How to create extraordinary virtual events with the help of AI 

What a great time to be organizing virtual events! You can now leverage AI to generate content, ideate, automate tasks, improve the attendee experience, and scale your virtual event activities.

We recently created and managed Virtually Live! by Kaltura, our annual event for marketers by marketers with the assistance of AI and it turned out to be a great event! Find out how we did it and how you can do it, too, in this article. 

Virtually Live! 2023: A virtual event about AI, built with AI 

Virtually Live! is a yearly virtual event, where marketing experts and global brand leaders dig deep into industry hot topics and offer inspiring and valuable information to thousands of marketing professionals tuning in from around the world. This year’s edition was dedicated to AI strategies and use cases in marketing and virtual events. 

Of course, the Kaltura Marketing team didn’t just talk the talk. Virtually Live! 2023 was a virtual event about AI, built with AI. I deliberately wrote “with AI” rather than “by AI,” because AI is only a tool in the marketer’s toolkit. And that was exactly one of the main underlying messages of Virtually Live! 

AI is there to assist you, not to replace you. It’s a tool that helps you create extraordinary events. It can help you automate repetitive tasks, ideate and deliver first-draft content, optimize your promotion strategy through predictive analysis, and instantly process attendee data during the event to create a more engaging and personalized event experience. But at the helm of it all sits the marketer. A virtual event is a human experience first and foremost and AI helps us automate the mundane while enabling us to reclaim the more human aspects of marketing. 

With that mindset, let’s get you started with simplifying and improving your virtual event processes with AI. You can leverage GenAI to produce and repurpose various types of copy, graphic design assets, and video, and use applied AI to personalize the attendee experience and monitor attendee engagement. Let’s dive deeper into how you can do all of this, based on our experiences at Virtually Live!  

Content writing AI 

A lot of content and copywriting is involved in the creation of virtual events, from promotional emails to landing page copy, titles, abstracts, questions, ads, downloadable documents, and publications, … you name it. It’s a time-consuming endeavor that is also very important to get right. According to Marketing AI Institute Founder and CEO Paul Roetzer, in his Virtually Live! masterclass, AI writing tools can deliver value through the following use cases: classifying, drafting, editing, ideating, optimizing, outlining, personalizing, planning, simplifying, summarizing, transcribing, and translating. 

These are the areas of the virtual event content production process where you can typically use AI: 

Session content 

Session content should of course be produced by your speakers or other experts on the session topic (though one can assume that AI may have assisted them too). However, session titles, abstracts, and questions are all fair game for AI assistance. Using AI consistently for all these copy tasks will drastically shorten your copywriting turnaround time. The true art here lies in feeding your content AI (ex., ChatGPT) the right prompts. This requires some trial and error, but our free masterclass with AI expert Ruben Hassid should help you on your way. And of course, always edit and tweak the results.  

Email content 

Email is the #3 most used channel for demand generation. And it’s a key promotion channel for virtual events. As early as two months before the event date, you should start sending out regular emails and email sequences to various segments of your contact list with personalized updates to keep your event top-of-mind of your audience. This requires a lot of writing, some of which can be quite repetitive and perfect for AI. You can request your content AI solution to write the whole email or sequence based on a few prompts or to rewrite/reformulate existing emails to create different flavors of the same content. 

Kaltura tip: according to our latest survey about the use of AI in marketing 49% of marketers worry about AI’s ability to understand and replicate their brand’s unique tone of voice. That being said, you can specify your organization’s tone-of-voice definition in your prompt for a more accurate brief  

Session content repurposing 

Your virtual event can provide you with months’ worth of marketing content. 89% of marketers repurpose virtual event content to various extents. And the shelf life of such type of content lasts for several months as marketing collateral, on-demand video, or publication to the website. 

Virtually Live! was powered by Kaltura Events, which instantly and automatically generates transcripts of the video sessions. If your virtual event solution supports transcription, too, you can have AI transform and repurpose those transcripts into in-session video summaries to be immediately shared with your attendees (check out Virtually Live!’s “AI-on-the-fly” summaries). Your summary content can also be used in future marketing campaigns. 

