Fast Forward: The Future of Artificial Intelligence in the Meetings Industry
Fast Forward Season 1, Episode 6
On this episode of Fast Forward, host Logan Pratt sits down with Anca Platon Trifan, one of the foremost experts on artificial intelligence and AV technology in the industry, to learn how AI is currently being used in the industry, how it will be used and what limitations exist with AI.
Anca Platon Trifan is the CEO of Tree-Fan Events and Fit Mindful Mavens as well as the host of the Events Demystified Podcast. She's worked as a technical producer and AV production manager for over 20 years and has spoke at numerous industry events. Since 2022, she has offered specialized AI educational consulting services tailored for event professionals that focus on integrating AI technologies to boost attendee engagement and improve decision-making through data analysis.
About Fast Forward
Fast Forward is a new Meetings Today podcast hosted by Logan Pratt with a mission to shed light on the future of the meetings and events industry. Each month, Pratt and his guests will discuss and analyze the new technologies, trends and changes that may affect an audience of meeting and event planners, suppliers, speakers, educators, attendees and more. Fast Forward will feature industry experts on the cutting edge of innovation working to help push the industry forward. Tune in to "Fast Forward" to learn what trends and technologies are here to stay and how they will change the industry in the years and decades to come.
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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.
Logan Pratt
Hello, and welcome to Fast Forward, a Meetings Today podcast that explores the future of the meetings and events industry. I’m your host, Logan Pratt, and this episode I am joined by Anca Platon Trifan, who currently serves as CEO of Tree-Fan Events and Fit Mindful Mavens, as well as one of the leading industry experts on artificial intelligence and AV technology. Anca is also an award-winning speaker and host of the “Events Demystified” podcast. Welcome to the show, Anca.
Anca Platon Trifan
Well, thank you so much for having me, Logan.
Logan Pratt
Yeah, I want to start off a little bit by learning more about your journey in the events industry. You know, how did you get your start and how did you become so knowledgeable on the subjects of AI and AV technology?
Anca Platon Trifan
Great question, well, how much time do you have?
Logan Pratt
All the time in the world.
Anca Platon Trifan
I'm gonna try to keep it brief. I, actually, I'm originally from Romania and sadly, even to this day, there's not a lot of opportunities for women, especially those who want to get into such a niche as AV production.
Now, my desire to do AV production started actually in high school when I started as an intern at a radio station, and I worked at that radio station all over high school and through college. And I really fell in love with that whole process. I think that's what kind of propelled me to start my own podcast eventually. But really, what was super interesting is that I fell in love with the technology, with what we were working with, with the equipment that we were using. And all of this was very much bootstrap. Like, if you were the radio DJ, you also had to mix your own sound, and you had to mix the levels, and you were running the playlist. You're taking the questions, the live questions from the audience, so you're basically, kind of producing your own show, even though we didn't really have a name for that.
But I was doing all of that behind the scenes while also being the host, and I love that. And I wanted to learn more about sound engineering. I wanted to learn more about this little Mackie 1602 or 1402 that we had that was our, you know, mixer for all the inputs, audio inputs that we were hosting in that particular radio station. And I did a lot of, like, self-teaching. I was playing with the sound. I mean, I had the opportunity to just be hands on and in a very, like, low pressure environment, because we were growing. It was a radio station that was very much, you know, very listened to. But we're very creative, and we're like doing things, and we had a lot of leeway home to the type of shows or the type of programming that we had, and I had three different programs that I was playing with. And I learned a lot, but then I wanted to pursue that, and I realized very fast that there is no opportunities.
So that kind of like brought on this desire to move to U.S. There was this picture that I had of the Statue of Liberty. And to me, what that signified was freedom, was this ability to follow whatever dream you have and not just pursue it, but also attain it somehow. So that… you know, that meant that after college, I got on an airplane, I got to the U.S. Long story short, to this day, I have not seen the Statue of Liberty in-person yet. I did fly over it, so it's definitely still a bucket list. And I keep talking about it. I'm like, “I can't believe that it's been 20 years and it's still a bucket list.” But, you know, sometimes it's okay when things take longer than anticipated. I think that's where like wanting to see it even more so becomes, you know, such a, you know, such a special experience. So I'm looking forward to that.
