Event marketing expert Katie Moser Stuck talks about how to use AI for event marketing without losing the human spark.
Now that AI has become the dominant topic in event marketing, it’s important to figure out how to navigate the best way to use this new technology. When and how should AI be a part of the workflow, and how much is too much?
Prevue recently sat down with Katie Moser Stuck, Director of Marketing & Business Development at experiential marketing and event management company GoGather, Stuck also supports GoGather’s client events, so she has a good feel for what’s involved from all ends of the event marketing spectrum.
Prevue: Why is it important for those who work in event marketing to understand how to incorporate AI into their work?

Stuck: A tenet of event marketing has always been not to just put out content for the sake of putting out content, but because AI makes it easy, the urge to put out more content just because you can is that much stronger. The problem is that, when you use AI too heavily, there’s a particular voice and sentence structure that’s very recognizable, and your content is likely going to look like everybody else’s. And if you’re just producing things that look like everybody else’s, are you really creating a good differentiator for your company?
Something that I try to instill in our team is to use these tools to support your work but always bring your own perspective and your own voice as you’re building content, because you can definitely tell when it’s AI-generated.
Prevue: Where do you tend to use AI most in your event marketing work?
Stuck: When we’re interviewing subject matter experts to get their input on a specific topic, our content team will use an AI like ChatGPT to synthesize their notes, provide a first rough draft, and build out a content plan. AI can make the process go a little faster. It also is helpful when it comes to getting video content out more quickly. Especially if your team isn’t focused on generating video content, there are video editing platforms that can take a podcast your CEO does, cut it into multiple clips for social, size it correctly, put captions on it and get it out the door more quickly. It’s very useful, and it doesn’t require much specialized skill.
We also use ChatGPT for internal processing like synthesizing notes from team meetings, generating action items and organize ideas into a content plan. That can all be very time consuming, and AI can help a lot with streamlining those processes.
Prevue: What would be a bad way for event marketers to use AI?
Stuck: Just using it to mass produce things without a layer of human review before putting it out on the internet. Or if you use it to put together an event agenda without reviewing it, you lose a level of personalization, nuance and context. And the more you use an AI platform, the more it learns about what you want — which can be very helpful. But it doesn’t know your organization, or your audience, or your presenters’ unique voices the way you do.
The same holds true if you use it for segmenting your marketing for different personas. AI will be able to tailor to a specific segment generally, but it won’t be able to understand that persona the way you do. We do a lot of marketing to marketers, so we have to be careful to have that human element, because marketers know all the tricks! You have to be more creative and more human than AI can manage at this point.
But it’s not just marketers. Everyone is playing with AI now — it’s no longer a novelty. Everyone has some familiarity with it, and they will be able to tell if it’s human-generated or more of a generic AI-generated piece.
Prevue: Are there any particular AI tools you recommend?
Stuck: There are so many tools being released by every platform right now. Canva has been releasing a ton of AI tools, which have been really helpful for my team when they’re building social content and producing videos — even just editing photos faster.
Prevue: So, the upshot is that these are useful tools, but they still need the human touch?
Stuck: When you see what is really resonating with audiences, it’s always brands that are leaning into the human aspect, that have the human touch. You still have to use your critical thinking skills to review and adjust and leverage your expertise — we still need humans.
We’re all feeling a little fatigued and burned out with internet overload. Events are the antidote to this, because they help us feel more connected to other people. That’s why we’re seeing a shift in recent years to people wanting more networking and personalized activations at events — people now know they can get all that knowledge from general sessions online. They can take a master class and watch videos on the internet, but they can’t get that one-on-one connection and brain exchange that they can get at events.
Brands can use AI to help get us there, but to be meaningful, we have to tap into this human connection, both in our events and in our marketing.
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