We became one of the first ticketing platforms to include AI-powered tools: Vivek Sagi, Eventbrite

At a time when innovative technology is transforming industries by improving processes, enhancing customer relations, and solidifying supply chains, the events sector particularly stands out as a shining example of these dynamic changes.

In a recent chat with ETCIO, Eventbrite's CTO Vivek Sagi shared some fascinating insights on how today's tech is revolutionizing the events industry. Think streamlined operations, improved customer experiences, and stronger supply chains - all thanks to advancements in AI and Machine Learning. Sagi's take on the subject offers a unique glimpse into how these technologies are shaking things up in the world of events.

Some excerpts from the interview:

How do you view the fast-evolving tech landscape as digitalization reaches ever-increasing speeds?

It can be challenging to stay on top of the latest technologies, especially in the context of AI when things seem to evolve almost on a daily basis. What’s even harder is to determine which new tech will stay around and which is driven by hype (anyone remember Clubhouse?). Lastly, as a CTO, I need to make a call on which technology we should actually explore and eventually implement. The key here is to constantly monitor the demands and needs of our customers, to determine whether an emerging technology can help us scale our offerings and to build a better and more useful product for our customers.

I spend a lot of time interacting with peers in the industry and companies that are using cutting-edge technologies to build innovative new products across the tech stack. As I chat with them, I am learning what problems they are solving and what kind of other problems they are seeing that’s applicable to us or might be around the corner for us, with user experience as the top priority. I am also cautious for our teams not to get locked into one set of platforms or models, as the arena is evolving too quickly and new ones will inevitably emerge. As a side note, despite my initial skepticism, Metaverse conferences are actually amazing to connect with peers. I’ve tried a few and I loved the experience.

What are your views on the emergence of new technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning? How can they help take customer experience to new levels? What role does AI and ML play in your solutions and how do they enhance the overall customer experience?

The emergence of new technologies such as AI and ML has fueled our customer-focused engineering teams to devote 60% of their capacity to creating new tools and features that enable us to provide our customers with personalized experiences and rapid impact.

On the supply side of our events marketplace, Eventbrite’s AI powered tools have simplified various tasks for our event creators, making event marketing much more intuitive, efficient, and easy – which frees up their time for what they actually love: creating unforgettable events! Typically, event creators are now able to do in minutes what used to take them hours and days before.

On the demand side of the marketplace, we are innovating at a rapid pace to make the global live events discovery easy. We are employing AI and ML technologies to enhance consumer experience through personalization and to make that connection between a consumer who might have never heard about an event creator or an event that might be in their neighborhood. So, when we make that connection, that translates into a relationship that lasts for weeks, months and potentially years. We are seeing a surge across consumer visits to Eventbrite across all our channels coming to discover unique events around them, and AI helps us serve them events they will like efficiently.

Many people believe AI will revolutionize most industries. How will AI change the events industry?

At Eventbrite, one of our key differentiators is our never-ending quest for innovation and providing users with value via all forms of technology. It is not about using something just because you can, but rather about realizing what value it will bring to our users and our business and making it happen.

As far as we know, we became one of the first ticketing platforms to include AI-powered tools into our daily operations at the beginning of 2023. This led to the emergence of a wave of intelligent features that are already starting to transform event marketing and creation, giving event creators all over the world better outcomes while saving time:

• Social media ads with AI-generated copy have shown a 17% better Cost Per Click (CPC) compared to campaigns without AI-powered content. Creators have been able to launch ad campaigns 30% faster with AI-powered copy compared to non-AI.
• Automating summary and description generation alone has increased the publish rate for both new and existing creators to between 4 -10% while reducing the time and effort for first users to create their first event by 30%.
• One of our standout features: “auto-create”, was introduced in June 2023. Primarily designed for new users, it allows organizers to create complete events in less than a minute by providing basic event information.
• Creators who like to grow their audience and boost their social media ads using Eventbrite Boost (a new all-in-one event marketing platform for creators) sell 63% more than doing it directly themselves.

Having said that, we are still in the initial stages. AI is incredibly good at making sense out of unstructured data – and since event descriptions on our platform are user generated, this capability will be critical to better understand and categorize the millions of events on our platform to deliver highly tailored and targeted event recommendations. This is the event industry’s pinnacle that everyone has been trying to crack for decades. And we have the wealth of data from millions of events worldwide to make it happen, thanks to advanced AI.

