MCI USA战略活动部门总裁Shawn Pierce谈会议ROI、ROE与AI在活动中的应用

Meeting attendance is only one measure of success.

In this Meetings Today podcast, MCI USA President, Strategic Events, Meetings & Incentives Shawn Pierce explains how event planners can measure return on investment, return on experience and attendee value.

Explore strategies for smaller networking groups, personalized event agendas, meaningful connections and post-event follow-up that make conferences relevant and impactful.

Highlights of this wide-ranging interview with a meetings industry thought-leader include:

Measure event ROI by outcomes, not attendance alone. Meetings should deliver meaningful interaction, learning, connections and value for participants—not just a destination or venue experience.

Design for smaller, relevant connections. Use small groups and data-informed matching to connect attendees with people, sessions, exhibitors and even hotels that fit their interests.

Use AI to improve service and planning. MCI USA applies AI to automate repetitive tasks, provide 24/7 attendee and exhibitor support, coordinate event workflows, analyze event data and personalize recommendations.

AI is changing jobs, but not removing the need for events. Pierce expects demand for face-to-face interaction and trust-building to continue; he advises new professionals to develop ownership, stress management, and project-planning skills and to explore the industry through internships.

Attendees expect low-friction, personalized experiences. Organizers should use available attendee data to simplify registration, tailor agendas and connections, and follow up with relevant content after the event.

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Transcript:

Editor's note: The following transcription was facilitated by AI and proofed by our editors. Although it is fairly accurate, there inevitably will be some mistakes, so please consider that when reading. Thank you.

Tyler Davidson

Hello and welcome to this Meetings Today podcast. I'm Tyler Davidson, Vice President and Chief Content Director for Meetings Today, and really excited to welcome Shawn Pierce, President of MCI USA's Strategic Events, Meetings and Incentives division. He leads a 130-member team and delivers innovative solutions for the meetings, incentive travel and events industry. Thanks for joining us today, Shawn.

Shawn Pierce

Well, I'm glad to be here. Thank you for having me, Tyler.

Tyler Davidson

Yeah, from the beautiful Dallas Metroplex—from Plano, Texas, I believe. Right?

Shawn Pierce

Yes, where it's finally turned nice weather, 70 degrees and beautiful.

Tyler Davidson

Well, sorry I'm keeping you from the outdoors, but I promise not to make it too long here. Tell me, Shawn, what you do with MCI USA's Strategic Events, Meetings and Incentives division, and what you and your colleagues do there?

Shawn Pierce

Thank you. Yeah, as president of this part of the company for MCI, I'm a managing director for MCI USA and the president over this division inside the USA. MCI is a global company based out of Geneva, Switzerland, and we're in 34 different countries. I happen to run the event side of the United States, which is obviously a very big area to run.

We have about 130-ish people. We do corporate events, corporate incentive travel, Black Flower luxury agency and association events, where we manage the full association event forum. We do registration, housing and sourcing business as well...so quite a bit of things going on here. We have a great team.

The reason why my group starts with the word “strategic” is that's what's important to me. We've got to provide strategy and strategic value, because otherwise you're just doing events to buy and sell a lot of expensive coffee and donuts. We'd rather do it for a good value and reason, with ROI at the end.

Tyler Davidson

Well, with that impressive background, you're the right guy to talk to regarding trends. I appreciate you making some time. One of the items in the materials I got before the interview was “The New ROI of Meetings, and Why Attendance Isn't the Metric That Matters Most.” Maybe explain what that means and why you came to that conclusion.

Shawn Pierce

Well, I think events have always been based on the opportunity for people to interact, learn, gather and create a marketplace in some way. Really, the value proposition today has to be that interaction and that outcome, rather than that you traveled to a cool city or saw a cool hotel, property or different thing. You've got to give people a well-rounded experience to draw them out of their homes.

People are working from home these days; they're working in different environments. Budgets are tighter, so all the way around, you have to be thinking the entire time about the value proposition for the audience and the participants, and what they're going to get out of this. What does that mean? Return on investment, return on experience, return on value.

It's interesting: I actually wrote an article about the differences, yet continuity, between the different age groups. From Boomers to Gen X all the way down to Gen Z, at the end of the day they're still looking for the same thing: “Tell me what's in it for me.” How do you connect me in a world that's disconnected today in a way that helps me further my own life, my own career, my own knowledge?

