Insights · ProCast
Episode 22 — How to Make AI + Human Creativity the Winning Formula
Guest: Henry Evans, VP of Strategy & Creative Director at Proscenium
In this episode, we’re talking with Proscenium’s VP of strategy and resident expert on AI, Henry Evans. Henry blends the intelligence of AI with the creativity of human ingenuity to create memorable moments for live events. In this episode he breaks down how to think about AI in ways that are easy, actionable, and actually fun. So hit the download button, screw your headphones on tight, and get ready to take notes.
Read the transcript below and listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music or wherever you get your podcasts.
Show Notes
Can't get enough of Henry on AI? He shares easy, actionable, and actually fun ways to use it in live events in his ongoing series, How to AI with Henry. Start with Issue 1.
Our Guest
With experience as varied as stage and film direction, speaker coaching, and circus production, Henry Evans is a multi-talented Creative Director. With a passion for tech-forward thinking, he is always trying to push the boundaries of innovation. Henry’s multi award-winning talents have been put to great use for clients including T-Mobile, HEINEKEN USA, Harley-Davidson, JetBlue, and TelevisaUnivision.
Credits
Hosted and Written by Jeremy Dobrish
Produced by Bethany Potter
Theme Music by Mike Mancini
Logo design by Shraddha Maharjan
Special thanks to Dossie McCraw
Want Henry's AI insights in your inbox? Our monthly newsletter serves up fresh tips and tools, like an espresso shot of productivity.
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Guest: Henry Evans
HENRY: Live events are more important than ever right now, because you can't really trust anything online. You can't tell what's a real image versus a fake image, whether what someone's saying online is real or fake. Human-to-human connection is maybe the only real truth we have anymore. I think there's something powerful about that, and optimistic for the live events industry: we're important. This is a really important time to be a part of this industry.
JEREMY: Hey there, thanks for tuning in. I'm Jeremy Dobrish, and this is the ProCast, brought to you by Proscenium Events in New York City. It's a podcast about corporate events. Each month, we take a bite-sized look at how to make corporate events, conferences, programs, and shows even more effective and impactful.
I've been trying to get our next guest on the podcast for quite some time. Henry Evans is a creative director who is fascinated by AI. I don't know anyone who has dedicated themselves to learning about and understanding AI, and how it can help the event industry, more intensely than Henry. But Henry was cautious. He wanted to wait until he felt confident he had something truly important, informative, and useful to say. Well, today he's ready to share what he's learned. If you're intrigued and want to learn how AI can make you and your events more productive and creative, then stand by for cue one of the ProCast. Cue one, let's go.
JEREMY: So I'm here with Senior Creative Director and Vice President of Strategy at Proscenium, Henry Evans. Henry, thank you so much for being on the show.
HENRY: Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.
JEREMY: So we're talking about AI, and I want to jump right into the question I know is on everybody's mind: should I be scared of AI? Is it going to take my job? Is it going to kill all the humans on the planet? What is the deal?
HENRY: With any innovation that affects basically every industry and everybody's daily life, there are things to be scared about, but there are also things to be excited about. And things happen on different time horizons. In the short term, there could be some really scary things that happen; in the long term, some really exciting things. But when it comes to live events specifically, I actually think this is more of an exciting time than a scary time. AI, and this digital, work-from-home world we live in, is all aiming toward us always being on our computers, always interacting with bots and AI. So this human connection, these live experiences, are becoming more and more important than ever before, which is an exciting time to be a live events producer or creative.
JEREMY: That's good to know. I feel better already. But if there are things that are scary, what are they?
HENRY: In a general sense, it's more about the powers that are controlling these AIs. It's the amount of power in the hands of a few people who are basically deciding how and what is being produced in the world of AI. I'm talking about the huge CEOs of these companies. We're relying a lot on them with a piece of technology that is really changing the world. AI isn't bad or good; the people in control of it are the ones who decide that. So ultimately, it's the human part of it that's a little scary to me, more than the actual AI side of it.
JEREMY: So give me the other side of that. You say it can be a little scary, but ultimately it's really exciting. What's exciting about it?
