People talk at parties, and sure, a lot of it will be rather polite useless babbling. But you can talk up a gym leader or two for how they train, or battle strategies. Even let your Pokemon mingle and collect some info from the other mons.

Or people, if there are certain folks there you want to keep an eye on. If my dog... *Nope, scratch that line of thought, try again.* If I had pokemon at home, I would definitely have used them to keep tabs on some people at school I'm... not terribly fond of.