But anyway, I got into this AV production shop that, at first, they actually hired me to be their computer-fixer, because I graduated in computer science and I knew a thing or two about computers. And I'm like, “Whatever it takes. I just want to get my foot in the door and I'll learn everything.” Because what I really want to learn more about is AV production.
So I started from the ground up, coiling cables, organizing warehouses, which gave me such a wonderful opportunity to actually learn gear. Like, to go through every single piece of gear that we had in this immense warehouse down in LA and play with it, and finical with it, and see what it does. And if he was broken, repair it. Like I was definitely hands-on. Like, from the very beginning, I blame my dad for taking me with him into his workshop. And just like constantly, you know, doing things, repairing things and being very much hands on. And that got me into like, basically from the day I started coiling cables to the day I mixed live sound for Linkin Park, Fergie, even Michael Jackson for a special coming, or about five years time to really learn what it takes to be a really good sound engineer.
Now, it does help to have the ear for it. It does help to have that innate, I guess, talent, and I did have that to this day. I still mix live bands on occasion, on weekends, and right now, I just do it for fun, because it's still fun to me to be very much hands on in some of those things, even though I have so many other responsibilities and other things that I run.
But that's kind of what got me started in AV production, and a long story short, eventually I started my own agency and just doing events and always putting myself in roles where I could learn and grow to me putting myself into uncomfortable situation where I'm sweating as I'm learning, it just gives me the opportunity to really focus on that process and nail it. And I when I put my mind to something, I just go all-in and I just learn everything there is to learn about it.
So there is no surprise that when you know AI came more on the on, you know, as part of our reality a couple of years ago with open AI and chatgpt, even though we had machine learning for quite a bit. I mean, every decision that you make on Amazon and every show you watch on Netflix has been decided for you and recommended based on your previous habits and patterns. That's all machine learning, right?
So AI is just not really that new. It's just the way we perceive it and we interact with it. Now seems to be but when this came up, I was like, “What is this thing? I want to know what? I want to get my hands dirty. I want to learn more about it.” So I dived straight into it, and I learned as much as there was to be learned about it.
And to this point, I'm actually putting myself in places and situations where I want to learn even more. Like last, last Saturday, I spent the whole day learning for the very first time, Python, like I haven't done programming in probably two decades. Yes, I graduated in computer science. Yes, we did C++ and whatever that's like language, programming language that we haven't used in a while because there's so many other updated languages now. But I'm like if I need to know Python to deploy this application in which I use chat GPT to pull from a spreadsheet all my attendee data or my guest data, say for a podcast, automatically, without me having to do anything but one key stroke. Well, guess what? I'm gonna build an app. I'm gonna learn how to do it, and I'm gonna deploy it took the whole day. But guess what? It's working, and now I have this private custom GPT that my team for my podcast uses it. And all it does is they, they go in there and say, Please provide a script for the last entry. That's all it does. No priming necessary. And that what that does. It goes into the spreadsheet that has all our inputting information that the guest has filled in on this form, and that means their name, position, bio, their fun facts, their topic of interest, the questions that they would like to be asked, or anything and everything that we have on our input form, and it will create this amazing script based on my workflow, based on my shows workflow.
Now imagine that same application being used in an event situation where you have all of this data from your attendees that are registering for your events, and you want to creating something so personalized for them on experience, or you want to create messaging, or you want to create marketing materials, but instead of like copying and pasting and having to go here and collect this data from there, you have it built in a custom GPT that is private to your organization. It doesn't have to be shared out there. And you take all of that information and you just create all of this marketing materials or content or whatever it is that you need to create for your event that is highly personalized to this one attendee based on data that you already have only you don't have to prime it so much that your prompting ends up to be like 100 million lines of code. So that's just a way in which AI can help. You know?
