Classifying Event-Ticket Emails with AI: From Prompt Engineering to Fine-Tuning GPT-4o-mini
Post 2 in my series on an automation hub for a ticket-resale business. This one covers the AI pipeline that reads and classifies event-ticket emails — from prompt engineering and multimodal handling (emails with images) to building my own dataset and fine-tuning GPT-4o-mini. The problem The purchasing team's inbox receives hundreds of emails a day: Ticketmaster presale announcements, venues releasing new ticket blocks, artists sending promo codes, cancelled orders that need refunds... Missing a "tickets released" email can mean losing a chance to buy at face value; missing a cancellation email means losing refund money. But nobody can read hundreds of emails a day by hand. The requirement: classify emails into categories ( PRESALES , TICKETS_RELEASED , TICKETS_ON_SALE , ALMOST_SOLD_OUT , PROMOTION_DISCOUNT , Cancelled ...) and extract structured data : performer, venue, event date, purchase link, promo code — and for cancellation emails, the order number, vendor, quanti...