There’s no question that AI has affected just about all areas of modern life. In both our personal lives and professional roles, AI has changed how we find information, complete tasks, and even how we interact with others.
The event industry is no exception, with event AI tools available to assist with every step in the event management process. In fact, the latest event technology trends indicate 50% of meetings planners are using AI to help them plan and execute events, with 42% using AI or planning to use it for attendee matchmaking, 41% for content creation with AI writing assistants, and 39% for tracking attendee engagement.
These figures will only increase as event AI tools become more sophisticated and as organizations embrace the full power of AI. Read on to find out how you can use AI to streamline the planning and execution of your events and become a true AI event planner.
How AI is changing the event landscape
One of the biggest impacts of AI in events lies in the changing expectations of those in the event ecosystem: planners, venues and vendors, and attendees. Thanks to AI, what does everyone want and expect these days?
They want:
- Personalized experiences
- Real-time communication and interactions
- Streamlined automation of tasks
- Sustainability and energy efficiency
Personalized experiences
Having a tailored, personalized experience is one of the major event trends for 2025 and beyond. Attendees want to make the most of their time at an event, but an event is not necessarily one-size-fits-all.
Offering personalized recommendations for relevant sessions, networking opportunities to connect with the right people, and other activities of interest shows you respect attendees’ time and truly understand their individual needs.
More than that, enabling personalized experiences shows you appreciate your attendees and want to go the extra mile to ensure they have a valuable and enjoyable experience. Thankfully, with event AI, personalization is a breeze.
Real-time interactions
Communication instills confidence and reduces stress—even more so when that communication can happen in real-time. Whether during initial event planning, venue sourcing, or during the event itself, AI chatbots, messenger notifications, and other automated communication tools have made it easier than ever for event planners and attendees to instantly give and get answers and solve problems.
Automation
These days, the fewer steps it takes someone to complete a task, the better. Getting things done with just the click of a button? Even better.
For so many tasks, AI takes away the need to do things manually. It has the ability to automate things like venue sourcing, event registration, and room block management—processes are notoriously complex and time-consuming. Streamlining these onerous tasks makes planning and attending events easier and more satisfying than ever.
Sustainability
More and more, planners and attendees alike are prioritizing sustainability at events. They want more recycling bins, locally sourced food options, compostable utensils, and an overall sense of energy efficiency. This is something that AI makes more feasible for planners.
To reduce food waste, provide adequate recycling, etc., planners can use predictive AI-enhanced analytics to better anticipate the resources they’ll really need at an event. Then, during events, there are AI tools available that can do things like monitor water usage and automate lighting and temperature controls.
Using AI for event planning
There are all kinds of AI tools for events available, each offering custom solutions for just about everything involved in the planning of an event, such as:
- Sales and marketing processes
- Daily event planning tasks
- Data collection and analysis
- Event registration automation
- Content creation and design
Sales and marketing
Specialty AI marketing tools help to streamline the varied tasks involved in promoting an event, building marketing and sales campaigns, and analyzing the success of those campaigns.
AI is makes each tasks more efficient, from mining attendee data to identify your audiences segments to drafting personalized emails and social media posts that speak to each segment individually. You can use AI chatbots and writing assistants to quickly craft original content or repurpose existing content for different purposes.
Daily event planning tasks
Here is where the automation possibilities of event AI can really shine. AI-enabled event integrations are designed to integrate seamlessly with your existing systems to help you view and manage everything that goes into planning an event: budget, transportation, scheduling, customer service, and more.
You can also enable AI customer service tools, such as an AI chatbot, on your website to answer attendees’ or exhibitors’ most commonly asked questions, allowing you to focus on more complex problem solving and planning tasks.
Data & analytics
All the decisions you make, from marketing to customer service to managing an event, can and should be data-driven. Thankfully, in addition to streamlining your everyday tasks, AI-powered event management software simplifies the all-important processes of collecting data and analyzing it for practical use.
When you use AI for event planning, you can quickly aggregate all the data that’s collected before, during, and after events. Then, all that complex data can be swiftly interpreted to:
Determine the success of previous events
All your costs, revenue, attendance figures, and attendee and vendor feedback can be collected and analyzed by AI to see if you met your event ROI goals.
Anticipate challenges
The same data can be used to determine what complications you can expect and determine out what could be done better at the next event.
Allocate resources
To help meet the challenges or wins your data has illustrated, AI can then recommend all the areas where you should add or reduce staff, supplies, and equipment.
Event registration automation
A well-designed and easy-to-use registration website, designed and built with the help of AI, makes the event registration process easier and more intuitive than ever. Use AI content tools to quickly compose the content for your site and keep it up to date. Then, use AI-enhanced tools to collect user data, send personalized emails, autofill forms, and essentially walk users through the event registration process.
