S8E7: AI Keynotes

Ever wondered if event keynotes are truly driving lasting change or just offering surface-level motivation? In this episode, Dr. Kristin Malek discusses her approach to speaking on AI, Gen Z, and neuroscience, emphasizing behavior change. She shares her journey from a successful AI session for rural leaders to landing more speaking gigs through LinkedIn. Despite skepticism about her AI expertise, she emphasizes mindset shifts over technical details. She challenges event professionals to prioritize keynotes fostering behavior change and diversify breakout sessions for comprehensive learning and curiosity among diverse audiences.

AI Keynote Speaking (1:26)
Promoting for Behavior Change in AI Keynotes (3:18)
Planning Purposeful Keynotes for Events (8:51)

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Transcript

Dr. K
You are listening to the Experience University podcast: Season Eight, Episode Seven.

Speaker
Welcome to Experience University where we aim to educate, inspire, and empower individuals who wish to design transformational experiences. Now, your host, Dr. Kristin Malek.

Dr. K
Hello, hello, my friends. It's a crazy week, and I'm completely going against everything I was doing this season: season eight. Season eight is all things interviews. I think I might have missed a week when someone canceled on me at the last moment. Serves me right for not scheduling multiple weeks ahead of time. But today, I wanted to jump on the podcast, and this will be just me. Then we'll get back to our regularly scheduled interviews next week.

The reason why is because I had a really interesting conversation the other day where I found myself having to defend myself, and that doesn't happen very often. I sat there and I said, “Why was this misconstrued? Why was this misunderstood?” It was a really interesting realization. And I said, “I've got to come on the podcast to talk about this.”

One of the things that I've been doing for a while, I've been speaking. I speak on a variety of topics. I've been speaking a lot on Gen Z and how to reach them, how to plan events for them, a lot of things with the culture and the climate around Gen Z but also with artificial intelligence mindsets. I do a lot with sponsorship innovation, so I do a variety of topics. I was asked to do one for some rural leaders about artificial intelligence; it was wildly successful. Every single person in the room, I think, except for one, literally went online and created an account on ChatGPT in that moment. They were all drinking, and afterwards at the bar, they were all playing around with it and talking about it and engaging with the material. They were intrinsically motivated to learn.

And so I posted about it on my LinkedIn. From that, I ended up getting several more speaking gigs in different areas all talking about AI. All of them were keynotes. I heard from a friend whom I respect, who is friends with somebody else whom I also respect, but don't know personally, that they were talking about how I shouldn't be talking about artificial intelligence because I'm not an expert in it.

And I sat there, and it kind of rubbed me the wrong way. At first, I was just like, “Yeah, whatever, I'm sloughing this off,” you know, high self-confidence and self-esteem, and I don't pay attention really to what other people say because, you know, the bigger and better and more involved you get, the more haters you tend to have. But this particular comment stuck with me, and I was really sitting there thinking about it.

I really came to the conclusion that obviously there's a speaker for every situation. And the reason why I've been so successful in all of these keynotes with artificial intelligence is because actually the first half of it is all about mindset. I am not a logistical. I'm not a tactician. I don't work for an artificial intelligence company. I'm not gonna sit there and get super into the weeds with all the different things. I'm not gonna tell you the four things to type into a prompt. I mean, I might mention it depending on how long the keynote is, but I'm not gonna sit there and give you all the little tiny in-depth things, which is what these other technology or AI speakers are doing for the most part.

I mean, you never make a rule of anything, right? I spent the first half of my talk all about neuroscience, conscious mind, unconscious mind, really setting up the pre-frame for change behavior and taking people through how their mind works and then bringing that into artificial intelligence and ChatGPT, Gemini, and other programs. This is really what I would say is maybe the difference between a keynote and a breakout or just maybe why I don't have to be working in an artificial intelligence area because that's not the behavior change I'm going for.

The people that go to artificial intelligence breakouts are normally the people who are already passionate about it; they already care about it. I use this example a lot. I say if you're advertising your session as a DIB (diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging) session, the only people who are gonna come to it are the people who already care about it. And that creates a huge rift in terms of people who care about it already continuing to evolve and people that maybe don't care or they do care, but it's not their priority to go to a session about it.

They just maybe are stagnant or fall behind, and this rift in the middle grows and grows and grows. I talk about this a lot in teaching and training when you have teaching sessions at a university or a continuing education program or anything that involves training or corporate training. The people who show up to those sessions are the people who are already good. They care about it or maybe if you're in a university studying, maybe grad students who have never taught before. So the good teachers continue to get better and better and better, but maybe the super heavy researchers who, it's not their priority for teaching, or, they don't like it, or, it's not something that lights them up, they're not going out of their way to take voluntary teacher training. They're just not.

