As Corp. Mtg. Site Needs Evolve, Groupize Eyes Tech

Companies are dealing with a post-pandemic surge in meetings demand and limited hotel availability, leading to difficult negotiations, according to Alisa de Gaspe Beaubien, CEO and co-founder of meetings management platform Groupize. She talked with BTN’s Angelique Platas about Groupize’s goal of total meetings management, internal meetings and empty office space, and the company’s outlook on tech. Edited excepts follow. 

BTN: What sets Groupize apart within the corporate space? 

Alisa de Gaspe Beaubien: About 43 percent of a corporation’s [business travel] spend is from meetings and events, and it’s not managed. Our core value proposition is total meeting management to make sure every meeting—whether a small meeting of 30 or a large meeting of 20,000—has this one centralized solution for the entire life cycle. Our secret sauce is that we are the best at group travel logistics. 

BTN: Groupize added a pharma compliance meeting module in May. What precipitated that, and how is the rollout going? 

De Gaspe Beaubien: The genesis of the HCP Digital Sign-in is the pull from the market to improve processes and automate really painful things. When a sales rep is calling on a health care provider, whether it’s in an office visit [or] clinical trial, everything is still done on paper. Because of regulation with the Open Payments Act, there are massive penalties for not reporting properly. This is just an extension of our focus on the life sciences vertical and helping them solve more business problems. 

BTN: Is anything else trending, more generally, throughout the Groupize client base? 

De Gaspe Beaubien: ‘Internal meetings’ has become a category. Nobody talked about internal meetings before, and now it seems like every department and every company is putting in for an internal meeting in their budget at the high level. We’re watching corporate real estate budgets getting moved to travel and meetings. So, return-to-base meetings happening in empty office buildings versus hotels is the other key trend.

BTN: The roles of technology, data and digitization are all becoming increasingly important in this industry. How has Groupize adapted or maintained to keep pace?

De Gaspe Beaubien: Technology for total meeting management is becoming the norm. It’s a very disjointed experience when a company needs to have a big meeting tool and a small meeting tool, and they don’t talk together. Having one solution is very valuable. SAP Concur resells our tool [as] Concur Event Management. Essentially, we’ve created a new category that’s an online meeting tool [with] the benefits you would have with on-board training—rules, permissions, roles for everyone in the organization. We believe we’re the only ones doing that for meetings and events. That’s what companies want right now.

BTN: When you say “everyone in the organization,” do you mean the tools are used by everyone—not just by travel managers or professional meeting planners?

De Gaspe Beaubien: Travel managers have inherited the category of meetings in many companies. For years the industry has been talking about the convergence of travel and meetings. It actually happened, it’s behind us. Travel managers are still using technology to manage this category, [but] they recognize it’s not their job to be sourcing and doing meeting management at this volume. [At the same time,] event planner staffing has been decimated across the industry, not only internally at companies, but at third parties. Every single travel management company third party and company is struggling with staffing. Basically, it’s more meetings and less people. So [Groupize] works to close that gap and make employees more efficient. 

BTN: What is Groupize focusing on for the remainder of the year?

De Gaspe Beaubien: We have three core initiatives: deeper integrations into expense solutions, on-site activities and improving the meeting entry point for TMCs. Starting with SAP Concur, we’re integrated with Concur Travel today but we’re going deeper to improve the experience, provide visibility, duty of care and more. Then, for more onsite activities, we have an event app, but there’ll be additional things during onsites. Third, the industry works on meeting request forms—they are archaic. They have 50 questions you would never know before starting a meeting, so we’re improving that entry point for TMCs and third parties. 

BTN: What kinds of use cases are you seeing for small and simple meetings?

De Gaspe Beaubien: I don’t think there’s an agreed-upon definition for smaller, simple meetings. We’ve all been trying to solve that together for years. The landscape is, definitely more corporate gatherings for teambuilding, more internal meetings, more training and more HR-led events happening regionally. 

With the remote workforce here to stay, we’re actually seeing some companies, every week, bringing in hundreds of employees for onsite training, which has the exact same pattern as a normal meeting. Some are also inviting customers for onsite meetings. I’ve been following threads that say it helps with sustainability versus sending a road warrior to meet 25 companies over a year. Instead, bringing them all together at once is just a more sustainable travel pattern. 

BTN: Demand for travel and meetings recovered ahead of budgets following the pandemic. How has that scramble impacted your clients? What are some of the challenges and what are you doing to address them?

De Gaspe Beaubien: Travel budgets were slashed during the past few years and a lot of companies didn’t know at what rate to bring their travel budget back. We’re also seeing [high] hotel rates as a large problem and not a lot of availability. It’s definitely a sellers’ market. It’s ‘Sign this contract right now. No concessions, no discounts, no anything.’ And if you don’t sign it in five minutes, somebody else will. People are having to be more creative [regarding] where they’re going to hold meetings, and their default is corporate real estate.

BTN: Artificial intelligence is a topic of conversation in the travel and tech space. Where does Groupize land on AI as a solution?

De Gaspe Beaubien: We use a lot of AI internally for operations and to make our teams more effective and impactful, from our support to marketing and others in our actual application. We have several theories that we’re investigating. I believe that venue sourcing and optimization of where a meeting could be held can drastically be improved with AI. We’ll be keeping our eye on how to incorporate that.