We put a lot of time and emphasis on providing that kind of value for the meeting itself, versus just the concept that we're going to build it and they will come.

Tyler Davidson

And this is all about connection, right? What common elements of meetings are obsolete and need to change? What are some new options you're using with clients to make sure they have that connection experience?

Shawn Pierce

Yeah, I think one of them is really just this: The old method was a little bit of the herd mentality. We're going to herd everybody into this big planning area. We're going to herd them out to 20 different meeting rooms, and we're going to herd them back to a big open area for networking and a refreshment break, or herd them to a luncheon.

What I'm really trying to stress now is breaking those groups into smaller subgroups that have something in common. We might need a plenary or a large general session to kick off and really set a mood, a bigger emotional tone, but I want to immediately put people in a situation where they're around a smaller group—20 people, 25 or 30 people—where they can learn people's names. I can know who Tyler is, and when I see you at the larger reception later on, I already have a little built-in group of connections.

One by one, you connect me to your friends, I connect you to my friends, and we create a little group, versus me having to wander around and not know anybody and find people.

We do that through technology. We try to pre-assess the connections between people using AI and other things. We assign them topics that are germane to them and put them at a table with people who have a similar career cycle and similar topic needs, so they can find a little tribe early in the process. As they expand, they get more and more tribes, and they'll leave that event with a lot more people, interactions, connections and long-term value.

Tyler Davidson

Yeah, I am totally a believer in that. Going to a lot of conventions myself, it's when that light bulb goes off—when you meet that person who has a lot of the same experiences and things that keep them up at night as you do. That's the most valuable thing you could get from a meeting, I would think.

Shawn Pierce

Yeah, it works out that way. Even think about things like a large tradeshow or a larger convention where there are multiple hotels and properties involved. In the past, you might have chosen that hotel based on your loyalty to a brand. It's the headquarters hotel, blah blah blah...

But if I, as a person who knows who's registering and what hotels are available, why couldn't I make the opportunity for you to be in a hotel that has people like you? Exhibitors are people that have products and services like you. Speakers are for the sessions that you're going to go to.

We have the lobby bump-in. It's accidental, but it was actually planned by the organizer so we can help you have the opportunity for natural connections to happen in a way you didn't necessarily have to think about. It's not creepy in the back end. It's just, “Hey, I think these people fit better together. Let them be in the same property group,” and therefore they can have interactions and meaningful connections.

Tyler Davidson

That's like next-level stuff. I never really thought of that. Bravo. It seems like one of those obvious ideas: Why hasn't anyone else prioritized it before?

Shawn Pierce

Yeah, it's certainly gotten a little bit easier for us to make that opportunity happen with the technological advances. Our ability to really understand the data and do something with it more easily and quickly has improved. You don't want to ask people a lot of questions to get a match. That was always the barrier. They don't want to fill out a bunch of data.

Tyler Davidson

And then, talking about technology, of course everyone is talking about AI. How is your division of MCI USA using it? Does it help clients in their event-planning process? Is the focus more on improving workflows, marketing and communications, or the quality of sessions—or is it all of those? What are some of the main uses you're incorporating it for?

Shawn Pierce

Yeah, I appreciate that. The term “artificial intelligence” to me is almost like—you and I are both of an age that can remember 1997, '98, '99. Everybody started using the word “internet.” “We're internet-forward. We're internet. We're internet.” Well, the internet is just a ubiquitous thing, right? Companies were changing the name of their whole company to “.com,” if you recall.

What I always tell people is that this is really the age of superintelligence. You have artificial intelligence, you have agentic-level intelligence that puts those things together, and now you have superintelligence that's giving these capabilities for various things.

What we did first was look at our own individual internal workflows and say, “Look, what are we doing today that's costing us a lot of time and effort that could be done more easily by AI, by the machines?” Those were low-hanging fruit. That's easy to do, and every company should do that right off the bat.

