What AI can and can't do for your event

Every season brings a fresh round of AI promises aimed at event organisers, and most of them sound wonderful in a sales deck. Some of it is genuinely useful. A fair bit of it is a slightly fancier version of something you already had. And a small portion is wishful thinking dressed up nicely. Knowing which is which saves you money and saves you an awkward moment in front of a client.

So here's an honest sorting, from someone who runs these things rather than sells them.

Where it actually helps: the dull, repetitive jobs. Sorting a few thousand registrations and flagging the oddities. Speeding up check-in so the queue doesn't snake out the door. Pulling a guest's photo into something fun they'll happily share. Drafting a first version of your follow-up notes so you're editing rather than starting from a blank page. These are real wins because the task is well defined and the stakes of a small slip are low. If a recommendation is a touch off, nobody's day is ruined.

Where it's oversold is anything that claims to read a room or replace judgement. It can tell you attendance dipped after lunch. It can't tell you the talk before lunch ran long and people slipped out for air, which is the bit you actually needed to know. It can group your feedback into rough themes, but deciding what to do about a grumpy comment from your biggest sponsor is still yours, thank goodness. Treat anything pitched as "insight" with a raised eyebrow until you've seen it work on your kind of event, not a polished demo.

And there's a category that simply shouldn't be left to run on its own. Anything a guest sees with their name on it. Anything going to a senior person at a client. Anything touching money or compliance. Use the tools to do the heavy lifting, then have a human read it before it goes out. The cost of that read is a couple of minutes. The cost of skipping it is the one mistake everyone remembers.

One more thing worth saying plainly, because the organisers we work with in government and finance ask every time. A lot of these tools want to hold onto your guest list and your photos to get cleverer over time. You don't have to accept that. You can use the helpful parts while keeping your guests' details to your event and clearing them out afterwards. If a vendor can't tell you exactly where the data goes and when it's gone, that tells you most of what you need to know about whether to trust the rest.