AI holds great potential to shape the attendee experience. Photo Credit: Adobe Stock/aubriella
Event organisers remain apprehensive with AI that directly touches attendees, whether through better targeting, increased personalisation and improved assistance.
This is one of the findings from a recent report by global market research company Forrester, which examined why AI is not realising its potential within the events industry. For now, Forrester says, AI remains a promise – but event teams need to act quickly or risk getting left behind.
Survey data, drawn from Forrester's Q1 2025 State of B2B events survey, shows that while there is high interest in AI, uptake is low among the events industry, with only 7-15% of organisations making use of AI to improve the attendee experience through better targeting, increased personalisation and improved assistance.
Leaders do see massive opportunity, with more than 40% of respondents saying they would like to use AI in this way even though they have no immediate plans to do so.
While some leaders are cautiously optimistic, there are wide-ranging concerns around safety, privacy and vendor capabilities.
AI content on the rise
Using AI for event content creation is a growing trend among organisers. Of those surveyed, 39% report that they use AI for tasks such as building event landing pages and writing emails, while 21% currently leverage AI to repurpose content post-event. Within these simple use cases however, uptake varies significantly. Forty-seven percent of mid-sized organisations are currently using AI for content creation, as compared to 29% of the largest enterprises, while just 19% of organisations in the financial services sector make use of AI here, compared to 40% of high-tech and telecommunications companies.
The tech spend gap
Organisations with larger event technology budgets are more likely to have already embraced AI and are exploring more advanced use cases, or plan to do so in the next 12 months.
Among those spending over US$250,000 annually on event technology, 68% use (or plan to use) AI for data analysis as compared to 39% of low event-tech spenders.
They are also more likely to be using or planning to use AI that directly impacts attendees, while low event-tech spenders are more focused on using AI for simple content creation, with 55% prioritising AI for that purpose.
Buy-in barrier
Gen Z and Millennial marketers are showing greater enthusiasm for AI’s potential, particularly in areas such as attendee assistance via AI-powered chatbots, predictive intelligence for targeting and attendee experience personalisation.
Their interest has yet to translate into action, however, says Forrester, as older generations mostly control adoption plans over the next year.