acronym RAG, which is, again, I'm actually having a brain spasm on the actual term there, the retrieval, augmented generation.
Essentially what you're doing there is you're taking your text, your information, you're uploading it, and then you're saying, don't just go to your brain to figure this out, but go to that information that we've already vetted and be able to figure it out there. I mean, I don't know when, but it's going to happen that a plan is going to have, you know, a know before you go, that's going to be driven by an app that's going to have all of that input uploaded weeks, months before the event starts.
And then people can start using AI and whatever custom chat bot they created for the event to be able to get all the information they need.
Tyler Davidson
And I think, still to re-emphasize, check your work right now, right?
Jim Spellos
Check your work with human beings, too. Let's, let's not put AI on this negative list. Can we do a really good job of critical thinking in this part of our lives? And I think that's slipping in general, and that might be the overwhelming, overriding factor that we have to talk about, which is, let's make sure we're getting things right before we open our mouths, or before we put things, you know, through a…
Tyler Davidson
…for sure, and then, how about, you know, I guess clarifying that when you use ChatGPT or when you use generative AI for something, what are the ethical implications right now you're seeing, which I'm sure are a work in progress, right?
Jim Spellos
You know, I asked my legal friends, Jonathan Howe, and other people in our industry who've been doing this for years. I know they're sinking their teeth into this because they're going to make them a lot of money, you know? And what really is the ethicality, if I can conjugate it that way of this whole process.
Now, Tyler, you and I both play guitar, you know? I put out a CD, great. I wrote songs, you know. Quite frankly, Paul McCartney could call me one day, if he really wanted to, and say, “You know, those sounds, those songs, sound like what we wrote 50 years ago.” Now, they're not, but I was influenced by it.
And really, that's the same thing as AI. It's not pulling out information, but it's influenced based on what it's trained on. So, anything creative, art, music, pottery, sculpture, you know, painting, whatever it might be, you know, it's going to only be able to start with a slate that has whatever it's in there. So, if it's been trained on a lot of, you know, modernistic painters, then guess what? That language model might return that information more often.
So understand that each of these models have different strengths and weaknesses, and that's true also with the visual models, and it's incredibly true with the video models, which to me, I'm playing more and more in because it's so fascinating that I can give it a three-second or three-sentence prompt, and it can create a 10-second piece of video for me, boom, you know, give me background sound and give me anything I want, but you’ve got to be persistent with using it.
Tyler Davidson
I'm on a couple AI sort of Facebook groups where you have people just sort of playing with it and creating videos that are fun and entertaining and sometimes odd and scary, too, depending on what it comes up. What resources should people check into or curious about This? And I guess right now, in the end, I mean, maybe the key skill to have is prompts. And where do people learn how to make good prompts to use AI?
Jim Spellos
You know, short of what I'm teaching, which obviously I really focus on that a lot. There's a lot of hit and miss, a lot of hot and cold and prompts that are out there. There are a bunch of people that I watch on YouTube that I trust, you know, Tim Simmons and Theoretically Media and Matt Wolf, and there's a whole host of them that do a good job here, really focusing on the information and try to get people, especially in the visual space, to build better prompts.
And if you follow that rabbit hole of those folks, you're going to come across stuff like prompt guides and style guides that are out there that you really, really can trust… Runway for the video has put a great internal guide out as to how to prompt for video.
So, the spaces you're working in, following a couple people you trust will lead down that that hole to give you the tools you need. But quite frankly, you know how to learn about it, play with it. You know, spend the $10 a month for a particular application and get your money's worth and go, “Okay, let me put a couple of 100 images in there, see what happens and see what works and what doesn't.”
Now, of all the social media, and I almost hate to say this, but the social media I follow most for AI, is actually X, or I still call it Twitter, whatever you want to call it, but a lot of the people who I really think are foundational in this space are spending their time there sharing, because they get to put out what they're doing.
So … play with it, find a few people, and then just talk to others and find out how other people are using it, because you'll get a lot of information, a lot of good ideas from somebody else who said, you know, I used it to put our table designs together. You go, “Oh, shoot, that's a great idea.”
Tyler Davidson
So, you know, what other tech outside of AI, what other tech things are you talking about, or other people are talking about? And then also, you’re kind of departing from the tech angle. You know, you're really an advocate for healthy eating, too, in meetings and in your life, and so what other tech things should be top of mind to listeners?
Jim Spellos
Happy to talk about both. The answer to the first question is, is there really any tech other than AI, right?
Tyler Davidson
I know, right?