Logan Pratt
Yeah, can I ask you a little bit more about custom GPTs? Because it's something that David Stevens, who you know very well, I know, mentioned last episode, he has a custom GPT for wellness specifically. he's a wellness guy, and that's a lot of what he does. Can you talk a little bit more about… because everyone's heard of Chat GPT and kind of it seems like that's more general. But how do custom GPTs work, and how can people maybe create one for their own business?
Anca Platon Trifan
Well, great question, because David built his own after I have pressured him for months because I already had a couple of my custom GPTs built. I have one for AV production, I have one for fitness coaching, I have one for Fit4Events, which is the framework under which my companies operate, which is very much divided in four different pillars. We can touch on that later.
But custom GPTs are such an amazing tool, especially when you want to have something that is created specifically for a project or specifically for an event or specifically for a task. Like I said, this private podcast script generator that I just created for my podcast, that is just for my podcast, and it has all the data of all the guests that and all the topics that we have covered over the last five years. And I have almost 200 episodes, so that even tells me, like, when I go in my GPT and say, “Hey, we want to my next episode needs to be on this topic,” it will go back in that data and tell me automatically “Well, you already covered this topic in episode blah, blah blah with guests, blah blah blah.” I don't remember anymore what we covered over five years of so many episodes, but now I have a tool that tells me.
Now, with custom GPTs, you can easily create something like that that's very specific, and it's already configured and primed on your own data set, and you can make that public as a tool for maybe, say, your audience. You have this event that you want to prime it with all the information for this large conference that you are planning to put on. Or maybe you're a DMC, or you're a bureau, a city bureau, that you want to promote your location, your destination, and people go to websites, sure, but honestly, there's not a lot of interaction in websites. Like, I would go to a website, I'm kind of trying to scroll to things and be like, “Wow, I'm really looking to put on this retreat.” And there's just not enough information to tell me, how should I plan the agenda.
So, like, if I want to do three, four experiences each day, how much time do I need between, like, going from Place A to Place B to Place C? Sure, it can take some time for me to go on Google Maps and map it all up and do all of that. But if you actually had a GPT that already was trained on all the locations, destinations, all the amazing things that someone could do at this particular at this particular place, and also give specific transition time.
So when you put on that agenda for this retreat or whatever activation you're planning to incentive, it already maps that out, and it creates this agenda. It tells you, okay, so if you're going to go to this place and you want to do this particular activity, you're going to need this much time. You're going to also need to stop here because you really must see this, because it's amazing, blah, blah, blah, then you're going to need this much time of driving, or you might need to go to here because you need to have lunch, or blah blah. All of those things could be mapped out based on the information that is specific to your location, that is what priming that custom GPT should look like, and would be helpful to have if you wanted to offer that as a project. I'm actually working with Visit Boise on creating our own version of that for our destination, because Boise is trying to get very hard on the map of a plausible location for events. And I know we had meetings today, having their own fam, but there's definitely beautiful places here and beautiful experiences that an activation that could be had. So that's just one way in which you can leverage a custom GPT and how to build it. Actually, me and David got on a live webcast not too long ago. It's available on my YouTube channel, and we just went step by step. And actually we made it fun, because we made it very interactive, and we asked the audience, hey, what type of custom GPT Do you want us to build? Because that's what we're going to do. So we went through this process, and that was a lot of fun, but it's not hard. Now, the type of GPT that I build, especially the one that actually relies on automation, that's a different story. That's where you probably need a professional like myself to get their hands dirty and really get some programming done, because there'll be a different type of GPT that we're talking about.
Logan Pratt
Do you think that looking to the future of kind of AI and stuff, which is kind of what this podcast focuses about? Do you think that custom GPTs are going to be the future of AI in a lot of ways? Do you see those kind of be integrated? Because I hear a lot of people talking about, you know, on social media that might be where a lot of people have encountered custom, custom GPTs before, with like the Meta AI and like on Instagram, you can now DM character AIs and have conversations with them. And a lot of people are pushing back on that, and they actually don't want to utilize those on those specific platforms. So how do you think that custom GPTs for something like a CVB would be different?