Kaltura tip: you can feed your AI solution the session content and then prompt it to reformulate, summarize in x number of words, expand on certain topics, etc. i.e., to knead the content you wish to repurpose into the desired format.    

Graphic design AI 

For your virtual event brand language and images you can use graphic design AI platforms like Midjourney. You can also use graphic design AI in more creative ways. For example, check out the Virtually Live! ’23 AI art gallery, with AI-generated art inspired by speakers’ insights.

To create a similar AI-generated art gallery for your virtual event, simply ask ChatGPT to develop a theme around cherry-picked speaker quotes (you can also ask ChatGPT to choose the speaker’s quotes for you, by feeding it the session’s transcript and prompting it to find an inspiring quote). Take that theme to Midjourney and prompt it to visually “imagine” that theme. You can then fine-tune Midjourney suggestions with prompts to unify the artistic style and colors.

If needed, you can then upload the images into Adobe Photoshop, an undisputed pioneer in genAI capability and features, to better match colors using their AI-powered selection tools and further edit composition and objects with graphic design AI plugins. 

Kaltura tip: Tal Margalit, Kaltura’s Marketing Design Team Lead, recommends understanding the strengths of each AI tool you use and then mixing and matching their output until you get exactly what you need. Perhaps this will take more time but, ultimately, it will lead to greater results. 

Video editing AI 

Being a video-based format, virtual events require extensive video editing. Video editing is a very time-consuming and often repetitive endeavor and as such a perfect use case for AI. That is probably why Adobe’s ubiquitous video editing software Premiere Pro boasts an impressive arsenal of AI capabilities.  

One of the most powerful AI features in Premiere Pro you can use for virtual event video editing automatically cuts footage according to who is speaking in the video. The AI feature knows to switch visually between speakers based on the automatically generated audio transcript (that indicates who says what, based on voice recognition software). Additionally, Adobe’s AI also uses the transcript to automatically add captions to where they belong in the footage. Editing interviews and conversations or creating audio transcripts used to be manual tasks that took hours or even days to complete. Today, they only take mere minutes, thanks to AI. 

Another amazing AI feature is the ability to automatically track subjects in the footage and recompose the image to always keep that subject properly framed when you change the aspect ratio of a video. This capability is especially interesting when you need to repurpose video to various social media formats or ad creatives. This is the type of tedious and time-consuming task no editor likes to do. And now AI does it quicker and better.  

Kaltura tip: All these AI applications save video editors a lot of time and enable them to be more creative and deliver better results. Our best tip for optimizing your use of AI in video production is to watch this short video clip, in which Kaltura’s Senior Video Editor Guido Bertisch talks about his use of AI to edit and repurpose video content for Virtually Live!  

Integrated engagement-boosting AI tools in your virtual event platform 

You can also use dedicated AI applications to create virtual events, offered by higher-end digital experience platforms like Kaltura Events.  

As mentioned above, Virtually Live! was entirely created and managed on Kaltura’s leading solution, which has been pioneering AI in virtual events, with features like AI-based content personalization (check out the “Inspire me” page on the Virtually Live! hub, which suggests content based on the attendee’s behavior, choices, and interests), and an AI assistant that monitors attendee engagement in real-time and offers suggestions (which are visible to the speaker) on how to keep those engagement rates up. 

Kaltura tip: Not all virtual event platforms offer AI capabilities. When shopping for a new virtual event platform, always check that it does all the things you need it to do and that it is future-proofed with regular tech and feature updates (psst… check out Kaltura Events).  

Final thoughts 

AI permeates through all aspects of the virtual event production and management lifecycle, to the benefit of the overall experience. And, of course, it makes production a whole lot easier for marketers. Shuchi Sarkar, Global Head of Marketing Segments at AWS said it best during Virtually Live!’s closing keynote, How AWS maintains a unique voice with AI: 

AI brings scalability to events by reducing cost and streamlining ops. AI automates routine tasks, optimizes ad spending through predictive analysis, and quickly adapts marketing tactics based on real-time data.  

AI enables a level of automation and scaling that was previously unheard of, taking repetitive tasks off the marketer’s hands, and freeing more time to focus on the projects that matter. We heard it many times over during Virtually Live! 2023: AI enables marketers to get back to the marketing they love.