Jim Spellos
But, you know, I still think what's going to integrate with this is stuff like augmented reality. Where's virtual reality playing to all this? I love talking about the local movement, and I think that's where a lot of these tools are going, which is allowing the every person to be able to develop the applications that they need, and they don't need to know JavaScript or Python or anything that it's really sort of democratizing the production of these tools takes time.
It takes a little bit of effort, but I think that's where a lot of the tech is going to go in the next five to 10 years, because these tools are going to give everybody the ability to do everything, you know. So, I'm not a video editor, but if I know an AI tool that can create great videos from what I'm playing with, and then integrate some augmented reality in there. Well, that's where the tech is. I do think the major conversation for the next few years is going to be the implementation of AI now on the health side, and that's a whole other conversation entirely. And I know Tyler. You know that I lost 120 pounds, and it reversed heart disease, and a lot of medical issues about seven, eight years ago. So, I am a complete champion for a healthy plant-based lifestyle. We're completely vegan, but on a very healthy side. So, no oil, no salt, no sugar, and love the lifestyle, and love talking to people about it, which, by the way, is more difficult than talking to people about politics or religion, because people are so entrenched in how they eat and what they do, so we sort of let the conversation come to us, and people see, “Hey, you look different. You lost a lot of weight, and we're happy to discuss it.”
You know, I know that it works, and I spent the time during the pandemic getting a certification, becoming a Food For Life instructor, making sure that if I'm going to teach this and talk about this, that I have some credibility and some facts behind me that are, you know, science based and isn't just for Jim but it doesn't work for other people, but I'm a huge, huge advocate of that.
And you know, one of the challenges in our industry, as you know, is getting healthy food at these events. And I'm always having conversations with the chefs and the wait staff. You know, when I tell them I'm vegan, they go, “Well, do you eat scallops?” No, they don't eat scallops, but, you know, that's because people don't know.
So, it's an educational process there as well. And then, of course, there's the food recovery stuff that I'm still involved with, which also is another thing that our industry could really capitalize on doing better, which is how we can take the food waste, even though they're trying to reduce what they're wasting, but still bring it to people who need it that night. I mean, we shouldn't be getting rid of any food that's out there when there are people who could literally help their lives by eating it.
Tyler Davidson
100%. I mean, we need to talk more about that offline here, because that is one of…I mean, I love this industry, but that is the one thing that's not so pretty about it is you see all these trays of just wonderful food just getting carted off to the landfill, right?
Jim Spellos
I mean, yeah, if you're going to feed your staff, great, just don't let the food go to waste. But when it gets thrown away, and when they complain, oftentimes it's the facility, not the planner, who says it's too much work.
I know with who I work with, with Rock and Wrap It Up (https://www.rockandwrapitup.org) as we essentially have it as a turnkey operation, we find the locations that need the food and connect with the source so that there could be an easy hand off there, and at that point, there's no reason not to.
Tyler Davidson
Great. Well, thank you for joining us. I'll vouch that I saw your one of your more recent presentations at an event here in San Francisco, and you still got it. You still rock and roll up there. So, my definite recommendation is to hire Jim to speak for whatever organization you might be working for.
How do people get in touch with you and also with your food waste effort? How do they get in touch and learn more about that
Jim Spellos
You can reach out to me. JimSpellos@MeetingU.com. All of my socials tend to use JSpellos as my address. So, LinkedIn, X Facebook, I keep it all the same regarding food recovery. I do have a page on my site about that, but https://www.rockandwrapitup.org is the organization, and they are amazing.
Matter of fact. Going to go tomorrow to see the folks who run it, and they do a weekly sort of farmers market for veterans in the Long Island area where they get the food donated by some of the big places that we throw it away anyway, and we're able to feed those folks, or whatever is not used goes to a community center.
So, Rockandwrapitup.org. Great location for people to find out how they can incorporate that into their meetings.
Tyler Davidson
Excellent. Well, thanks, Jim, for joining us and for doing all you do. I really appreciate it.
Jim Spellos
Tyler, my pleasure. Thank you so much.
Tyler Davidson
That was Jim Spells, president of MeetingU, and one of our Meetings Trendsetters for 2024, as part of our Trendsetters Tuesday podcast series we hope you enjoy.
I'm Tyler Davidson, Vice President and Chief Content Director for Meetings Today. Head on over to meetingstoday.com to check out our podcast section for our regular podcast with meetings and events industry thought leaders, and we hope you'll enjoy those and all of our other content on there.
Thank you for joining us for today's podcast, and no matter what you're up to with the rest of the day, go out and make it great.
