Lindsay Ball, the development and events specialist for the Michigan Farm Bureau in Lansing, plans between five and 10 events each year ranging from 50 attendees up to 1,000. Of all the tools in her meeting planner toolbox, one of the newest might be the most useful. Its name is Claude, an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant designed by San Francisco-based AI research company Anthropic.
“I can essentially train Claude to know my job position and to know exactly what my job is, so when he’s evaluating things, it’s based on the parameters I have given,” she says, noting she refers to Claude as “he” because, well, Claude is generally a man’s name.
Now, Ball estimates she saves up to 15 hours when comparing proposals per event. What used to be tedious manual work creating a master spreadsheet with multiple tabs to calculate a budget for each of the locations under consideration is now a Claude job. “I prepared that entire spreadsheet in the format I wanted it to look like and gave it to Claude,” she says. “Then, I gave Claude all the proposals I used. That’s me training him—‘this is what I want it to look like, this is what I was given’—and Claude is smart enough to see how I got there.”
That’s just one example of the myriad ways AI is changing the landscape for planners and the convention and visitors bureaus that support them. Meeting planners across the state are turning to AI for everything from simple tasks to the complex spreadsheets Ball uses.
Carol Galle, president and CEO of Special D Events in Detroit, sees several advantages. She says it can help planners be more efficient, giving them more time to focus on strategy. Special D Events uses AI for brainstorming creative ideas. “Here’s the thing—there are all different types of tools, but we still rely heavily on our team’s creativity and fact checking,” Galle says.
AI also can be helpful for refining language. “[We use it] if we’re sending large documents and we want a second set of eyes [on them]—it’s never the last set, but sometimes the second set,” she says. Galle adds that many planners use AI to review contracts, analyze clauses, and come up with language that better protects their interests. “They don’t always have law firms on speed dial,” she says. A big deal at Special D Events is having guardrails in place and enforcing them. “We have to respect [not sharing] proprietary information like vendor proposals and client data,” Galle says.
Justin Gifford, executive director of Visit Lenawee, says he has seen planners use AI to create a destination scoring model. “[If planners are] trying to decide between two, three, or four destinations, AI can give each destination a score based on whatever weights they put in,” he explains. “Maybe two score high in the model, so that helps eliminate the other two.”
While Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island is known for being historic, the hotel’s Vice President of Sales and Marketing Dana Orlando says it’s all 21st century when it comes to AI usage.
For example, her team frontloads the hotel’s website with information presented in an AI-friendly format, meaning meeting and event planners easily can access the information they seek when they use AI to search for venues.
“We are revising [the website], and we are nearly done updating it so it’s AI crawlable—so AI can find us,” she says. The team also developed an “itineraries” section for the site that is easy for AI to locate, and they are reworking the FAQs page for the same reason.
Bavarian Inn Lodge in Frankenmuth embraces AI for event planning, brainstorming, and coming up with social media ideas, among other things, says Chief Hospitality Officer Joanna Nelson. The key, she notes, is inputting detailed prompts so AI delivers the best responses. “The more thoughtful information you put in, the higher quality output you’re going to receive,” she says.
Nelson suggests meeting planners use AI to come up with ideas for programming and off-site activities. “Right now, we’re working on a big ’90s-themed event here in the waterpark, and [staff] used AI for help with ’90s activities, decor, and food suggestions,” she says. “It can give you fun, helpful lists.”
Destination Facilitation
Stan Smith, vice president of marketing and communications for Visit Detroit, says convention and visitors bureaus are in the early stages of discovering what is possible when it comes to using AI for marketing purposes. So far, Visit Detroit has been reviewing the materials it posts online and reworking them into formats that are more friendly to the way AI searches out information. “We try to start all our communications with questions we think a meeting planner might ask,” Smith explains. “We want ChatGPT to know where to find the answer as quickly as possible.”
Visit Detroit also runs the requests for proposals (RFPs) it receives through AI to identify common questions and issues. “We do this quarterly [to get] a report of things that surface again and again in requests for proposals, since we receive so many,” Smith says. “We need to have AI to connect the dots.”
Sammi Chapell, group sales manager at Explore Brighton Howell Area, finds AI helpful for searching out organizations and companies that might be interested in the meetings and events potential in the Brighton Howell region. She also finds it useful for adding polish to client proposals.
Milly Hudgins, who oversees sales markets for the Holland Area Convention & Visitors Bureau, toggles between Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini for itinerary planning. “Often I will use [both] to get two different ideas or versions of what I am looking for,” she says. She also taps AI for research. “That works well for me because, as everyone knows, it is fallible. Using the two helps me have a little more confidence in it.”
Bavarian Inn Lodge
bavarianinn.com / 989-652-7200
Explore Brighton Howell Area
explorebrightonhowellarea.com / 800-686-8474
Frankenmuth Chamber of Commerce and Convention & Visitors Bureau
frankenmuth.org / 800-FUN-TOWN
Holland Area Convention & Visitors Bureau
holland.org / 800-506-1299
Mackinac Island Tourism Bureau
mackinacisland.org / 906-847-3783
Visit Detroit
visitdetroit.com / 800-DETROIT
Visit Lenawee
visitlenawee.com / 517-263-7747