Anca Platon Trifan
So I think that's a difference that we need to make. What you're interacting with on meta is not a custom GPT, it’s a bot. So there's definitely two different type of things that we're talking about here, AI bots, AI assistants, whatever, how you might call them. They can be, they can be a turn off for people. I mean, I personally not, do not enjoy especially let's say this was delta, and I needed my flight change, and this bot is trying to support me, but literally, they're just constantly like, going in this, you know, cycle of like, not really helping me. That's frustrating. I don't want frustration.
Logan Pratt
People remember, like, Clippy and stuff from, like, old Microsoft and stuff and like, it was never terribly helpful. So…
Anca Platon Trifan
Exactly. So that's where I feel the push, pushback is we still want to deal with humans. We still want that human interaction, like, whenever, like, and it's happened to me so much to my travels where I had to change my flights like this because it was some cancelation or something change, or I delays that really like, put me, you know, in the middle of nowhere with no way to get out. That human interaction, to me, is 100% more helpful than any AI bot or chat bot out there. Custom GPT is they're a tool. They're a resource. They do not act like the chat bot. Now, you could integrate your custom GPT to be the support system for an AI bot, but we're talking about two different type of tools here, right? Our custom GPT is the future. I would say AI agents are the future.
Now, what is the difference between all of these three things, right? An AI bot is basically fad and trained on a certain number of, you know, frequently asked questions or interactions. It does learn to each interaction, but I feel like it's a slower deployment of what AI intelligence really is a custom DGP is more of the resource the database that you build. It's kind of like the user manual that you want to give, as I said, if this was a destination for that destination, and it provides you the assistance on top of your manual. So, like, it's almost like, I go to Google Maps and I can map, you know, this point A to point B to point Z, but I don't have a whole lot of assistance. If I don't know Gemini is really trying to get in there and support that, but I don't have much assistance to tell me. What else could I see between destination, point A to point B, right? Your custom GPT can be that support system without being nagg, without being, you know, annoying, without being frustrated because you're really having a conversation with an assistant, like someone that is there to support you, right? And the AI agent.
Now this is where you're thinking about a gazillion of those custom GPTs, very much built to do very specific tasks that now are working as a team to go and do things for you. So in the future, the way we see, even in the future of events, and actually, there is a tool that has been already built by social 27 it's called HiveGPT. And it’s a series of AI agents that are deployed the moment you give that AI agent your SOP. What is the scope for this event? What are we trying to accomplish? You gotta have to prime it. You're gonna have to tell it. I'm planning an event for this many people. This is what we're trying to do. This is what the campaign should be like. This is what the landing pages we're thinking for each each individual that will join our event. And now those AI agents that all have different positions, like, one might be a sale executive, might be a marketing manager, one might be the sponsorship AI agent, one might be the registration. One might be the, I don't know, creative side. They all like go to work to accomplish the task that you gave that is where the future is going. That's what Google is going. That's what AWS is going towards. That's what the event industry might go towards.
Obviously, we're moving a bit of a slower rate, because when it comes to AI and even professionals, I honestly see three distinct archetypes. You have the fearful. These are the event professionals who kind of feel threatened by AI, and they often fear that it will replace their jobs or maybe disrupt the traditional event planning process. And to them, I would say, AI is not here to replace you. Is here to support you. They convert as a powerful tool that can really hand. Example, the time consuming, like, for example, my custom GPT saves me 59 minutes. It used to take me up to an hour to do this one task that I mentioned, now it takes me one minute. That's 59 minutes that I'm saving to do other things. So if I can replace some of those mundane tasks, time consuming, I don't want to do type of things with a tool, a custom GPT, that can focus on just that one thing, while I can focus on what truly matters, which is, you know, building relationships, creating strategies, delivering unforgettable experiences. That is, to me, a win, because you then save time to do something that a human should do, which is the creative process, the relationship, building all of those things. So start small, experiment with AI in areas like scheduling or maybe post event analysis, and you'll find it how it can really complement your skills.
Then we have those doublers like those are the professionals that they're kind of cautioned about experimenting with AI. They're using it sort of like in limited ways, but not fully embracing its potential. And if I were to say something to those people, I would say, you're already on the right track, but AI's capabilities go far beyond you using ChatGPT like once a week, you have so much more that can be explored. So think of AI as this co pilot, somebody that can even predict your attendees behavior, can optimize your venue layouts or streamline AV production agendas and the flow of things, and the more you integrate it, the more you realize what potentially can have to really elevate every aspect of your event planning and event management. And then we have the sold ones. These are the professionals that are really fully on board. They're using AI to its full capacity, and they're constantly seeking new ways to innovate. I consider myself one of those people, because I feel like to myself and the ones that are in this category, you know, we are the ones that are leading the way and are showing that there is so much more out there that can really push the boundaries of what's possible. There is so much to be done with content creation, with real time, audience engagement, with personalization, and we happen to be, you know, in a field that's still evolving, kind of like pioneers, and that's okay, right? Sometimes people embrace pioneers. Sometimes they're like, We don't understand you. Like, stay away from us, because you scare us, right? But that's okay. Eventually, we're all moving in that direction, because AI is here to stay, and as we all fall into one of those groups, we'll have to make a decision how we're going to embrace it and what piece and whatever stage we find ourselves in. Now think about AI like right now it feels like it's a 10 like an AI year feels like a 10 human ears, because the piece of AI development is so incredibly fast with big breakthroughs and with changes that are happening so so very fast, every few weeks, every few months, and that has already dramatically shifted our industries, and it will continue to do so. So what might take, well, like, I don't know, a decade to evolve in traditional technology, it really happened in less than two years for AI to just constantly, absolutely change our way of working, our way of thinking, even our way of talking, the way we now use some words that we haven't done in the past. And there's so much more happening as we speak, new models, new tools, new applications and new updates, they are constantly rolling out. So we can just stay out of this from afar and look at this development as it's happening, or we can be part of this as it's going on, and try to kind of stay in step with it, because the more distant you are from all those changes, the harder it will be at one point to really adopt Everything that's been happening in this just few years that that we've seen the changes happening.
Logan Pratt
Definitely, and I wonder, then how it's going to impact you've kind of touched on a lot on, like, what the future of work kind of looks like in relationship to AI. And I know last time we spoke, we talked about, you know, kind of the limits of AI, because you're very optimistic about the potential of AI. But do you see kind of a an upper echelon or a limit to where AI should go? Because, you know, we talked about, you know, AI should free up some of the mundane tasks so that we can focus on creative tasks. There are AI programs that are starting to delve into the creative tasks, and seem to be pushing us towards a future where the robots do everything fun and creative and. The humans do all the mundane stuff that maybe we don't want to do. So what does that look like for you? And where do you think the limits of maybe where AI should stop and let the humans kind of take over certain aspects of projects and daily tasks?
Anca Platon Trifan
I mean, at the end of the day, AI is trained on human data set, human knowledge, human banks of knowledge. So how much AI is creatively creating creative content? That's a question, questionable statement, okay, will the future of AI involve creativity at that level? In the future? We don't know. I'm pretty sure it's going to happen the moment we get into AGI and other type of AI models and modalities. I think it was open AI, they came up with this prediction, and they were talking about, like, how you know their chatgpt, 234, and where we're at, like, moving into five. It was like, right now chat GPT four and five is kind of at this PhD level of knowledge, but then when it goes past that, is going to be basically, like autonomous, like, be able to do things and task and not needing a lot of prompting and supervision to do the things of the you know of that it's being programmed to do, or the things that it's being told to do. So like, you just might give it one task, but you're not going to give it every single step. It's going to know what the steps are, because it's going to learn just based on everything that's known up to this point, right?
So where should the limit be? That's a great question. I feel like we may we as humans, we still want to, still want to communicate and collaborate and network with other humans. I don't see necessarily a future, not anytime soon, where we would be comfortable into this mixed hybrid environment where there's going to be humans and robots walking around like we're talking about, you know, scenes from, you know, from some Sci-Fi movie, right?
