What AI can and can't do for your event

Every few months a new batch of AI promises lands in front of event organisers, and they all read beautifully in a sales deck. Some of it does real work. A good chunk is something you already owned with a fresh coat of paint. And a bit of it is wishful thinking in a nice font. Sorting one from the other saves you money, and it saves you an awkward moment in front of a client.

Here's an honest sort, from people who run these things instead of selling them.

Start with where it earns its keep: the dull, repetitive jobs. Sorting a few thousand registrations and flagging the ones that look off. Moving check-in along so the queue doesn't spill out the door. Dropping a guest's photo into something fun they'll actually want to share. Drafting a first pass of your follow-up notes so you're editing instead of staring at a blank page. These are real wins because the task is well defined and a small slip costs you nothing. If a recommendation is slightly off, nobody's day is ruined.

Where it gets oversold is anything claiming to read a room or stand in for judgement. It'll tell you attendance dipped after lunch. It won't tell you the talk before lunch ran long and people slipped out for air, which is the part you actually needed. It can bucket your feedback into rough themes. Deciding what to do about a sharp comment from your biggest sponsor is still your call, thank goodness. When something gets pitched to you as "insight," keep one eyebrow up until you've watched it work on your kind of event and not a polished demo.

Then there's the category you never let run on its own. Anything a guest sees with their name on it. Anything headed for a senior person at a client. Anything near money or compliance. Let the tools do the heavy lifting, then put a human in front of it before it goes out. That read costs you a couple of minutes. Skipping it costs you the one mistake everyone remembers.

One last thing, said plainly, because the organisers we work with in government and finance ask about it every single time. Plenty of these tools want to keep your guest list and your photos so they can get cleverer over time. You don't have to hand that over. You can use the useful parts and still keep your guests' details inside your event, then clear them out when it's done. 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 trusting the rest.