That really goes into that behavior change. I have message after message after message on LinkedIn; I should have pulled some of them up, so I could read them directly for you. But one of them, she told me, in a LinkedIn message, she said, “When I was walking into the session,” right? “I was walking into this day, this three-hour continuing education day, and this was the session I look forward to the least. When I got done with it, it was the one I was the most excited about and found the most applicable to my life.” I think that just shows the power because what my motivation is, it's not to get you to use it in a particular way for your business. My behavior change that I'm going for is for you to open up your mind and accept and get curious about it. That's really all it is. It's like, “Hey, how many of you are using it for personal only? How many of you are using it for business only? How many of you are using it for business and personal? How many of you are using it for neither? How many of you don't even know what AI is?”

Right? We've got to pick up people exactly where they are and then move them along, and if I can get people curious and create an account, download the app, or go in the browser and just start playing around with it, that's awesome. For people in the room who are already users, getting them to think about it in different ways that they can implement it in their life. I talk about meal planning and prepping. I talk about exercise. I talk about obviously some work things that are general. I’m planting the seeds in an unconscious mind for them to grow because I'm not there to deliver an entire session.

So obviously, you can tell that this might have affected me a little bit to the point where I was like, you know, I'm not making a podcast to defend myself because realistically the two people who made the comments, they're probably never going to listen to it. But I do think that there is a real case. Everybody has a different behavior change. and everybody has a different outcome for their speech. And just because AI is in the title, it doesn't mean that every session's made the same. If that makes sense. I can talk to farmers and get them super excited about AI, I can talk to engineers, I can talk to event professionals. I could talk to marketers. I mean, I could talk to anybody and get them excited about AI because that's what the point of my talk is, is to get them excited about it.

If you have ever thought about speaking or if you've gone into a session, like a breakout session at an event or training, and you're like, “I didn't get anything out of that session.” Chances are that session wasn't meant for you, and that means that, that communication breakdown somewhere, either the organizer of the event or training was not clear with the speakers about exactly who was going to be in the room and what needs to be said or at what level, or the speaker didn't do their due diligence to adequately prepare or have relevant examples or whatnot.

But somebody in the room was impacted by something, right? And so the difference between a keynote and a breakout to me, it's not that the keynote has to be motivational, and I think that's where I get annoyed. This is just a full-on rant, y'all. I appreciate if you're still listening to this because I have a lot of feelings about how our events are, our association events in particular, but how they're running right now because they're spending all of this money on these keynotes, these celebrities or big names or these motivational people that are there to motivate but really provide, I don't wanna say no real value because obviously there's value there, but they're not the ones that are gonna really impact you in this massive behavior change and they're getting paid all this money.

Then the breakouts, we all know how they go. It's like, okay, I'll waive your registration if you do a breakout and you get accepted for that, which means that… who are you attracting? You're attracting your existing members that no speaker is gonna pay for their own airfare and their own hotel to go to an event that is not their event, right? They're not interested in it. And that's where I feel like we've become so siloed.

There was an event that I was at and they were asking questions on their own, like, “Well, who's doing this?” And nobody raised their hand or maybe one person raised their hand, and they acted like nobody was doing it because nobody in the room was doing it. But realistically, there's these other fields and industries that have been doing it for 20 years, but they're not showing up to our events because they're not our people. We would have to pay to bring them in, but that's where the real learning occurs. So if you are in charge of events and you're listening to this, you're my fellow event professionals, just think about that. Breakout speakers, we should be getting people from different areas and that often involves paying them. Really think about your keynote. Is your keynote just a motivational person or is it someone who's still enacting significant behavior change and mindset change in your attendees?

Thank you so much for listening to this podcast and for letting me interrupt season eight. I felt very strongly about this, on my heart, because I do feel like if we don't start adjusting our mindset of who's speaking at our events, then we're gonna fall behind. And since I am a paid speaker, I go around and speak at all these events, I know that a lot of events are paying outside speakers for their breakouts and their keynotes, and the event industry, I don't feel like has really done that to that level. Or again, they're just paying people who are maybe celebrities in this field.

Food for thought. Think that through. Next week, we will resume with our normally scheduled programming. We've got some awesome people coming up in the podcast for finishing out the season. We have an epic, epic event meeting psychologist. Super excited about that. We also have a Larper, live action role play, which is not just for our dungeons and dragon nerds out there. I have so many friends who are there. So anyways, thought that I would put that out there. Thank you so much for taking the time to make the time. I will talk to you soon.
 
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Experience University podcast. Stay tuned for our next episode.