Presented by Cvent

Marketing is quickly being transformed by generative AI. One team put the technology to the test when they used ChatGPT to create a highly successful webinar. Here’s a look at where they used gen AI, what went wrong — and why they’ve become one of ChatGPT’s biggest fan.

Watch free on-demand here.

“AI has got us all wondering how we can boost our processes and how we can use this tech to make us quicker and sharper,” said Brooke Gracey, marketing director for leading event platform Cvent. “But the real question is, how do we use it properly?”

To answer that question, Gracey and her colleague generated an entire webinar, from start to finish, using ChatGPT. The result was a wildly popular webinar, and a new focus on the balance between the tech and the human element; between the organic and the authentic, so that individuality and originality isn’t lost. In this VB Spotlight event, she spoke about the five key stages of building a webinar, best practices for using AI to help you ideate, build, promote and execute, use insights post-event and more.

Can ChatGPT make you more creative?

The first step for Gracey’s team was the ideation stage — the birthplace of the webinar, so to speak. The big question here was: Can AI truly comprehend and mirror human creativity, or is this just a tool that recycles pre-existing ideas?

“As we delve more into this and you learn more about how AI works, this question becomes more and more important,” Gracey said. “When you have a bunch of unique humans sitting in a room together brainstorming for an idea, it’s going to be truly unique, right? But when you use a technology that’s essentially using old data and existing information to come up with its responses, you can see how it could feel like we’re maybe just saying the same thing over and over.”

The basic webinar topic was providing inspiration for event planners to take their events to the next level, and determining how AI could assist this brainstorming activity. In just seconds, ChatGPT generated 50 ideas for a webinar based on the intended audience and topic — but they had to sift through to find the gems, and then then use those ideas as inspiration, delving deeper, refining and polishing.

ChatGPT was also very useful for refining their pitch to stakeholders by suggesting potential questions or concerns each stakeholder might have, and then helping them build talking points to address them.

Gen AI vs. intellectual property

So AI was proving to be a total asset, creating a ton of efficiencies in the ideation and pre-planning process of a webinar, then drilling down and creating a concise and impactful webinar description and helping them craft an outline. After refining it, they gave the outline back to the tool and asked it to write a 30-minute script, which was returned in minutes. But a concern about the purview of the content started to creep in.

“Is this really my content? Can I really take what ChatGPT wrote and read it, word for word, on a webinar and essentially act as if it was my own intellectual property?” Gracey said. “A lot of questions around this came up along with other things to consider when you’re doing anything with AI, whether it be creating images or content.”

Scale, personalization and bias

Gen AI offers a profoundly scalable way of doing marketing — it can write 100 emails in seconds, which would take humans hours to do. But the genuineness of the content it produces is in question.

“It’s going to lack that personal touch, depth and authenticity that you would get with human-created content,” Gracey explained. “There’s a risk that it will sound too robotic or formulaic. We’ll be saying the same thing, all of us, because we’re getting it from AI. This is why it’s important to layer that human touch over this technology. As a marketer, I’m always concerned about the personalization factor. I want to be able to personalize my marketing, but is AI going to be able to do that for me?”

But the technology was also useful for promotion — the team used ChatGPT to help build persona-specific promotional content by identifying target personas and defining demographics, interests, pain points and so on, then tuning the model with that data to get customized content from the tool.

The question soon became, “Is AI really an evolution in precision, or is it a regression in personalization?” Gracey said. “Yes, we can use AI to help with data-driven decisions. This is its bread and butter. It makes data-driven decisions very quickly. It helps us to eliminate the guesswork, to see an enhanced return on investment. But there is a concern about unintended bias.”

When you’re training a model, it’s garbage in, garbage out, as usual. If that data is biased, then its responses will be biased, and you’ll end up alienating your audience.

Lessons learned and challenges to tackle

AI is undeniably cool. It can create a tremendous number of efficiencies — but the key thing to keep in mind is that it requires the human element to function correctly.

“The one question that I get asked all the time is, would I do a webinar again using AI like I have?” Gracey said. “I would definitely use AI for a webinar again. I would not have AI write all of my webinar copy. I would not have AI write all of my scripts without me having the opportunity to add that human element. I need to read through it. I need to make sure it makes sense and sounds like me. I don’t want to sound like a robot reading a script. But I would definitely use AI to help not just with a webinar production, but content writing, content development and data analysis. There are tons of opportunities for us to create these efficiencies. I would highly recommend that everyone go try it out.”

Watch the full webinar now, for a closer look at how their ChatGPT-generated project turned out, plus ways to leverage generative AI to create efficiencies, boost productivity and more.

Watch this VB Spotlight for free, on-demand!

Agenda

How can AI be used to ideate topics, build the abstract, and write the content outline and script?
What are some ways that AI can be used to help promote a webinar?
Can audiences distinguish between AI and human input?
Does using AI actually save time or does it add to the workload?

Presenter

Brooke Gracey, Marketing Director, Cvent