HENRY: A really simple way to put it: what would you do, as a human, with 300 or 400 more IQ points? What would you do if you had a breadth of knowledge about something you've never read about? That's what's so exciting about it. If I had to sum up the innovation in one thing, it's giving us access to IQ way beyond what any human is capable of. That's exciting to me, and I think it'll ultimately lead to incredible solves for some of our biggest issues, whether that's coming up with cures to crazy diseases or fixing environmental issues. Long term, and maybe not even that long term, it'll solve a lot of the massive issues we deal with every day.
JEREMY: I think that's a great way to think about it. I love that idea of adding 300 or 400 IQ points. There's all this concern that now kids have AI, so when they do their homework or write their papers or take a test, they're just relying on these machines to do it for them. But we had Google to do that, and go back further, the calculator. So it sounds like AI is a new tool, like Google was, and what it's going to allow us to do is going to be incredible. What about in terms of security, privacy, and safety? People seem to be afraid of AI on that front. Is that justified, do you think?
HENRY: Yes. I think you should always assume that nothing is safe. Even our biggest tech companies now have data breaches all the time, and if you think one thing is safe because they're saying it's safe or encrypted, they have issues. It's always going to be a thing. So you have to be careful about what you're putting in, really think about it, and assume that data could be released in some way. There are some easy ways to avoid putting in information you don't want out there while still using the tools in helpful ways. For instance, I just did this the other day, where I needed to figure out the event persona of the attendee. I needed to create a few personas of who we think the attendee is for a specific event. I took the registration list from last year and scrubbed it of all the actual personal information that would link to their name or contact information, anything personal, I took out, and left just the variables that make up the makeup of each of these attendees. I fed that into ChatGPT, and you could do that with any LLM you choose to use. I asked it to create some event personas, and it did, and it was fairly accurate to who I know the attendees to be. That was just an easy, simple way to get the same result without giving it all the personal information you obviously don't want out there.
BETHANY: This is behind-the-scenes Bethany breaking in with a fact check. LLM stands for large language model, which is what ChatGPT is. It's like a super-smart, magical librarian who reads millions of books and remembers everything. It can answer questions, tell stories, and even write poems, but instead of books, it uses computers to learn and create new content. And, of course, that cute little metaphor was created and written by an LLM.
JEREMY: I definitely want to get into how to use AI in events, but I know you use AI all the time, and I'd love for you to talk a little about how you're currently using it.
HENRY: I use ChatGPT and Claude and different LLMs for different things every single day. It's completely replaced my Google searching at this point. Anytime I have an idea for something, I put it in there, because it starts to learn a lot of my ideas, which is great when I'm trying to brainstorm something later on. It'll remember the things I came up with on my subway ride to the office months ago and maybe bring one of those back up if it makes sense for a specific idea. So I use LLMs and ChatGPT all the time for basically any note-taking, any research, anything like that. That's the base level of what I primarily use it for.
JEREMY: How should other people, who maybe aren't as adept at AI yet, be using it in their daily life?
HENRY: I think there's a very easy way to do this. ChatGPT, Claude, whatever you want, one of the big LLMs, I think you should create an account and talk with it. The best place to start: when you get asked to do a task, or you want to do or research something, the very first place you should go is one of these platforms, and ask it how it can help. That's literally all you have to do. "I have this task I want to complete. How can you help me do that?" You put that into the chat, and it'll come up with a list: I can do this, I can do that. If one of those speaks to you and is helpful for your process, use it. You might find, no, it hasn't gotten the response I want, so I'll go elsewhere. But ultimately, asking it how it can help you is a great place to start.
JEREMY: So Henry, you're obviously very good at AI. You spend a lot of time on it, you think about it a lot, and you've become very adept at using the tools. But not everybody on every team is that way, and a lot of people are still intimidated by AI. So how do you get a team to work together using these tools?
HENRY: That's a great question, and there are some steps you can take to make it easier for your team to adopt it. A way we're doing it at Proscenium is we're creating a prompt library, a database of prompts that are useful for event people. This is easy to create. Like I said, you can ask ChatGPT, "How can AI help me in my field?" or "How can AI help my team?" It'll come up with a list of things, and you can choose from those and put them in your prompt library. That gives easy access to any of your team members to go through and go, "Oh, that's a really good way for me to use it." For instance, you could develop a prompt for RFPs, if producing RFPs is a pain point for your team. If you need to do venue searches all the time, maybe there's a good prompt for how to best search for venues using ChatGPT. You can also source this out to the rest of your team, the people using it: who's using it, and how? That's a great way to build this database of different ways to use AI, so someone who may not be as experimental can look through and see if there's a helpful tool for them.
JEREMY: That's a great idea. It seems like a very easy way to get people to use it and get results that'll be helpful much faster than they would otherwise. So where does that lead us in terms of AI and events? Because AI can do so many different kinds of things, it's almost overwhelming to think about. What are some practical things, either that you've done, or that you've seen, or that you think people could be doing, with AI to make their events better, faster, cheaper?
HENRY: I have such a long list of examples of things I've actually done, and also things I want to do that I know are possible. I'll start with a fun one we did recently. We were in the ballroom at an event, 15 minutes before a presentation rehearsal with the presenter. They wanted to do a game show theme for this section, and the ask came in from the client to create some sort of theme song. "I wish we had a theme song for this opening, for this presenter to come out to." I had 15 minutes. I went to this app called Suno AI, but there are plenty of other apps that do a similar thing. I plugged in the name of the song, the name of the game show, and gave it a little bit of the style I wanted, and within five minutes I got four different versions of that song. It was perfect to use for this 22-second walk-in for the presenter. Within 15 minutes the presenter walked in, we got him into the system, and we were able to play him the options. Such a cool way to do it.
JEREMY: So you said you have a few more. Give me a couple other examples.
HENRY: One thing we're constantly asked is how to make presentations a little more interactive. I feel like I get asked this every single time we're producing an event or presentation. We have our go-to tools for Q&A and asking questions, but one way to take that a step further using AI: you have your presenter ask an open-ended question to the audience, all the audience members scan the QR code, or whatever the process is, and enter their answer. Then on the back end, you can collect all of that data, put it through ChatGPT, and ask it to summarize it and come up with a consensus of what the feedback was. Then pretty quickly you take that information and potentially even put it in the teleprompter, so that by the end of the day, or even the end of that presentation, the presenter can be armed with the answers those people output. Now you're taking audience interactions and bringing them to the presenter, and again, giving that presenter an insane amount of IQ points. All of a sudden they've read all these people's minds, read the 500 answers, and culminated it into a summary. That's super powerful, and could be really cool. And that just scratches the surface. How do we then turn that into graphics on the screen for the end of the day? So that's just the start, and I'm excited to use that tool moving forward.
JEREMY: That's amazing. It's almost like, why wouldn't you do that? That just seems incredible. So that's one way the audience can be interacting with AI. Are there other ways you think audiences at these events will be using AI?
HENRY: This might be too pie-in-the-sky at this point, but even with just the internet, audience members have had access to information far greater than they used to. And I think AI is only going to increase that significantly. It's constantly a struggle of, what are these presenters actually giving these attendees that is new information they couldn't have found online? I think that's a big shift happening now. That's partially why you see this big change from the more didactic formats of presentations toward wanting them to be more engaged, more networking-focused. Because ultimately the information we used to deliver at these presentations, they can now find a lot of it online, or by asking these AIs to summarize it for us. So that's going to be a big shift, and figuring out how to navigate it comes back to my earlier point: how can we make these presentations more interactive, more about the audience interacting with the presenter? Ultimately, I think that's where it's going.
JEREMY: So if people can walk into an event armed with all this data, and maybe already know what the presenters are going to say, why do we still need live events?
HENRY: Live events are more important than ever right now, because you can't really trust anything online. You can't tell what's a real image versus a fake image, whether what someone's saying online is real or fake. Human-to-human connection is maybe the only real truth we have anymore. There's something powerful about that, and optimistic for the live events industry: we're important. This is a really important time to be a part of this industry.
JEREMY: I think people now are hungry for it. I think people are lonely and disconnected and want, more than ever, to be in the same room with their friends and colleagues, face to face, interacting, learning from them, sharing stories. I think it's really important. I totally agree with you. What about for something like an event app? How do you imagine audiences interacting with an event app through AI?
HENRY: If you'd asked me this question three months ago, my answer would've been very different. But there's an event app called Highbar.ai that's really trying to push this right now. It's basically creating an event app that uses this LLM, ChatGPT-type chat structure, where you just ask the questions: "What would you recommend I go to? Where is this located? Who should I network with?" And you just chat back and forth, and it has all the data from the event. So I think that's the start.
JEREMY: So if I'm asking the AI, "Who should I network with?" or "What breakouts should I go to?", is it giving me a stock answer, or is it really personalizing that answer based on things it knows about me specifically?
HENRY: It's completely using the data it has on you, and it's learning as it goes. When you ask it, "Hey, I want to network with this person because I'm interested in X, Y, Z," it remembers that about you and creates an attendee profile on you. So the answers are going to be very personalized, more than ever before. Ultimately, I think event apps will turn into much simpler platforms, which I think is great, and could end up just being these chatbots you go back and forth with, and it gives you the information you want in a very personalized way.
JEREMY: What about in terms of content development? How can AI help with that?
HENRY: Generative images and footage have really come a long way since a few months ago, and even a few years ago. Now, as you've probably noticed, it's almost indistinguishable from real footage and real images. One way, and we're doing this right now, is: we're often sent an image by a client as inspiration, and they say, "Hey, I really want this mountain shot," or "I really want this specific image, can you find something similar to place into that video?" In the old times, a few weeks ago, we would go to Shutterstock and find as much content as we could that's similar, that would work, and go back to the client and say, "I know this isn't exactly what you asked for, but it's something close." Now the process is a little different, and this is crazy, I'm still baffled by how it works. The new way is taking their inspiration photo and extending it to fit our widescreen. Then you'll notice, okay, this image is low-res, so you can up-res that image using AI, software that's been around a long time but is just so much better now. And you know how you've seen footage, and all of a sudden there's a still image in the middle of a video and it looks odd, like, why does this have no motion? Now we can take that widescreen image and add motion, whether that's the camera moving, or zooming in and out, or the trees blowing in the wind. All of that is possible now. It takes a little work and finessing, it's not perfect the moment it outputs the first version, but working back and forth with the AI, it's pretty incredible what we can do.
JEREMY: That is really cool. That's a great example. So Henry, things with AI are changing so quickly, and it seems every time you turn around, something new has come out. There are articles and podcasts and all sorts of stuff. How does the average person keep up with the latest developments in AI?
HENRY: There are two answers to that. I'll start with the shameless plug, which is that we're going to start releasing, in the Proscenium newsletter, a section that speaks specifically about AI and events. I'll keep sharing new ideas and concepts and ways we've used AI for our events in that. The second idea is something that naturally happened here at Proscenium: a group of us who are interested in AI banded together and send each other stuff constantly about what we're seeing. Because, to your point, it's moving so quickly that one person cannot catch every new change happening in the field and how it could be useful in events. So a small group of us are tossing around different links, seeing what works and what doesn't, and testing things out. Find your little group, whether that's inside your company, outside your company, or us, to help you stay on top of it, because it's impossible for one person to do it.
JEREMY: That's great advice. So where do you think AI is going? You said even three months ago you'd have a different answer. Where will we be three months from now? Or dare I ask, three years from now?
HENRY: I was listening to something the other day that said the intelligence of AI is doubling every six months. If you think about that in IQ points, I said earlier, what would you do with 200 more IQ points? In six months, what would you do with 400 more? You'd solve all the world's problems. So, this might be a hot take, but I think the software is way ahead of where the hardware is at this point. What we're going to see as a huge new evolution in events is when we start seeing innovation in hardware. It's happening with the Ray-Bans that have cameras on them, it's happening with Meta creating the Orion, or what used to be called Orion glasses, bringing augmented reality, with these AI platforms powering the software on the back end. Once that becomes everyday use for people and attendees, we're going to have to start incorporating how to use it at live events. I think that's where the shift starts to happen, when we can augment the real reality of a live event and add the capabilities we all know are powerful with the LLMs and ChatGPTs of the world into those experiences. It gives us answers and knowledge that much quicker, without having to take our phone out or go on our computer.
JEREMY: Wow. Like you said, it's a very exciting future we're headed for. It's a little bit scary, not going to lie, I'm still a little bit scared. But wow, to really think about those possibilities, and the way you've framed them, it just sounds amazing. It's still hard to picture, but it's exciting. So I'd love to move on to our lightning round. These are three questions we ask all of our guests. The first: who's your biggest get? By that I mean a guest speaker, an entertainer, or a subject matter expert, anyone you would love to see at a live event.
HENRY: I've been listening to and watching a lot of Mo Gawdat. He's an incredible mind, especially around AI and how, in a bigger sense, it's going to change humanity. A lot of what I talked about at the beginning, the long-term and short-term effects of AI, he talks a lot about, so if you're interested in that, he's incredible. What I like about him is that he sees a future where AI is really beautiful and helps us as humans create a better world for everybody, eventually. The path to that, however long it might take, is what's scary. I'd love to have him at any of our events to blow people's minds.
JEREMY: We'll certainly link to him in the show notes. All right, question number two. What is one thing you wish presenters did more of?
HENRY: I often see that a lot of presenters start building their PowerPoint presentations, or what they want their PowerPoint to look like, before they decide what they actually want to say. Not only do you waste a lot of resources building these decks, but starting with the script, and really fine-tuning exactly what you want to say, should lead you to, "Oh, I don't think I need a visual for that," or "This is a better place to have a visual." It's just a clearer way of doing things. Ultimately, people want to hear you talk about things, and be really concise. So starting with a script first, then going to the graphics, is a simple thing I'd love presenters to do more of.
JEREMY: It's so interesting. At Proscenium, we talk a lot about our theater roots, and I agree with you a hundred percent. That's such a theater perspective on things. There's that saying in the theater: "If it ain't on the page, it ain't on the stage." Because of course, in theater, everything starts with the script. It all stems from the script. The idea that you would try to circumvent the script, or have anything come before it, in theater is crazy. Of course you do the script, and then you make the script come to life. So yeah, I think it applies just as much to corporate events. Great advice. All right, our last question. What is something, a book, a movie, a song, whatever you like, that was a big influence on you?
HENRY: A big influence on me, ever since I was very little, is magic, magic tricks and performing magic. I think it's a beautiful art form and a beautiful performance style, and it relates a lot to how I create things today. When you're creating a magic trick or a routine, you very much start at the end and work your way back. You start with how you want them to feel, you know what the desired effect is for the trick, and then you figure out how to do it. Building any event or presentation is the same type of storytelling. So sometimes I frame it and think about it in terms of magic. And I will pitch magic in every single presentation I ever have, whether they want me to or not.
JEREMY: It's so funny, I have a little bit of magic in my background as well, not as much as you do, but I find that magic permeates everything I do. Even if a client says, "Oh, I don't want to have a magician at my event," I get that, but there's often magic, and principles behind magic, that end up in the event, that they may not even realize, because it's such a powerful way of telling a story and influencing an audience. So I completely agree with you. Henry, thank you so much for talking with us about AI. I'd love to have you back, because this is a very quickly changing and evolving landscape, and you're thinking so hard about what to do with it and how to use it effectively. You're playing around with all the tools; every time something new comes out, you're seeing what can be done with it. I'd love to keep people abreast of what you're learning and what you're playing with. Thank you, I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge with us.
HENRY: I bet by the time this podcast comes out, everything's going to be old tricks at this point. But yeah, thank you for having me, and I'm excited to keep the conversation going.
JEREMY: Well, that was super interesting, talking to Henry about AI. If you're interested in AI, and how could you not be, Henry really is worth checking out. In addition to the newsletter, which I do suggest you sign up for, he's giving talks, making videos, and writing articles. He really is worth a follow. For me, there were tons of takeaways in our conversation, but these are the four tops. Number four: your company can create a prompt library of common prompts for your organization that can help your team be more productive. Number three: it's impossible for one person to stay on top of all the changes going on, so form a group of like-minded friends and share resources. Number two: if you don't know how to use ChatGPT, ask it how it can help you with a specific task. And number one: using AI is like adding 300 to 400 IQ points to your intelligence, and it's just getting better and smarter.
JEREMY: But look, I could talk about this stuff all day, and if you want to talk to us about how to incorporate AI into your events, or anything about live events, check out our show notes for more information. There's lots of fun stuff in there. Or just go to proscenium.com and drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you, because at Proscenium, we help presenters do their best in front of their most important audiences. As we like to say, we help brands perform, and I have a sneaking suspicion we can help your brand perform. And if you want to get in touch with Henry, you'll find his contact information in the show notes.