Fandom Unpacked

AI’s Impact on Live Entertainment: Unpacking the Business Effects on Sports, Arts, and Ticketed Events

• Situation • Season 1 • Episode 9

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The intersection of artificial intelligence and modern fandom is transforming how we discover, experience, and connect with live events. In this enlightening conversation, Janette Roush, Chief AI Officer and SVP of Innovation at Brand USA, shares a treasure trove of insights on the evolving relationship between AI and the live experience economy.

Most marketers approach AI with a mixture of curiosity and anxiety – an understandable response to technology evolving at breathtaking speed. Roush dispels common misconceptions, explaining that while today's AI tools aren't perfect, we're merely in the "training wheels" phase of what will eventually revolutionize the entire ecosystem of live entertainment.

The discovery process for experiences is already being dramatically reshaped. Unlike traditional search engines prioritizing paid results and keyword-stuffed content, AI-powered discovery offers truly personalized recommendations aligned with individual preferences. This represents a fundamental shift away from volume-based recommendations toward connecting fans with experiences that genuinely resonate with their unique tastes and interests.

The conversation explores essential tools for marketers ready to embrace AI, with recommendations including ChatGPT Team, Claude, Google Notebook LM, Midjourney, and Descript. Looking ahead, Roush envisions a future where personalized AI assistants become our primary technology interface, proactively recommending experiences based on our preferences, schedules, and interests.

Whether you're a venue operator, event producer, or marketing professional, this episode provides critical insights into how AI will reshape fandom while offering practical guidance on navigating this exciting transformation. Ready to explore how artificial intelligence will forever change the relationship between fans and live experiences? This conversation is your essential starting point.

Recorded Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025
Host: Damian Bazadona, CEO & Founder, Situation
Guest: Janette Roush, Chief AI Officer and SVP of Innovation at Brand USA
Producer: Peter Yagecic, Innovation Advisor, Situation
Slides: https://situationlive.com/aipdf

Peter Yagecic:

You're listening to Fandom Unpacked the podcast, an audio version of our regular live stream series where we unpack modern fandom with some of the brightest minds in sports and entertainment. I'm producer Peter Yagisic and I'm joined by our host for today's Q&A, Situation's CEO and founder, Damian Bazadana. Damian Bazadana Our guest is Jeanette Rausch, Chief AI Officer and SVP of Innovation at Brand USA, the destination marketing organization for the US, dedicated to driving international inbound travel. Today, we'll be talking all about the ways generative AI is impacting live events and fandom. Here's Damian, with our first prompt. Let's roll.

Damian Bazadona:

You have to curb me and Peter. Talking about AI for 30 minutes is going to be a challenge. It's going to be tough, but we'll do it. We'll do it for hours.

Damian Bazadona:

So AI is at the center of fandom. As you know, on our Livestream series, we spend a lot of time talking about fandom. That's the whole thing, and AI is literally at the center of it, of how it's going to evolve it and change it, and I think it's really one of the most exciting unlocks I've seen in my career in the digital space. That is exciting. So I know on the call today I saw the registration list. We've got sports folks here, theater folks, attractions, everyone from the live experience economy at large. So it's exciting. So I want to just dive right in. Jeanette, you spent a lot of time with marketers across hospitality, travel, live entertainment all these live experiences. How would you describe the general mood around the broader topic of AI? Because you know, I'm assuming, if you, for the people on this live stream right now, if you had to guesstimate how they're feeling right now when they're thinking about AI, how would you describe that?

Janette Roush:

I'm going to guess that it's a combination of curiosity overwhelm, some nervousness. I'll say probably 20% of the audience is currently using paid tools of some kind so that your data stays a little more secure and you have access, kind of, to better capabilities. And then I think the other 80% most of you are probably using free tools and playing around with it every once in a while and maybe kind of asking well, what's the big deal, what's the point? Or this is the thing that's going to steal my job and you're not quite sure what to do with it or what the next step is.

