By Rebecca Bultsma
Every day there is a new headline about AI “transforming” productivity. It’s automating up to 70% of routine tasks. It can handle full workflows! It’s transforming entire businesses!
Then you try to use AI to do these things, and it’s actually way harder than it sounds.
We are living in a textbook hype cycle. Gartner has a model for this that is worth knowing because it describes exactly where we are standing. Does this look familiar?
A new technology arrives, and expectations climb fast, well past what the thing can actually do yet. That is the peak. Then reality lands, the demos do not survive in real work contexts, and everyone slides into what Gartner calls the trough of disillusionment. Eventually, people find the narrow places where it genuinely works, and it becomes useful in a boring, unglamorous, permanent way.
A lot of us are in the trough right now. And it’s not necessarily because AI doesn’t work, but because putting it into every part of a job turned out to be harder, more expensive and less magical than we were told. It turns out, pouring AI sauce onto everything is not the secret.
When AI adoption stalls, it usually stalls for two reasons. First, the files and data are not organized well enough to tell AI where to look, what to do and where to put the work when it is finished. Second, and this is the bigger one, nobody has the time or energy to take on a whole new challenge on top of the job they already have. The overwhelm is the problem.
The messaging has it backward. Everyone is telling you to think bigger about what AI can do for you. The secret to productivity is the opposite: Think smaller.
Anthropic published a report in December on how AI changed work inside its own company, built on 132 surveyed staff, 53 interviews and 200,000 work sessions. One of the most effective uses they found was fixing “papercuts,” the small, repeatable, annoying tasks that quietly eat your day. Better still, 27% of the AI-assisted work was tasks that would not have been done at all otherwise. So not transformation, but finally getting through the stuff that never made it high enough on the list.
Picture your job as a basket of notebooks. Each notebook is a responsibility. For an event planner, that might be a notebook for venue and vendor management, one for registration, for sponsorship, for budget, marketing and communications, run of show, onsite logistics and post-event reporting. Everyone’s basket is different.
When we open the registration notebook, each page lists a task that belongs to that responsibility. The registration notebook has pages for the builds, the confirmation emails, the housing block, the name badges, the dietary tracking, the last-minute substitutions, the no-show list.
And under each task is a checklist that outlines the process. The dietary tracking page has a checklist that includes: pull the form responses, sort by restriction, cross-check against the guarantee, send counts to catering, update the BEO, then flag the three people who wrote “other” and have to be called.
This is where the papercuts live. We’re not using AI to replace entire notebooks or even pages. AI is most useful in the backend processes that live at the line-item level.
Pick one process. Then:
If the blank page is the obstacle, check out Jobs GPT in ChatGPT to help break your role into responsibilities and tasks.
This is the unsexy version of working with AI. It is also the one that works best right now. And the mapping pays off twice, because a process you have written down is a process you can hand off, defend in a budget conversation or point to at your next audit.
Remember. The human parts of your job were never in the dietary spreadsheet. Clear the papercuts so you have time to go do the things that really matter.
MEET
Rebecca Bultsma is a contributing writer from Calgary, AB. She is not a lawyer, and this article is not legal advice. It is a landscape scan of emerging AI-related legal trends relevant to event professionals. Consult your own legal team for guidance specific to your organization and jurisdiction.
(Images generated using ChatGPT)
For 20+ years, the MEET family of products have provided regional and national resources that have kept corporate, association, medical, education, independent, and religious meeting and event planners informed about relevant vendors, industry news, tech innovations, and resources that impact and influence how and where they plan their group business.
For 20+ years, the MEET family of products have provided regional and national resources that have kept corporate, association, medical, education, independent, and religious meeting and event planners informed about relevant vendors, industry news, tech innovations, and resources that impact and influence how and where they plan their group business.