The next thing is to ask, “What is causing the most consternation for my clients and their clients?” and figure out how to tackle those issues. We looked at customer service a couple of years ago and revamped our entire customer service system to answer repetitive emails and requests for data much faster and more easily, right away. Attendees could get answers 24/7. Exhibitors could get answers to their lead-retrieval questions, or how to fill out a form on-site, or have it filled out for them for electricity or carpet. All those things can be done automatically, 24/7, so they don't have to deal with someone unless they need to. The AI will elevate that up.

The next thing we looked at was our own internal project-management scope. It's all a series of project management, as you recognize with events. We asked how we could take all those project details, align them to our staffing needs for the event, align them to our financial needs, put hour tracking together, and bring all those pieces together into a larger project plan. That includes assigning people to an event and on-site, making travel arrangements, and putting all those pieces together so there's one system our teams can go to and interact with the show.

We've had to go one by one, so you have a lot of different systems: an exhibitor-management system, floor-plan-management system, speaker-management system, content-management system, and all those things. Each one by one, we're either amalgamating and putting into our larger overall AI stack, or we're looking only at the needs we have for those particular properties—our own needs that need to be fulfilled with new AI agents doing the work for us, versus rewriting or redoing it ourselves with a new third-party vendor in some cases.

We're trying to look at it piece by piece, but really, I always take a large circle and say, “In this circle is my entire year's worth of work. What's taking the biggest portion of my job?” Then take that piece and make it my circle, and say, “What's about this that's taking my time that I can automate?” Then put those practices in place with AI.

Then you turn that towards the client and say, “Look, now I know all your events have all your data for you in one large AI sandbox, so I can now give you intelligent information about who's coming to your event, who booked in the last major marketing round, what the persona of those people was, how much more they spend this year than last year, and how many people are deciding to come to the show earlier than before. What's the persona of those people? Are they newer in the industry? Are they old-timers? Am I basically getting the choir to come to church early, or am I getting new congregants to come in first?” That kind of concept for them.

We can tell them the value of that marketing effort right away. We can tell them what's happening with their event overall versus previous years, and give them information on how their event compares with an aggregate look at peers in their industry that we may work with as well. What other medical events are doing, and things like that, can give you an idea of how you're performing and how you're looking.

Then we add things for them, like suggestive information on attendees' flow. As they're registering, we can give them the sessions that make the most sense for them—their career, their job, what their company does, and probably why they're at the event. We're making a supposition based on a lot of data on the internet. As they're starting to fill out the information, we're learning more and adjusting their agenda to what makes the best sense for that audience.

Then we suggest who they need to speak with as an exhibitor. “Here's people that meet kind of what you're looking at for the sessions you picked, or other exhibitors you've already interacted with. These are who we think you ought to be with.” We give them a mobile app that not only has that information on it, but leads them in a pin-map type of way directly to those exhibitors and says, “Here's who you should be with.”

Tyler Davidson

That is a lot of amazing information. I'm going to have to go back and unpack it individually. It's crazy what's happening so fast.

Shawn Pierce

It really is, Tyler. These are all things I've really wanted to have happen. I've been doing this for 30 years, and we've done a lot of this stuff in a very manual, hard-fought way over time. Now I'm able to do it in a much more automated way.

We have a lot of new, cool things on our immediate horizon to try to tackle next. But it's one thing at a time, right? You keep moving through it.

Tyler Davidson

Well, this is maybe more of a macro sort of question, but I know we're very interested in making sure the talent pipeline is here in the meetings and events and hospitality industry. A lot of young people just coming out of college are very nervous about how AI may eliminate entry-level positions. What would be your advice around that, and other advice for young people coming into the industry and how they can get their feet moving in a direction in it?

Shawn Pierce

Yeah, I appreciate that, too, because I also have two young daughters who just graduated college recently. It's certainly a different world they're walking into than the one we walked into in our day.

One good thing that's out there that I can tell you almost for a pure fact is going to be there: The events industry is going to be here through COVID—or through COVID, geez—through AI and beyond, because humans want face-to-face interaction. Humans want to be able to look across the aisle and see if that information is real. Plus, they're not going to understand what to trust as much anymore. Every day, AI is getting easier and easier to program to trick you with content, video, and voice.

Live events would be one of the few places you can go to see things in reality, meet your fellow colleagues and humans in that environment, and build trust and a dynamic that's different from anywhere else. I believe our industry is stronger than ever and will grow, not shrink, due to AI. That's kind of cool—one of the few industries I think that's true for.