How is the remote-forward work culture helping you tap top talent across the country and also achieve diversity goals in hiring?

We want to work with the best talent – in the best environment. Part of this is empowering our employees to work where they work best. It’s an important aspect of our holistic approach to the new workplace that promotes our employees’ physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. Our remote forward work culture has allowed us to transcend cultural and geographical boundaries and access a far larger talent pool far beyond our work hub in Hyderabad and across India.

Most importantly, this strategy has helped us provide equal opportunities for top tech talents across the country in places such as Guntur, Jharkhand, Varanasi, Tiruvannamalai, Coimbatore, Bhayavadar, Berhampur, Mandla, Bhuj, Junagadh, Dharampur etc., in addition to those from the metros such as Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Chennai etc.

Women in technology and those from the sandwiched generation (middle-aged adults who are caring for both their growing children and aging parents at the same time) make up a sizable portion of our applicant pool. They are keen to leverage the benefits of remote work —such as flexibility, autonomy, and global collaboration—in order to tap into their creative potential and advance innovation for the business without having to leave their dependents and home-towns behind and migrate to tech hubs.

As of April 2023, women accounted for 44% of our worldwide workforce and 55% of top leadership positions; these numbers also roughly correspond to India. As we continue to inch closer to our 50:50 gender equality goals, we are committed to continue on this path towards DEI and pay equity across India.

How do you manage engineering teams in a remote and asynchronous setting?

It is important to resist the urge to micromanage and to empower teams with leadership on eye-level. At Eventbrite, pursuing goals that inspire results are more important than the number of hours teams work. We use a lot of tools and technologies that help with communication, teamwork, project management, asynchronous stand-up meetings, insightful reporting, etc. to ensure that we are always operating as high-performing remote teams. Particularly, the use of AI enterprise search and knowledge discovery tools to onboard and connect employees to the right context and person with minimal friction has supercharged our internal efficiency.

Some face-to-face meetings across time zones are unavoidable, but in general, we aim to be respectful of everyone’s time, and that includes being very deliberate with whether meetings are necessary at all. For roles that support our operations, we have centers spread across multiple time zones, enabling work to follow the sun. Functions that require real-time feedback and increased autonomy are also carefully co-located. In addition, we try and move as many collaborative processes ‘asynch’. This took – and is still taking – us time to adapt to. It’s a very different mindset to our in-office focused culture pre-pandemic.

We also recognize that fully remote work isn’t for everyone. People who flourish in this environment are often doers who own goals and like finding their own ways to get there – and yet collaborate efficiently with their peers and managers. Eventbrite provides a transparent environment, clear goals, and efficient collaborative tools to make sure that everyone stays on the same page.

How do you implement a flexible-first environment across your global development centers from a technical perspective? What tools, platforms, apps, etc. do you use?

As a global company with Britelings across nine countries and multiple time zones, we continue to experiment with new ways to make the future of work meet the needs of our Britelings and our business.

At the same time, we are also mindful of when and how we work to create an equitable employee experience where all Britelings feel like they belong. India Britelings are empowered to choose what works best for them: to be fully remote, work from Hyderabad office, or take advantage of the best of both the worlds.

While we value flexibility, we also function as teams. For this reason, various rituals—such as sprint demos, retrospectives, and daily standups—are calendared with virtual meetings to ensure continuity. We value our employee’s time and we make every effort to avoid needless meetings, particularly when one must attend at an inconvenient time. We alternate meeting hours as they are necessary so that no one is burdened by a single time zone and no one is forced to attend every meeting. Instead, whenever practical, we make use of tools that let us work together and obtain the information we require asynchronously, like:

● Slack and Google Workspace

● Atlassian tools: JIRA, Confluence

● Zoom, Google Meet for regular all-hands, weekly calls with CEO – recorded for async viewing

● Intranet using Simpplr

● Glean: AI Search and Knowledge Discovery

Our software development build and release process no longer involves human intervention. Upon completion of a build, as an engineer, I just click a button to have my code tested and sent to production, allowing me to monitor its performance. Through flexibility, autonomy, and cutting-edge tools and technologies, Eventbrite continues to constantly experiment and embrace “new work principles” that aims to establish an engineering culture that not only inspires and desires excellence but also gives people the bandwidth and freedom to drive innovation and create real value for our customers.