Do More With Less Using AI (Issue 11)

THE PROBLEM: It's 4pm on a Friday. You've got a 38-page venue contract that needs to be signed by Monday. You know there are landmines buried in there—one-sided indemnification clauses, surprise fees, attrition penalties that'll wreck your budget if attendance dips. But between back-to-back calls and that sponsorship deck due tomorrow, you've got maybe 30 minutes to find them.

THE SOLUTION: The Event Contract Auditor reads contracts the way you wish you had time to. It methodically flags every red flag, every hidden fee, every clause that favors the vendor way more than industry standard. It's like having a detail-oriented paralegal who actually understands event contracts on call 24/7.

HOW IT WORKS:

Upload Your Contract - Handles venue agreements, hotel contracts, AV proposals, catering contracts, speaker agreements, and more.

Choose Your Audit Depth:

• Quick Audit - 10 critical items checked in 2 minutes (perfect for renewals or vendors you trust)

• Standard Audit - Comprehensive review of all major clauses

• Deep Dive - Full analysis with negotiation strategies and comparison to industry standards

Get a Color-Coded Report:

• 🔴 Red Flags - Deal-breakers or severely unfavorable terms (negotiate or walk)

• 🟡 Yellow Flags - Worth pushing back on, but not catastrophic

• 🟢 Green Highlights - Surprisingly favorable terms you should preserve

Receive Specific Action Items - Not vague advice like "review the cancellation policy," but "Clause 8.2 on page 12 charges 100% cancellation fee regardless of timing. Industry standard is sliding scale. Here's the exact language to propose..."

WHAT IT CATCHES:

Based on the contracts I've analyzed while building this, here are the most common gotchas:

The Hidden Fee Multiplier
You see "$5,000 for catering." The contract says "plus applicable service charges and gratuities." Those "applicable charges"? 23% service charge + 20% gratuity + 8% tax = 51% markup you didn't budget for. Your $5K dinner just became $7,550.

The Relocate-You-Whenever Clause
"Venue reserves the right to relocate event to comparable space with 30 days notice." Comparable according to who? Your 500-person ballroom becomes their 500-person lawn tent because "technically it holds the same number."

The Attrition Trap
Hotel contract requires 80% room pickup, which sounds reasonable. What you missed on page 19: it's calculated against rack rate ($450/night), not your negotiated rate ($225/night). You think you need 160 rooms filled; they're calculating like you need 320.

The One-Sided Indemnification
"Client shall indemnify and hold harmless Vendor from any and all claims..." with zero reciprocal protection. If their AV tech trips over a cable and sues, guess who's paying? (Hint: not the vendor.)

THREE WAYS TO USE THIS TODAY:

1. Before You Negotiate
Run it through before your first vendor call. Walk into that negotiation knowing exactly which three clauses you're willing to die on versus which are standard boilerplate.

2. The Second-Pair-of-Eyes Check
You've read the contract twice. You think it's fine. Run it through anyway. I've tested this with "clean" contracts and the GPT still found 3-4 items worth clarifying.

3. Teach Your Junior Planners
Have new team members run contracts through with you. The GPT explanations are teaching moments—"See how they buried the equipment delivery fee in section 14? That's why we always check addenda."

WHAT THIS DOESN'T REPLACE:

Let's be realistic:

❌ Not a lawyer - Complex legal disputes or high-stakes negotiations still need professional counsel
❌ Not a fortune teller - It can't predict which vendors will actually honor their contracts
❌ Not an excuse to skim - You still need to read the contract; this just helps you catch what you'd miss at 4pm on a Friday

START HERE:

Grab that contract sitting in your inbox—the one you've been meaning to review for three days. Upload it and run a quick audit.

Takes 2 minutes. You'll either get peace of mind that it's clean, or you'll find the clause that would've cost you $15K in unexpected fees.

AUDIT YOUR FIRST CONTRACT NOW →

Last Monday night, five event professionals walked into Monte's Trattoria in New York.

No presentations. No vendor demos. Just honest conversation about what's actually happening with AI in the events industry.

Corporate planners. Freelancers. Production company leads. All dealing with the same pressure to do more with less.

We stayed for nearly two hours, and here's what came up:

The corporate AI gap is wider than you think

Someone mentioned their banking institution just gave employees access to AI tools last week. In 2025.

This sparked the biggest frustration of the night: wanting to use AI for time-consuming tasks but not having access to the tools that could actually help.

Here's what's happening: Companies are (understandably) cautious about security risks. But by the time they build their own internal solutions, the models they're offering are already behind the curve. Meanwhile, event professionals are stuck doing everything by hand.

The key insight: The specific tool matters less than the habits you build. Because often, you don't get to choose what you use at work anyway. Focus on learning how to think with AI, rather than looking for a 10% performance boost.

Vibecoding is fast, powerful, and risky

I shared how I built my event vendor directory in two days using AI to generate code - something that would normally take weeks.