Damian Bazadona:

From where you're at, it's funny, I think, of curiosity, anxiety. Curiosity and anxiety are like my eating habits at night too, I'm like shouldn't do this, but it looks so good, and I've seen you speak at a lot of different events and what would you say is the biggest misconception? You're hearing, you're like in large rooms, all these types of marketers, everyone's asking you a question, given that's a significant part of your role, what do you feel like is the biggest misconception that people are getting on it right now? And, by the way, let me just qualify really quickly. I'm using the broadest term of AI. It's like air at this point. It means everything. It's been around everywhere. We're talking a lot, I think, a little bit more in the genitor space, the idea we're going to be leaning a little bit into chat, gbt, that ecosystem, just to qualify a little bit, because it's a massive topic.

Janette Roush:

But talk about the misconceptions you're hearing that it can either solve all of your problems or that it cannot measurably help your problems in any way. So it's kind of living too much at the extremes. There is a certain fallacy of working with AI that everything that it gives you is going to be perfect and amazing and almost a mandate. You have to use this because look at how much language you know. This was trained on. Like, how much smarter is this than me? What do I know? Whatever it said, let's do, or the total opposite, which, and I'd say, neither version is helpful.

Damian Bazadona:

Yeah, I feel like particularly in misconception. It gets a lot wrong. And I'm going to a lot of the context. What I'm speaking is I'm sort of in the chat gpt lane, uh, for a whole range of reasons, but it's probably the most frictionless to sort of jump into and I now use it as an unlock for pretty much everything. But it's fascinating when I speak with other people about it. I see those two camps often and, um, it gets a lot wrong. It's we're like on the training wheels right now, like Like we're just getting. You can see the opportunity to it. How do you envision AI reshaping the way fans discover live experiences and thinking like travel planning or finding that next concert? And when I'm poking at, the keyword in that sentence is discover, because we're going to get into other stuff later. But the discovery is rapidly changing with the relationship of search and how that's looking. What's your take?

Janette Roush:

You know somebody I was running a workshop with a friend of mine at the Oregon's Governor's Conference on Tourism last week gone to Medium and wrote this ode to a toothbrush that they had found through ChatGPT. That is like this small German brand and I guess they had put in a chat query something that was you know, not just what's the best toothbrush in the world, but also with some of their own personal specifications for what they were looking for. And it came back and said this this is the toothbrush that you want. And they're like well, that's who am I to argue that I'll give that a try? And then they were like this was the best toothbrush I have ever seen in my entire life. This is changing toothbrushing for me.

Janette Roush:

And then my friend discovered that article through ChatGPT. So it kind of became this virtuous discovery cycle and I think what it shows us is it's a little unpredictable what these large language models? What? Because it's not a recommendation engine, it's a next word predictor, and so I have heard from people they're really nervous that it's going to Latin. All of the recommendations that come out of AI that we're all going to be sent to the same top 10 restaurants near me that would show up in a Google search result, and I think what that misses is this personalization aspect that our own AI is going to add in.

Janette Roush:

So where I see all of this going is and I you know there's going to be a number of different paths for how people use AI but I think the primary way is that we're going to have on our phones the one chatbot. That's kind of our main source. So if it's chat GPT, then it's chat GPT and that it will. Chatgpt just turned on persistent memory a week ago across all of your chats, so now it knows everything about you that you've ever had a conversation with it about. More targeted to me, jeanette Rauch, than just here is, you know, the top ranking toothbrush on Amazon, which you know. Great, that's volume. But do I want to make every decision based on volume of other people purchasing? Not necessarily, not as a fan, and so figuring out and kind of, and so figuring out and kind of unlocking.

Damian Bazadona:

How do we get our productions, our sports teams, our live events to surface in these large language models? I think that's like the big hill for all of us to climb right now, so let's dive into it, because that's, I think, the huge question In the marketing space. I would imagine a lot of people on this call. A significant amount of their money probably goes to well, definitely goes to some Google product at large and or a meta product, but let's just use search. That's like the gateway in, and we all know how to play that game. It's a paid model. Yes, there's some organic play and there's different placements. You can play in math, but, generally speaking, and so you can now look. Well, at least you used to be able to fully understand that.

Damian Bazadona:

Google now is clearly, I think it's in a clear identity crisis, trying to identify what is it going to be with this Google AI overview. How do you think, though, brands should be preparing for it? Like, what are the steps Again in the past? Well, I'll pause there, because I'll just keep asking questions. What do you think they should be? How do they should be preparing for discovery? What would you be? What do you think? What are you recommending people should?