Now, is our job going to change? Yeah, it's going to change pretty dramatically. Tyler, I'm not going to need someone anymore to fill out 600 spreadsheets with everything that we ordered, track where each particular client got it, and portion out badge holders and pieces of carpet to each individual company. That part of the job is going to get automated.

What we're going to want people coming into the industry to do is take ownership and responsibility for helping a client achieve their goals. Understand how they are going to be in a situation that could cause stress. Events are stressful. I'm going to have you onsite, the power is going to go out, something's going to happen.

The hiring discussion for new people coming out of school is really about finding the attribute skills that are best for our industry: ownership and responsibility, the long-term capability of handling stress, being able to deal with a project plan and work that plan through, and understanding how they're going to learn from that over time.

We're looking for those types of qualities in individuals, not necessarily a certain thing on a résumé. You could have a marketing degree, an operations degree or a business degree. Fine—we're looking for these attributes no matter which one.

There are several good groups. SISO today was putting out this Handshake thing for young adults coming out of college that you can apply for. I know Warwick Davies put out a system for internships where he's trying to give people a small amount of six-week training, and you get placed into different large organizers in the events world, which is a great deal.

I think interning is the best way for us to find quality talent. You get a little tryout. They get to try out the industry as well. Some people don't love the travel. Some do.

Tyler Davidson

Right? And there's no way to really tell until you get in and start swimming, right? I mean, you've got to be a people person, and you have to be able to react under pressure, right?

Shawn Pierce

That's right. I say all the time, you can be an introvert as long as you're an extrovert when you're in front of the audience, right? We have a lot of introverted experts.

Tyler Davidson

I absolutely like that. Absolutely. Some of the best-performing artists in the world are like that.

Shawn Pierce

They are absolute introverts unless they're on stage or in that environment. Then they're out there.

We're really bullish on working with the schools, trying to get out there with vocational schools, colleges, junior colleges and getting people who are the brightest and can really be a part of our world. Then, you know, interviewing, giving them an opportunity—an internship or an opportunity to come in—and see if they like it. I always say we know after the very first show whether you're going to make it long term or not.

Tyler Davidson

Yeah. So thanks for joining us. Just one quick question before we go. We've talked about things from the planner side a lot, and a bit about attendees and their increasing desire for relevant connections. Are there any other changing expectations of meeting attendees that people should be aware of?

Shawn Pierce

I think they expect that you know who they are now. They've either come before, or they've given you all this data. You should not treat everybody with a blank piece of paper and say, “Give me your first name, last name, email address, and everything else.” You should be able to get that data from your membership system, from your previous registrants, or from their own information. Put it on the screen for them right away. Make it easy.

They expect the barrier to entry to be almost zero. They want to come to your event; they don't want to fill out your form or walk through your 20,000 questions. They want you to make it easier on them and help them along.

They want you to help them build their agendas and match them with other attendees, exhibitors and sponsors. They're really expecting a customized experience, and that means before, during, and after. You need to follow up with those attendees just like with exhibitors. Tell them, “Here's what happened with you at that event. Here's what we see for you. Here are three nuggets of things. Here's some recordings we took of other sessions you might be interested in. We'd love to see you again.” All those things need to happen. They expect it, and it's something we should do.

Tyler Davidson

Well, wonderful. Anything to add in general for meeting and event planners out there?

Shawn Pierce

No, I think that you're all awesome. I think we're all going to be great. The future looks super bright, and let's stay the course.

Tyler Davidson

Well, awesome interview, Shawn. Thanks for giving me some time today. I really learned a lot, and I appreciate it.

Shawn Pierce

I appreciate it, Thank you.

Tyler Davidson

And that was Shawn Pierce, President of MCI USA's Strategic Events, Meetings and Incentives Division. I'm Tyler Davidson, Vice President and Chief Content Director for Meetings Today. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you're interested in other podcasts we've done, head on over to MeetingsToday.com and check out our podcast section, which is full of interesting interviews with meetings and events industry thought leaders.

So thanks again to Shawn, and thanks to everyone out there for joining us today. No matter what you're up to with the rest of it, go out and make it great.