But here's what I learned the hard way about vibecoding:

The security risks are real. If you're building on Github, you need to be obsessive about environment variables and API keys. If your OpenAI API key gets exposed, anyone can use your account (and you pay for their usage). If your database connection key leaks, they can access all secure information on your site.

The takeaway: Vibecoding can turn a month-long project into a weekend sprint. Just don't skip the security review, even if you're moving fast.

The Gen-Z critical thinking problem

This one got everyone nodding.

The pattern: Early-career professionals are using AI to draft emails and communications, but they're not fact-checking the output. AI invents the wrong date for an event. They send it. Client catches the error.

One person at the table said they're encouraging their junior reports to avoid using AI in most cases - not because the tool is bad, but because they need to build the reps for how to do it right first.

The lesson: AI is a force multiplier, but only if you know what you're multiplying. If you don't know what good looks like, AI can't teach you.

Everyone's under pressure (and it's not getting better)

The industry is struggling:

• A lot of talented people are out of work, meaning intense competition for every open role

• Budgets still haven't fully recovered from COVID

• Corporate expectations keep rising while resources keep shrinking

• Long hours have become the norm, not the exception

The only coping strategy that seems to work? Community. Finding other people who understand what you're dealing with. Having conversations where you don't have to explain why it's hard right now.

That's exactly why we did this dinner.

Before you vet another speaker or verify another vendor claim, ask yourself this: How many of your team members know how to use Ctrl+F to find text on a webpage?

Dan Russell, a Search Anthropologist at Google, surveyed thousands of people and found that 90% don't know this exists.

And if 90% of people can't do the most basic research task, what does that say about their ability to verify the information they're basing decisions on?

The stat that should terrify you

Dan's colleague Sam Weinberg at Stanford discovered that 80% of university graduates cannot distinguish a legitimate EPA website from a lobbying front group using an almost identical logo.

Watch Dan demonstrate exactly how to catch this:

His trick? Copy the street address from the "About" page. Paste it into Google. You'll immediately discover it's the same address as a lobbying firm.

Takes 30 seconds. 80% of college graduates can't do it.

Three tactics for event professionals

1. Lateral Reading - Don't evaluate a site by diving deep into it. Open a new tab and Google the organization name. See what others say about them first.

2. The Address Trick - Copy any physical address listed on a website. Google it. See what else operates from that location. Same address = same organization, different name.

3. Reverse Image Search - Take a photo of any image with your phone and use Google Photos to identify it. Catch stock photos vendors claim are from "their events" or speaker headshots that are actually from model portfolios.

Why this matters now

Think about your last three days:

• Vetting a potential keynote speaker through their website

• Researching a vendor claiming "20 years of event production expertise"

• Verifying a statistic your junior planner put in a sponsor pitch deck

• Checking credentials on a speaker bio your team drafted using ChatGPT

Every single one of these requires the exact research skills Dan teaches. And most of us never learned them.

The optimistic part? Dan teaches a MOOC called "Power Searching with Google" that's reached 4.1 million students. Students who completed the two-week course tripled their search skills—and those improvements stuck around months later.

As Dan puts it: "Tomorrow's illiterate will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

Want to bring Dan to your next event? As a researcher who's spent decades understanding how people actually learn and search online, he delivers keynotes that fundamentally change how audiences evaluate information. Book him through Speak About AI or reply to this email.

💼 Associate, Events and Experiences @ Walton Enterprises (Bentonville, AR | On-site) – Lead end-to-end planning for high-profile Walton family and organizational events. Manage budgets, vendors, logistics, and stakeholder relations. 10+ years experience required. $143K–$179K per year. Posted 1 week ago. Apply here

🎯 Event Planner @ Stanford University (Stanford, CA | On-site) – Plan and execute academic, corporate, alumni, and departmental events. Manage logistics, budgets, vendor relations, and facilities coordination. Strong benefits and career growth opportunities. $73K–$87.8K per year. Posted 1 week ago. Apply here

🚀 Destination Planning Manager @ Hotel del Coronado (Hilton) (Coronado, CA | On-site) – Lead planning and execution of site visits, FAM trips, and VIP client experiences for luxury property. Coordinate cross-department planning for sales, catering, and marketing. $70K – $75K per year. Reposted 4 days ago. Apply here

🎪 Experience Coordinator @ City of Fishers (Fishers, IN | On-site) – Plan and execute citywide events like Fishers Farmers Market, Spark!Fishers, and Glow in the Park. Manage logistics, vendors, staff, and on-site operations. City government role with benefits. $49,117–$59,263/yr. Posted 4 days ago. Apply here

💡 Wedding Planner @ Walters Hospitality (Lago Vista, TX | On-site) – Guide couples through full wedding process, manage vendors, lead rehearsals and day-of coordination. Full-time weekends required. Includes 401k match, medical benefits, and unlimited PTO. $60K–$70K annually. Posted 3 weeks ago. Apply here

Check out the full spreadsheet with 100+ up-to-date event jobs here.

Are you hiring? I can spread the word. Reply to this email with any job opportunities and I’ll add it to the sheet!