Ted Dworkin, Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite, sits down with NDA to discuss the role AI is playing within the event marketing and ticketing space.
The ways in which people explore and engage with events changed dramatically during the pandemic years, leaving a lasting impact on live experiences. This period was quickly followed by the mainstream emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), paving the way for another transformative phase, which we’re in the midst of.
AI technology is particularly playing a significant role in the world of event management and ticketing, helping organisers to more easily deliver successful events.
“We’ve started using AI is to really help our event organisers and creators. We’ve deployed AI tools that allow them to more easily create events; add media for those events to their event listings and descriptions; apply tags to those events to make it more easily discoverable; and then also to create content for marketing that allows them to find an audience for those events,” says Ted Dworkin, Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite.
“All of those things have reduced the amount of time and effort that an event organiser has to put in in order to be able to create a rich, interesting, and attractive event listing. And it actually increases the effectiveness of those event listings in finding an audience.”
Eventbrite has been able to reduce the time and effort required for users creating their first event by 30%, and has increased publish rates by between 4% and 10% through summary automation and description generation.
Moreover, the event management platform has helped organisers to launch ad campaigns 30% faster with its AI-powered copy, versus manual copy. And social media ads with Eventbrite’s AI-generated copy have improved cost per click by 17%.
Notably, Eventbrite points to the use of its promotional tools enabling organisers to sell, on average, 63% more than if they choose to run promo themselves.
“That was part of our decision to actually deploy the technology. It wasn’t just that it was AI, and that everyone was talking about AI and wondering how to use AI, but we could demonstrably show that it was more effective for event organisers and help them with their business,” explains Dworkin.
Eventbrite has also deployed AI to help with search engine optimisation – helping events to become more easily discovered – and in increasing the speed by which organisers are able to get their questions answered. Eventually, the platform will look toward using the technology to generate rich media and create a more conversational, generative search and discovery experience.
However, it’s not just externally where AI technology is making a difference.
“We’ve deployed Copilot tools for our engineering organisation. We’ve got AI deployed that helps with lead generation for our sales team. We’ve got AI deployed that helps our marketing organisation with their ability to generate marketing communications and tune into audiences and look at patterns of usage of those audiences,” says Dworkin.
Of course, having AI weaved throughout the business brings up one of the big questions around the use of the technology and how it’ll impact jobs. Fortunately, Eventbrite plans to leverage the technology to help it to “invest more in human capital that does the kind of work that AI can’t do or can never do,” according to Dworkin.
Dworkin highlights how Eventbrite’s engineers have been using AI and Copilot tools to become more productive over the past year, while welcoming more engineers into the team, and enabling them all to do “more satisfying, interesting, and higher value work.”
“We’re a case study in actually increasing the investment we’ve made in R&D as a function of embracing AI.,” Dworkin says. “Our whole goal with its deployment is creating value for end customers and internally making work more satisfying, more effective, and letting people spend time and energy on the more creative and collaborative aspects of the work that machines certainly can’t do today and may never be able to do.”
Beyond the AI use cases at Eventbrite, Dworkin is also “hopeful” about the impact that the technology could have in making people’s lives better more generally, pointing to how it can improve “real-life” work being done around sustainability, medicine, and more.
“I’m really hopeful that it will have a profound impact on the ways in which real-life gets better rather than digital life,” he says. “So, things around environment, and improving our ability to detect and solve environmental challenges. The medical profession – the ability to do things like disease detection and prevention, or pandemic mitigation. Ways in which large data can really be reasoned over quickly and solve problems at a global scale.
“Those are the areas that I’m most inspired by, and that’s all about improving real-life. There are also things like traffic management, transportation, and massive public policy, just ways in which you can develop things that can improve the human condition in a very real way,” Dworkin concludes.