I think AI is definitely for me the way I see it, the support, the assistant, the tool that I leverage to do whatever it is that I need to do better, faster and more efficiently, would I rely on AI to give me creatively the type of information that I need to put out, something that's more creative than I am able and capable of. I don't know, I struggle with that. I've actually tested that, and I haven't been able to get something out of ChatGPT or cloud or perplexity that was, oh my gosh, this is really brand new thought leadership. Because again, it goes back to, you know, all the priming, all the knowledge that Jetty has not just about myself through all our interactions, but about from all the data set that's been, you know, very much trained on. So I don't really have a good answer for you, Logan. I just know for myself where I would be comfortable with and how far I would want to take it like, I don't want this to turn into some kind of like scene or episodes from black meter.
Logan Pratt
We definitely don't want the matrix or anything like that to happen.
Anca Platon Trifan
Or that, or sidebrox. I think there was another sci fi that I was really into. Battlestar Galactica had a prequel, and it was all about this side Cy Bronx, I think Cy-some, I know I forgot, but there's like, basically robot humans that very much look like humans. And it was kind of like a scary world, you know, to not know who's real human, and who's that, you know?
Logan Pratt
Yeah, and I think for a lot of people, I think we talked about this, and I know a lot of people have brought this up as well, where, you know, if you're worried about AI truly being a creative thing. I don't know if AI can have original ideas. Like, it seems as though AI is just kind of taking a lot of human ideas and, you know, mixing them up. And that's, that's a lot of uses that I found for AI. I think I'm in your middle category. People are like, I use AI on occasion, and I found it most helpful when writing to kind of mix up words and stuff almost as like a much more advanced thesaurus.
Anca Platon Trifan
Or even elevate a little bit or enhance some of the creative writing that you've already done, and that's, again, based on something that you've already outputted out there. And I've always used it like that, like I would come up with this thought process like and that's happens to me every single morning, I would have this thought, and I want to elaborate on it, and I'm thinking about it, and I'm like, “Okay, so I want to create a LinkedIn post. I want to create an article. I want to create this blog that enhances this thought process that I have, and I want to include these things, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” and I put my bullet point, I put my thought leadership into that, and then I'm okay with AI to then take that information and custom it into some kind of good, flowing paragraphs, you know, and I'll go back and edit some of that, but that's pretty good, like the output of that, once I prime it with what I want it to be, whatever the topic might be, that's actually a pretty good output.
By now, my own ChatGPT, just because, you know, we've been working together for a while, knows exactly what I want to hear and how I want to talk like how my language is, what my conversational style is, my tone, and all of that that is to me, supports to the next level. I have not had any assistant, any in person or VA, that was able to translate my thoughts that well, and that, to me, is a win, you know.
Now, sure, there's the question like, “So, where's the place of the VA assistance? Where's the place of all of those, you know, roles that will they go away?” Maybe they will go away. That's a question that we are all asking ourselves. So maybe, if you're in a role that you know, it can easily be replaced by AI, maybe it's time to upscale your career. There's a lot of courses out there, free courses like Microsoft has a bunch, IBM has a bunch Udemy courses that you can take to just take your skill set to another level, because domain expertise will still matter. But if you have no domain expertise, and you used to do things that now AI can do, probably that should be a bit of a, you know, alarm bell, like red flag.
Logan Pratt
Yeah. And I think, I think we've talked a lot about, you know, don't fear AI because, you know, the fearing of it is not going to make the the actual idea of AI go away. Like just because you stick your head in the sand and ignore it does not necessarily mean that it's not still going to come and be a huge part of the industry in the future. So trying to, you know, adopt and learn with people how to learn how to use AI in a daily sense, I think is a is a great takeaway for people. Because I think I was going to ask you, like, what you would recommend for people to, like, learn about AI. But it sounds like there, yeah, there's a bunch of courses.