Content creation and design
Content creation is perhaps one of the most used AI capabilities. With the help of AI writing assistants, chatbots, and design tools, you can create not only content for your event website and marketing materials but even for higher-stakes content like event session presentations.
Need to put together an outline for your keynote speaker? AI can help you generate content, polish it to match your brand’s tone and messaging, and even create a beautiful presentation to go along with the talk track.
AI for venue sourcing
Your event venue can make or break your entire event, which means it’s crucial to that the space you choose has the right functionality, style, layout, and amenities to meet your event needs.
Of course, this makes the venue sourcing process a particularly stressful step in the planning process, but your event tech, including AI tools, can help alleviate many of the pain points of venue sourcing. With AI-enabled tools, you get:
- Streamlined discovery of venues that meet all your criteria
- Customized, thorough RFPs
- Seamless communication
Streamlined venue searching
There are specialty venue sourcing tools that use AI-enabled search to make sure you find the right venue options for your event. After your initial search, you can then filter down based on your specific criteria: location, dates needed, expected number of attendees, room blocks, amenities, and so on.
The results that remain should be the right options for your event. So, from the very beginning of the venue sourcing process, you know you’re only viewing venues that can offer everything you need for your event.
Customized RFPs
With your venue options shortlisted, AI writing assistants, agenda planners, and other tools are available to give your requests for proposals (RFPs) the right details and sense of urgency. That way, the hotels and venues to which you send your RFPs will have fewer questions and be able to respond more quickly.
Seamless communication
Any questions or concerns that come up can be managed quickly with automated alerts. Plus, everything related to venue sourcing can be easily accessed via a centralized venue sourcing hub, where you can keep an eye on the status of all your venue bids and communications, compare venue responses side-by-side, and save preferred venues for future events.
AI tools for event management
When the time comes, it’s up to you to make sure your event stays on track and that all your attendees and stakeholders are satisfied. As you’ve likely already suspected, yes, event AI can also help you with your event management processes during your events.
Event management AI tools can help to ensure:
- Improved attendee engagement and satisfaction
- Streamlined event check-in
- Attendee tracking and engagement summaries
- Efficient event logistics
- Enhanced event safety and data privacy
- Real-time attendee support
Improved attendee engagement
Event AI can make attendees’ experience at your event feel personalized and engaging from the very beginning. It all starts with a dedicated event app. Pretty much all your event attendees will have their phone with them—and they want to use it. That’s why a mobile app can be an invaluable tool in the overall attendee experience.
Not only can it provide relevant information about the event overall—with interactive maps, speaker schedules and featured sessions—but with AI agenda building tools, it can also offer personalized recommendations for speakers and activities that would most interest each attendee.
What’s more, AI can be used for attendee matchmaking to help attendees identify and schedule appointments with peers whom they’d be most interested in meeting and provide real-time alerts to help attendees stay on schedule.
Recent event trends find gamification to be a popular new way to keep attendees engaged during an event. Event app features like a Points, Badges, and Leaderboard (PBL) system, interactive scavenger hunts, and live polls encourage engagement and connections with other attendees.
Streamlined event check-in
As soon as attendees step into your event, you’ll want to ensure as smooth an experience as possible. That means making your check-in process as efficient as you can.
Beyond leveraging onsite check-in and badging software to keep bottlenecks to a minimum, AI can help move things along even more quickly. Attendees who have uploaded profile pictures to their event app can simply scan in at the check-in desk and confirm their identity using facial recognition AI.
Attendee tracking and engagement summaries
Tracking attendee engagement is a key component of evaluating your event’s success, and AI can help make the insights you gather more comprehensive and simpler to report on.
As you use your event tech to track attendees’ engagement with sessions, exhibitor booths, activities, and more, AI can help you summarize their experiences and even recommend additional activities or content they might enjoy based on their prior onsite activity.
Efficient event logistics
You want to keep attendee traffic flowing, and you want resources available at the right times and locations. AI’s predictive data analysis capabilities are certainly great with planning before the event, but AI can also help when challenges arise in the moment.
For example, AI-powered security cameras can notify you when and where there’s congestion at your event so you can reallocate staff and resources as needed to smooth things back out.
Enhanced event security
AI is a great security guard. It can be used to keep your attendees and exhibitors safe, both physically and digitally. For example, facial recognition at check-in and at strategic points throughout an event can help you identify if someone is or is not an authorized attendee, or if there are any signs of physical theft.
Other event AI tools can be put into place to detect cyberattacks, fraud, and other suspicious digital behavior, helping to pinpoint perpetrators and notify security teams.
Why use event AI?
The better question might be “why not use event AI?” AI is a useful tool at every stage of your event planning process, from curating your marketing campaigns to sourcing venues and even managing the flow of your event as it takes place.
To help you better harness the power of AI, and for tips on using specific AI tools, be sure to check out our eBook, Mastering AI for Events.
