Greetings all, and welcome to The Mixer! 💪

As we get closer to the holiday season, it’s worth asking—are you looking for a little inspiration? We have that in spades with this issue, with a piece on the power of brainstorming—and how AI can help with that.

Also this time around:

🌎 The headaches facing international travel

📱 Can you pull off a meeting without a phone?

🤝 A big event’s big transition

As always, have any questions? Reach out to [email protected], and maybe you might find yourself in a future issue! Anyway, let’s get to it:

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By Ernie Smith

Here’s the truth about event planning—it’s a situation where you have to come up with a ton of ideas, often on the fly, and those ideas can be difficult to nail down.

Perhaps you have hundreds of photos of whiteboards on your phone, a never-ending collection of digital mind maps, and Moleskines filled to the brim with fresh ideas for innovative displays or internal reorganization strategies. It can feel like a lot of busywork if that brainstorming doesn’t help you reach your desired results.

But AI has the potential to help make ideation a bit of an easier task, says Robin Reuben, CMP, the founder of R² Events.

“I think there are so many use cases for brainstorming. I think people sometimes see it as a waste of time, but I think now with ChatGPT and other things, it can be very quick,” she says.

Could you make it work for you? A few thoughts:

1. Get in the habit. AI is one of those things that you don’t think you need until you need it. But if you’re not using it, you might not be primed to come up with effective prompts—meaning that you might not get the results you want when it’s necessary. “Start by just using it a little bit every day, just even for something simple,” Reuben says.

2. Don’t feel like you have to aim big. The word “brainstorm” evokes a big, complex idea that can feel easier to ideate than execute. But the truth of the matter is, AI can simply be used as a way to help minimize busywork. Reuben points to how ChatGPT has helped to improve ideation simply by making information easier to parse survey results. “It used to take planners so much time to compile results,” she says. “And I think that it’s so easy now, and it’s so amazing, like the things that it can extrapolate. It’s just like, ‘Wow.’”

3. Consider your prompt strategy. LLMs tend to thrive on specificity—if you’re starting with a short, broad prompt, you’re going to get weak results. Which means you’re often going to feel disappointed by your prompting strategy if you’re not giving it the TLC it needs. “I think people start out—and I know I did—using any kind of AI tool like Google, ‘Give me a quick this or that,’” Reuben says.

Reuben suggests arming your LLM with as much information and specificity as you possibly can. Rather than asking for ideas for displays, share information about what you’ve done in the past, what has been successful with audiences, and use that to narrow in the results in new directions.

“When you’re able to do a prompt that is much longer, bigger, and has more breadth to it, then you can get better answers,” she says.

(Another thing worth keeping in mind: Some AI tools, like Claude, allow you to organize ideas into projects with existing knowledge, and even share data with the LLM. If you’re struggling to write effective prompts, it could help you get an LLM on your wavelength.)

4. Use AI to inform, not replace, your in-person brainstorms. In a lot of ways, the secret to making AI work for brainstorming is to treat it as one input of many. Recently, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business found that while AI can help generate more creative original ideas, it often has less breadth than a human brainstorming session might because of a lack of unique inputs. For the purposes of ideation, that suggests that AI’s best role may be as one input of many—something that augments your existing brainstorming approach. “You do have to assess the information that you’re given, right?” Reuben says. “It can be a great resource, but you still have to say, ‘Well, will that work realistically for my group?’”

5. Don’t be afraid of new tools. Given the shifting nature of AI, it’s likely that your toolkit may shift by the month, as new techniques and apps emerge. One month, you could be committed to ChatGPT—the next, something like DeepSeek can come about, forcing you to rethink your expectations.

Because AI is still experimental, new tools designed to help with the brainstorming process are emerging every day. For example, Google Labs launched a tool called Mixboard earlier this year—a tool that combines the mind-mapping power of a whiteboard with the image inspiration of something like Pinterest. (Oh, and yes, AI-generated graphics.) The goal of a tool like this is not to lead you to a final product but to spark an idea or two.

Have any AI brainstorming strategies you’ve found helpful? Share them with us! Email [email protected] with your ideas.

Want to get better at brainstorming, with or without AI? Borrow a few tips from the links below:

» Looking for inspiration to help support your sponsors? Check out EventMobi’s guide to creative event sponsorship ideas.

» The techniques required for a great brainstorming session are seemingly never-ending. The Asana blog has 29 of them, and they might be just what you need to spark a fresh idea. Skift Meetings has a version targeted specifically for event planners.

» Brainstorming could be particularly powerful as a group activity—in fact, it could even be an event of its own, as EventHeroes notes.

Can you get attendees to put their cell phones away? At least for an evening? Sounds like a tall task, but it could be a cool opportunity to create a genuinely unique event. Recently, 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang has helped put on a series of themed parties in NYC called OFFLINE, which emphasize a phone-free, doomscroll-free experience for attendees willing to let go of their digital lifeline for a few hours. According to Pitchfork—which expressed some careful cynicism about the event—it’s part of a trend of anti-digital culture that’s picking up in the city.

Yang has interestingly taken on a secondary career as an event planner, and the OFFLINE events promote one of his projects: Ironically, a mobile service called Noble Mobile, which pays people back a portion of their bill to use their phone less.

Admittedly, event planners are unlikely to be launching a new mobile service anytime soon, and it might be hard to convince attendees to put away their phones for a three-day event. But an after-hours party, or an hour-long interactive session at the event? There’s something to be said about taking steps to keep people in the moment. (Don’t ban cameras, though; you still need folks to document what’s happening, after all.)

That’s where the event sector stands this month. Keep an eye on where we’re headed—and be sure to share this link with your favorite reader: