After a year in client
beta testing, Cvent announced Tuesday at its Connect conference in San Antonio
that the company has released its Cvent Essentials platform to its general
customer base. Introduced last year at Cvent Connect, the Essentials tools now
fully joins the panoply of “simple” meetings tools in the market—like Hubli,
Groupize and others—that allow companies to de-centralize their meetings
management strategies.
Essentials operates with templated workflows that guide the
meeting planning and attendee management process for non-professional meeting
planners. According to Cvent, it supports smaller, frequent gatherings—like field
marketing activations, internal meetings, client trainings and executive
networking—without the complexity or cost of traditional event management. While
professional event management teams would be expected to set up the guidelines
and configure the original templates, non-professional executive assistants,
marketing professionals or internal team leaders can then plan, market and
execute smaller events “with minimal oversight or hands-on support,” according
to Cvent.
Essentials automates workflows via its templated structure
and feeds event data into existing Cvent systems of record and to any marketing
technologies like Salesforce or HubSpot that organizations may have integrated
with their instance of Cvent. Attendees benefit from streamlined registration
and key Cvent offerings like the OnArrival check-in app. Onsite engagement apps
like live polling along with post-event surveys wrap around simple events.
“Cvent Essentials… helps teams say ‘yes’ to more event
requests without sacrificing brand consistency or data visibility,” said Cvent product
management VP McNeel Keenan. “For many organizations, that means freeing up
valuable time and resources to focus on flagship experiences, like annual
conferences or major customer events, while still maintaining control and
capturing impact from the hundreds of small, high-frequency events that often
fly under the radar.”
While Essentials is a latecomer to the “simple” meetings
management platform party, it may prove to have a leg up on other providers in
the space as some companies have been reticent to take on a second platform to
manage simple meetings, despite their longtime availability in the market. Such
companies have cited a need for tight data integrations into a single system to
support a full picture of meetings activity along with difficulty getting
buy-in from senior executives and IT departments to launch a separate system. With
Cvent as the giant among meetings technologies, existing clients may find less
resistance in deepening their Cvent relationship for a small meetings platform
as opposed to bringing on an additional supplier, even if the functionality is
more mature.
Artificial Intelligence Simplifies, Enhances Traditional
Tech Stack
Cvent also reviewed its ongoing efforts to infuse artificial
intelligence across its legacy meetings management platform. The concept was
introduced in some
of its parts last year, but on Tuesday Cvent rolled out an aggregated view
of the enhanced functionality under the new name CventIQ.
IQ touches all sides of the Cvent platform—event organizers
and marketers, event attendees as well as event hosts and hospitality
providers.
Event organizers benefit from AI-enhanced content creation
for marketing messaging, emails and sessions descriptions to personalized
attendee communications and event configuration at scale. Real-time,
AI-enhanced intelligence derived from data generated before, during and after
the event is now on the table for users.
Attendees get the flip side of that personalization from the
experience perspective. Tailored event calendars, chat-based advice on sessions
to attend or people to meet are based on the user’s profile and those of other
attendees. Automated session summaries and takeaways work to recommend the user’s
next actions or sessions to get the most out of the event.
Hospitality executives have personalization baked into their
prospecting efforts, can take advantage of AI-generated RFP responses and
AI-enhanced data and reporting.
“By infusing advanced AI into the tools our customers
already use, we’re empowering them to deliver more engaging events, more
efficiently, with greater returns,” said Cvent founder and CEO Reggie Aggarwal.
“Our launch of CventIQ reflects how we’re bringing trustworthy, practical
AI to every corner of our platform so our customers can stay ahead of today’s
fast-evolving landscape while remaining focused on what truly drives impact:
human connection.”
Cvent, again, has the advantage of a huge existing footprint
in the meetings management space as the weight of AI innovation both enhances
and begins to bear down on legacy systems of all types—not just in travel and
meetings but certainly including them.
Former Cvent executive Brad Gillespie, speaking at a recent
BTN event and in a recent
Op-Ed for BTN, called out players like Salesforce and ServiceNow as
emerging competitors in the meetings and event management space, as AI enables
faster development and major tech companies are investing in event tech built directly
off their platforms. He also suggested a new “AI-Native” platform that no one
sees coming will emerge soon to disrupt the current meetings management state
of play.
That Cvent is getting in front of such possibilities with
its own AI infusions could buffer it against potential disruption. The idea of “practical”
AI in a system that organizations “already use” is a powerful strategy that
Cvent presented this week.