Janette Roush:

do. The best advice that I have heard is just do what you ought to be doing anyway and creating the good quality content that through your research and through all of the work that everyone does to determine what's going to be the most moving. To do it, because right now we live in this weirdly gamified world of content where, you know, for Google search, everything is written with keywords in mind and everything you know we have, all we've done this to ourselves, because the internet is full of recipe websites that you have to scroll through a life story to get to the recipe. And that has happened because Google rewards those websites because they've chucked in more keywords.

Janette Roush:

But it's not the actual best answer to the question that somebody might be trying to ask you know, how do I cook this particular kind of food? So what large language models if they continue to center, like the person and the experience of the person using it? You know, and that's probably an open question that might not always be true, but let's assume that's pretty true right now then it's not going to force me to read all of the junk before the recipe. It's just going to give me the recipe as succinctly as possible and so, like that becomes the opportunity is don't try to trick or confuse the large language models by, I don't know, having content on your website in every single possible language, because large language models like to go to in-language examples before they go to other language examples, depending on what you speak when you're typing into the engine and like you can waste a lot of time gamifying, or you can just do the right thing create the content that users need, answer the questions that they need to know before they purchase the ticket.

Damian Bazadona:

Yeah, no, I think we're about to see the biggest shift I think I've seen in a long time, as it relates to consumers connecting with the things that they want. And there's Google, and I love Google as a company and I think they're going to figure it out, it's no question. But the current search on travel sucks. It just sucks. I'm sorry what it does. It gives you every choice, and every choice that's paid for, and you're kind of going am I getting anything of value here? Until you start digging in? And there's too much work. Until you start digging in, and there's too much work. And again, a long hill to go, even on the ChatGPT side. But I don't know from personal experience. I just find it a lot better, way better experience. Let's talk about how AI will actually change the actual experience for fans. Let's think pre, during, post. I'm a Knicks fan. That was not a great game last night.

Peter Yagecic:

I'm so sorry, but that was not a great game last night.

Damian Bazadona:

But like, how might AI help me, whether that's wayfinding, gamifying, like what are you seeing, what are you thinking, even in sports or travel or any other just vertical, just curious how you think it's going to impact the actual experience itself.

Janette Roush:

Wayfinding. I think there are huge opportunities there Wayfinding and translation. So again, that personal device that lives on your phone. Imagine you're a wheelchair user. My device, my Google account, would already know all of the dimensions of my unique wheelchair, because this is an issue across travel right now that there's a number of companies working to solve in some way, because a hotel might say the room is accessible and that is a absolutely meaningless adjective. I don't know if my you know if it's a roll-in shower or, you know, do I need to have two people with me to help transfer to the bed or is that equipment already there? And so for a future version of Google Maps to understand where is my hotel and what is the path to the theater or to the arena, that includes curb cuts at every curb so that my wheelchair can make that trip.

Janette Roush:

I think that's like the level of accessibility help that we can expect in the future. You know, we already see amazing things for people who are blind or have low vision and the ability of you know. Imagine a pair of meta glasses that can do audio descriptions for the user as they're out navigating the real world. So I think some of the greatest opportunities are in that arena. And then I think it comes down, like for the fan experience I've kind of been thinking about, like what would it be like to be able to experience the game from the perspectives of actually the players on the court?

Damian Bazadona:

Yeah.

Janette Roush:

And so, like that's, I'm cheating now and like moving ahead of like what's the ultimate dream 10 years from now? But imagine being able to see a musical, but now you're seeing it through the eyes of Elphaba instead of through the eyes of the audience member. Like experiences that would never be available to us. I think that's the kind of thing AI can make real us.

Damian Bazadona:

I think that's the kind of thing AI can make real. Yeah, you know, just building on. This is really not necessarily about the experience itself, but almost the transaction process of being able to map out where I want to sit. I will tell you, if I I am an aisle snob, I will pay a premium for an aisle. I will sit on the roof if there's an aisle seat, and so any. It does not take a genius to be able to watch me for like 10 minutes and go oh, this guy wants an ILC, and so pretty much no matter what and I know there's a lot more automation happening on that front of botch being able to shop within as agents, excuse me, which would be incredible, which I know, peter, you've been testing with. I just think there's obviously a massive opportunity on that front. Speaking of Peter, peter, are there any questions coming? I just want to make sure I'm being mindful of any questions that might have come in.