Anca Platon Trifan
And, yeah, I even like to, especially for event professionals on one on ones. I like to take them on a, this a little adventure of, like an intro course, and it's like a 60 minute mini course, I like to call them, and just getting them to the level where they can utilize AI in their own workflows that is very much personalized to their own processes. And that's been more successful than trying to just do kind of like an overall course. I've done those two. I still do workshops where anybody's welcome, and it's more like a, you know, want to 15, one to 20, but when it's a one on one, you know exactly what that one particular person is struggling with, or what their fears are, because they're more open to share. You know what? They're not just fears, but also maybe challenges and and stoppers in their thinking. A lot of this is mindset, I feel like, more than anything, it's the mindset of, like, just try it. Like, just go out there and try it. No, you're not going to be good at it from like, the first instance. You're going to use it the same way, how you know you go for the first time in the gym, and you're like, looking at all this equipment, and I'm like, I'm going to embarrass myself. I'm trying to use this machine. I don't even know like how to like how to use it, right? But if you just start it, and if you just look around, watch other people do things, and then you're like, Okay, so I'm going to give it a try. Like, the same way, you know, it's good to be part of communities that are already doubling into AI. They're already talking about AI. They're sharing expertise, they're sharing resources, and you learn with the community. So if you raise your hand and you have a question, it doesn't feel like it's a stupid question, because most likely more other people more than you had the same question, right? So there's definitely steps you can take where, in a safe environment, you can learn and not look like, oh, I look, you know, silly, or now I'm just going to be the only one that has asked this one question when everybody's probably thinking it.
Logan Pratt
Yeah, and I think a lot of people are intimidated by AI, because I think some people have just kind of resigned themselves to, well, I'm not tech savvy, so therefore I can't utilize AI, but I think it's like any other you know skill that you learn. You know you're going to be bad at it at first, and you're going to make a lot of mistakes, but that's okay. And like you know, everyone's learning together, because this is a pretty much a brand new piece of technology in the way that people are you obviously AI has been around for a while, but like in this kind of new wave of AI, everyone's learning altogether. So it's, it's definitely okay to, you know, not be good at it at first.
Anca Platon Trifan
I mean, it happened in 2020, when, all you know, event professionals out there that had no understanding of technology or AV production, they found themselves being producers. Is a virtual event. They're like, “Oh my gosh, I have to learn this platform. I have to learn how to stream. I have to learn how to do all of this.” Well, you could do that, or you could find something else to do, because there's no other option. So right now, it's like, kind of put in that, you know, like, Oh my gosh. Do I have to learn this? Or yes, because guess what, soon enough, there's not going to be any other option, yeah,
Logan Pratt
Definitely. The future is coming. Well, thank you so much, Anca. Just as like, kind of an outro thing, where can people find you and, like, what kind of things do you do in the industry that people should check out?
Anca Platon Trifan
Totally. I mean, yes, I am the most present on LinkedIn. You can always find me there, and that's where I share a lot of the thought leadership, as I said, coming back to the pillars that formed this Fit4Events framework, I talk about AV production, I talk about AI technology. I talk about empowering our audiences with wellness and strategies that give us the ability to learn but also thrive. And then also I talk about the behind the scenes themes. I have two communities that I support, especially women behind the scenes in events and AV technology.
And if I put content out there, it has to fit one of those buckets that's like non-negotiable to me, and that's really where I thrive. And then there's also a blog on my website. I put a lot of content around those topics. The podcast itself is the resource and the AV production GPT that's available, as well as the feed for events custom GPT that's available. I would also like to mention the HiveGPT, which is, again, this new tool that, along with PCMA's Project Spark and events, GPT copilot, are just resources that event professionals can use for anything from like creating menus to dialing in agendas to creating, you know, amazing incentive experiences and destination planning and all of that is available. Just go out there and try it all.
Logan Pratt
Well, yeah, thank you much so much for being on the show, Anca.
Anca Platon Trifan
Thank you for having me.
Logan Pratt
That was my conversation with Anca Platon Trifan, one of the leading experts on artificial intelligence in the industry. If you liked what you heard, you can check out more episodes of the Fast Forward podcast by going to Meetingstoday.com/podcasts or find us on Spotify. And as always, thank you for listening.
