Five Ways AI Will Transform Meetings & Events

Here’s the dirty secret of meetings and events technology: no one wants self service! 

Customers want full service, but at self-serve prices. This is one of the big reasons why there has been a graveyard of event software companies over the last 20 years. Startups start with the hope of building scalable self-service technology. Then they soon find out that most of the dollars are in the enterprise market and they need to provide a tremendous amount of customization and services in order to fulfill enterprise needs. Once they factor this in, the gross margins go way down, and these companies find out they don’t have the free cash flows they need to fuel fast growth. They are then hit with the double whammy of slower enterprise growth combined with low gross margins, making the opportunity much less exciting for investors. 

This combination of lack of capital, slow growth, and low margins equates to a whole bunch of dead companies. Another dirty secret is that venture capital firms absolutely hate the event software category for these exact reasons!

But I’m here with a hopeful message for 2024: This is the year all of this can change, with the power of artificial intelligence. There is an opportunity for trained AI models to handle the full-service needs of customers for the first time ever. But it can’t be a thin layer on top of ChatGPT. You actually have to train the model to be a professional.  It has to follow a scientific diagnostic model, following the right steps in the right sequence, to actually fulfill the customers needs. Here’s the thing: There is very little being done in AI across the event management companies aside from wrappers on ChatGPT. Hopefully this article inspires people to consider all the possibilities. Here are five huge opportunities for AI in the meetings and events space:

AI Event Concierge – I don’t think AI can replace event planners anytime soon. There is just far too much “feet on the ground” assistance needed. But an AI assistant is a game changer. You can chat with your AI assistant to discuss your dream event, the specific details, all the considerations, and then this assistant can orchestrate the event planning for you! This is within the constraints of what is possible right now.

Purposeful Gatherings – One of the things I’m most excited about is the ability for AI to assist in curating event content and attendees to achieve specific objectives, and actually measure whether the objective was fulfilled. Finally, AI can usher in the era of truly purposeful gatherings. Where the objectives are clear, only the most essential attendees are included, and the gathering is optimized around all the factors including costs, sustainability and impact.

Unbiased Personalization – As an attendee to events, I am frequently lost when I show up. I haven’t had time to do full planning on which booths to attend, where those booths are or how to schedule everything around sessions I want to attend. Events are too frequently suboptimized for attendees, except for those few that do extensive planning. AI can solve this problem. Simply chat with your event concierge in detail and get back fully customized event agendas. The event chatbots in the market have not done an adequate job of fulfilling this dream.

Guest Curation and Networking – Networking is the number-one reason why people attend events. But networking is a nightmare in today’s event technologies. The furthest we’ve gotten is being able to set up appointments and even that doesn’t work too well. There is an opportunity to improve this experience dramatically by using AI. You should be able to chat with your AI event assistant to discuss the needs you have, your interests, what you want to potentially buy and what you want to sell. The AI then should give you a short list of relevant attendees to connect with and make it really easy to set up a time to meet. Not only that, but AI should help event organizers target the right people from across social networks to market their events to! 

The Holy Grail: ROI – For decades, event software companies have been promising to help marketers figure out their ROE (return on event). But this has been a seemingly impossible task. The reason it’s so difficult boils down to one word: attribution. You meet a prospect at a conference, but you may have already touched them via email or calls leading up to the show, and there may be many other touchpoints that occur before they convert to revenue. This makes it very hard to attribute revenue to the event. You are then only getting credit for net new leads. However, with better AI tooling, leads can more effectively qualify interest and action items coming out of the event, leading to richer attribution insights and ultimately crisper ROI and ROE measurements.

Overall, AI has the potential to be a 100x multiplier for the event software industry. The future favors the brave. It will require imagination, risky investments and experimentation. It is clear, however, that the next leaders of the event software space will be AI-first.