Peter Yagecic:

Yeah, we do have some audience questions coming in. Going back to your toothbrush example, jeanette, deep research gen AI seems like a much better comparison shopper than earlier LLM models. Just ask deep research to help find the cheapest tickets for any given Broadway show this weekend and see what you get. I think the question is a year from now, will any humans be doing this research or will it all be our personal AI agents? But maybe could you take a minute to kind of let the audience who may not be familiar with deep research we were talking about it right before we went on camera the difference of kind of what deep research is doing, and then you know will it take over all of the research that we're doing?

Janette Roush:

So deep research, and this is annoying because the people at these companies are so terrible at naming their products. And so Google Gemini came out with a deep research back in December, which then OpenAI came out with their own version of deep research a month later. I think Perplexity now offers deep research. I think Claude has rolled it out, but they've called it something slightly different. But what the technology is doing is essentially I think of it as going down an internet rabbit hole. So all of these services that all offer some version of this type of work, it's you lay out a problem for it and then it may ask a couple of clarifying questions or let you see its research plan, and then the language model goes off and spends up to 30 minutes researching on the Internet to see what are the best ways to answer this challenge.

Janette Roush:

You have given it, and it is great for comparison shopping on products. It is really good if you're doing a competitive analysis. So you know, brand USA, we're looking to move more into the business event market, so that's getting more conventions to be held in the United States and for you know and this will be a new piece of work for us Like, we're not going to have sales teams that are literally booking the convention centers, because that happens at the local level. So what is our role? And deep research does a great job of taking kind of a big, needy, diffuse project like that and coming up with a McKinsey-style 50-page report that is based on 30 minutes of research. It is insanely valuable.

Peter Yagecic:

More are coming in if we want to do another audience question.

Damian Bazadona:

Do it, do it, do it, do it. I've got 400, but you go.

Peter Yagecic:

Starts out? Security, security, security. Should we operate under the assumption that anything we put into chat GPT is not private and could show up anywhere? Is there a way to protect ourselves? Which I think the answer to that is yes, but, Jeanette, I'll let you take a whack at that.

Janette Roush:

Yes. So I have done a lot of studying on AI governance and kind of what are like how do we responsibly work with AI in our companies? And so, like I'll say for me personally, I am a privacy fatalist. I have no assumption that anything I ever do or say is private anymore. So I'll put my blood work in the chat GPT so that I know what my doctor is going to say before she says it.

Janette Roush:

But that is not how I would approach privacy and security. You know, on behalf of our businesses or on behalf of Brand USA, and so for both of those, the first step is use a paid model, because that gives you the opportunity to turn off a toggle that says that the language model can use anything that you put into it as training for future language models. So that's the first step. It's going to in most cases, if you're using a chat GPT team account or an enterprise account, that's going to give you SOC 2 security. So again, it keeps your data safe from hackers when it is moving to the cloud where it's going to be analyzed, and then while it is at rest in the cloud. But then there's separate questions about what is okay to put in a large language model. That isn't necessarily related to security. So I'd say yes, I would feel pretty comfortable knowing that I have a SOC 2 compliant closed system putting most items into a language model. I'm not going to put the schema for a new iPhone into it if I work at Apple and I'm using ChatGPT, which is heavily invested in by Microsoft, but they're not doing that anyway and most of the stuff we're doing is not going to be at the level of state security but in terms of what else is not okay to put into a language model PII.

Janette Roush:

So you know personally identifiable information. It is a violation of GDPR to put any you know names and phone numbers, email addresses of an EU citizen into a tool like ChatGPT, because the EU says you have to give like affirmative consent in order for somebody to use your information in a language model. So that's just a best practice to not do that, because it's not your information to give away. And then you want to look at the third-party permissions of things like research documents. So one of my favorite use cases for AI personally is to create a project inside of ChatGPT or inside of Clod. It looks like little folders and you can put background information into those little folders but some background information, like a research report from a third party. If it's syndicated research, they may say in your contract that you're not allowed to share this information with a third party.

Janette Roush:

A language model is legally considered a third party. So it's time for all of us. You know, as small business owners I bet on this phone or people who work for really, really big brands you want to make sure that you are talking to your vendors. Like, rather than ooh I don't know if it's okay to do that Like, let's get it out of. You know the secret realm. It's okay to say I'd like to put this stuff into a large language model that has training turned off. Can we add those terms to our contract?

Peter Yagecic:

Fandom Unpacked is brought to you by Situation, an award-winning marketing agency built for live entertainment that champions the power of unforgettable shared experiences around the world. We offer full marketing and creative services for experience-based brands in live entertainment attractions, theater sports, arts and culture and more.

Damian Bazadona:

Check us out at situationinteractivecom. Now back to our Q&A. There's one of the common. I'm going to switch gears a little bit. I want to talk a little bit about authenticity in terms of, and content development, and so I feel like one of the more common questions I've seen and I'd love to get your take on this is how does AI run the risk of making content feel less authentic?

Damian Bazadona:

And what I've heard from content developers oftentimes is like hey, look, I use it for a lot of stuff, but my voice I'm so niche that it would never really capture what I do. Now I'm like you're wrong, because if you train it enough, it's going most likely to be you if you want it to be Now. I personally don't want to live in a world like that. So there's something about you have your own personal judgment of things you want to hold on to. But it's interesting I hear this a lot that the belief of like oh, it'll never get me, I think is missing the point of the power of what you're dealing with. What's your take? Because this is a big one. A lot of people on this webinar right now, on the live stream these are content creators, and so what's your take?

Janette Roush:

I'm just curious on AI and development. There's so many pieces to it, right? Because part of it I'm like. I think, yes, not today. Can it perfectly replicate our own unique voices? I don't think that's very far away and I think, from an artistic perspective, totally not there today. I think there's a lot of fun stuff you can do with Midjourney or the new image tool inside of ChatGPT. It's not human-replacing today, but but I think it could get much closer pretty soon.

Janette Roush:

And that you know, in my world that creates a lot of consternation because, you know, destination marketing organizations are promoting destinations and there is like a big push to make sure that everything we do to promote the destinations is authentic.

Janette Roush:

We wouldn't want a, you know, phony version of the Empire State Building to be used, even if we knew in every single way it was perfect. That's also today. And so if you think 20 years ago when Photoshop was new and everybody's like, oh God, I want to on the cover of our brochure or for this trade show booth, I want to make sure that the blue sky behind the city skyline really pops, and there's a little bit of hand-wringing about how much Photoshop is okay and how much is too much. But we don't have that conversation anymore and I'd argue people completely expect, if they see a sky in the photo, that somebody touched that sky up and if the sky were kind of hazy and dreary that people would kind of be upset that you didn't do that work. So what we consider to be our norms are going to subtly shift over time.

Damian Bazadona:

If you think about it's almost like how do you measure authenticity? That's like a big one, right? Because it's like how, like, how, like I don't know. You know, I would imagine some of the pushback because, I agree, I I'm hard, how far technology has come, how fast. And yeah, you can like, right now you can tell when something's a little bit off, you're a little bit off here. But if you call this training wheels and go 20 years from now, oh, the technology itself is going to figure it out.

Damian Bazadona:

The question, I suppose, really is it's consumer push, it's consumer pushback, right, if I found out that I was talking to someone who I think I'm a machine, I think I'm talking to a human, so that really goes to like, what's the role of brands and being transparent of this is just, you're dealing with my AI self, but also the role of government and compliance, which I think is that's. The government is clearly going to step in at some point and try and put guardrails on this, because the knock-on effects of this are going to be incredible if this just remains unleashed on our economy, on our society. This is a hard, this is a tricky question. The crystal ball of like, what is government? What is compliance or government? What do you feel like? Where do you see that maybe going?

Janette Roush:

A lot of the compliance stuff, like I don't know how much the US government is going to step in from a regulation standpoint. Certainly other governments will. So as long as we're selling our products to European citizens, the EU AI Act will dictate a lot of kind of the bigger things that all of us can use AI to do. But ultimately, I think it does come down to the brand level to be very clear about how do you use AI and where are your company's personal limits, because nobody is going to tell us what to do. There is no real right or wrong. It's just what do we collectively agree to do together? And so for a brand that can look like AI guidelines.

Janette Roush:

So that's something you know we rolled out when I was pretty early on here at Brand USA and it's something that I would suggest every organization needs, because it's the opportunity for you to come together and say how comfortable is your organization with pushing the limits when it comes to AI use and maybe collectively agree.

Janette Roush:

Or leadership comes together and agrees oh, we're gung-ho on this and we want to provide the tools for everybody to use it safely. Or you may say no, we want to keep AI out of the workplace. I'd suggest you're at risk for shadow AI or BYO AI if you did that, but that could be a position to take, and then it allows you to say how much alteration are we okay with before we want to tell people, you know, with a note on our website or a footnote to a picture, to some way be clear, because I think that is like. The number one reputational risk is that people don't want to be tricked, and so it's not that using AI has a moral implication, but you want to make sure that people understand what the AI did and what the human did.

Damian Bazadona:

Yeah, well, let me okay. So let me switch gears a little bit. Talk about I'd love for you to talk about your must-do list for marketers, right? I think it'd be helpful for the folks on here to see what you're playing with and some tools.

Janette Roush:

Great. So for me, chatgpt Team is kind of the go-to account. If you're only going to do one thing for your team, get ChatGPT Team. It's going to be $25 a user a month if you purchase monthly, I believe, or, yeah, if you purchase annually, that's the monthly rate and your ChatGPT comes out with the newest additions, like the best features, faster. I don't think it out with the newest additions like the best features, faster.

Janette Roush:

I don't think it's always the greatest model. I'd say today it's probably the greatest model, but then Claude will leapfrog over it. So if you're looking for just one answer, looking at this entire list, it's chat GPT, a paid version. But then on top of that I really like Claude, which also offers kind of a safer team account because it just has a better writing style. And if you're somebody who gets into a long conversation with something like ChatGPT, you'll find that ChatGPT will start spitting out the same ideas over and over and it kind of just gets stuck in a rut. Cloud is much less likely to do that in my experience. And then if you look at the Google suite, google's you know their new model that just came out is currently top of the leaderboards. That is not typically the case for Google, so it would be lower on my list to buy unless I already had Google Workspace. But I will say some of the other products that I have on there, like Google Notebook LM terrific research tool. For that one you just upload PDFs or other files and then it will answer your questions only looking at your files and it will open up your files and it will highlight where it found the answer to your question, so that it's a way to work through hallucinations and be really grounded in truth. And then, just like picking a few from the other categories in the image and voice tools, midjourney takes some training to understand how to create images with it, but it's well worth it. Training to understand how to create images with it, but it's well worth it.

Janette Roush:

Descript is a fantastic tool for editing short videos or audio content. So you could take this podcast, feed it into Descript and then they have what they call an AI underlord. So not your overlord but your underlord, and it will find all of you're like I'm looking for five 30-second segments and we'll find the five most interesting segments from the podcast. It will make it vertical or horizontal. It'll put whatever style of captions you want on it. You can do more editing tricks if you're not. You know I'm not an editor, but if you already know how to do that, it's easy to do it within the tool and even so, somebody like me I could fake somebody into thinking I was a podcast producer by just having this one $20 a month subscription. I also under the everything else bucket. Beautifulai is a terrific presentation tool and I think it's worth trying out. Napkinai, if you are ever making infographics for an ad meeting.

Damian Bazadona:

Great See, I love it. I'd sometimes I know a lot of people. I asked Well, what actual to should I tool should I use? I mean, there's a lot of different and I know a lot of people on cloud, by the way, and I've tested notebook LM to me as one of my favorite. It was one of those things when you, when you see, I put my own medical stuff to it and it gave me better. It gave me, but with better bedside manner. Peter, I know there's more. I want to be respectful of all the questions we have.

Peter Yagecic:

Sure, yeah Well, I think I know the answer to this one, but as it relates to research, how can we specify where we want AI to pull answers from to avoid research information bias? You mentioned that notebook will just scam what you give to it. But is it as easy as saying? Because most of these are conversational interfaces, you can just say that to them.

Janette Roush:

Sometimes I mean, if you're depending on what the research question is, sometimes it will go, it will lead you astray, and I think the problem with asking it is that it wants to make you happy and so it will lie. So there is no asking AI to fact-check or proofread itself.

Peter Yagecic:

We do use AI tools not Descript, which I'm very interested in, but we use it. We feed all the transcripts from this very series into it, asking for great quotes, and it has hallucinated those quotes. It's come up with great stuff, but stuff that nobody actually said. So yeah, take it with a grain of salt.

Janette Roush:

Yeah, that's why the notebook tool is so great, because it will pull. You will look at the actual quote in real time.

Peter Yagecic:

Yeah, and you know, I think, as Damien mentioned, this is just the beginning of probably a continuing conversation. One question that I would want to ask on behalf of our audience is how can people best stay in your orbit, jeanette? I mean, you are staying on the forefront of this, it's in your job title. What's the best way for people to continue to make sure that they get continued wisdom from you in this topic?

Janette Roush:

I write a lot on LinkedIn about AI actually, so LinkedIn is the best spot to learn more from me. So LinkedIn is the best spot to learn more from me. And then I follow so many different newsletters that I had to open up a separate email inbox to track all of them, so it doesn't just overwhelm my work inbox.

Damian Bazadona:

Listen to podcasts I am heavily consuming this information so that you don't have to work quite so hard at it. That's how I saw I mean, I've known Jeff for years, but that's what kind of triggered this conversation her LinkedIn feed of watching all the stuff that she's doing, which I just think is just awesome. Peter, can I ask the last question? I just want to ask Go for it On the horizon that you're excited about. And obviously there's a million things on the horizon in the AI space. It's like sky's the limit. But, like you know, I'd love to ask kind of, what's on the horizon that you're excited about that? Or you know, if you have a dream up, an AI experience in your head of like, oh, here's what I can see happening. Like I'd love to talk a little bit more about the future.

Janette Roush:

I really see the idea of our one personal AI device being the way that we interact with AI in the future, and so I think, from a live event perspective, what that means like, let's say, my personal AI ends up being Google's Gemini. Gemini, like Google, already reads all of my emails and it has, you know, parts of my calendar, and you know so much of our personal lives is already really deeply known by Google. So if that were to become my personal AI, it would know when do I have free time coming up in August, and so does my husband and our stepkids, and it's been a long time since we've gone to see a Broadway show been a long time since we've gone, you know, to see a Broadway show, and they know that there was some chat message that the kids had that I didn't see, that talked about some or other show, and at the point that I am ready where I would say, oh, I need to start planning a family activity, gemini will open up on my phone a I don't know if I would call it a website, but it won't necessarily have to look like a text chat interface. I think, based on what we are doing, it will create an interface on the fly that matches the activity that we're talking about and that I would use that interface to choose a vacation destination or to pick a Broadway show.

Janette Roush:

I think, if it were something like picking a Broadway show, that if I am a short-form video person, that it would create three 15-second video clips from three different Broadway shows to help give me a taste of what it is, from three different Broadway shows, to help give me a taste of what it is, and it may steal those images you know from YouTube. Or maybe we keep on our websites for our products like a library, like a capsule of here's all the video and image content that you can pull in to your LLM to create these spun-up websites. Here's all the descriptions that you would need to know, and it wouldn't be something a person might want to read. But let's say, the website includes here's all the target audience profile segments who are currently buying tickets to this show, and then that's a way that the data that we already have can help us find more people who fit into those you know audience target segments, without them needing to raise their hand first, because they're just doing it intuitively through using their device.

Damian Bazadona:

Yeah, it's exciting. I think that it's just an extremely exciting time to be in the marketing space for live experiences and the whole intersection of phantom. So I think to me I'm like it's scary to some, exciting to others. The reality is it's a massive change and we haven't even started seeing the impact of it and the knock-on effects. And with change is opportunity, and so I I've never been more excited to be in this space. I think it's actually very cool.

Peter Yagecic:

That's going to do it for this episode of Fandom Unpacked the podcast. If you liked what you heard, please be sure to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Find out how to join us live for an upcoming recording at SituationLivecom slash fan. We'll see you next time, true believers.