Part 4: The New Intelligence Layer-5 New Event Industry Predictions for 2036
AI Agents, The Neutral Scoreboard, Data as Asset, The "EventFluencers" and New Event Entrepreneurs
A note before the predictions. This is my take — a point of view, not a forecast I’m betting the house on. Some of it will be wrong; I’ve misjudged this industry’s timing in every decade I’ve worked in it, and I’ll misjudge some of this too. The point isn’t to be right. It’s to pull the camera back far enough to see the whole board, and to think it through together. So read what follows as an invitation, not a verdict — and tell me where I’m off. That’s the whole idea.
The intelligence layer is not the events industry’s friend. It is the mechanism by which the events industry’s self-reported claims about its own value will, for the first time, face external scrutiny from systems that cannot be charmed, lobbied, or taken to dinner. The organizer who has been surviving on the absence of rigorous evaluation is about to meet the evaluation she was never designed to pass.
AI Agents Become the Most Important Audience the Organizer Has Never Designed For.
The agent operating on behalf of a company’s professional development budget does not read speaker bios and feel inspired. It reads last year’s attendee list and cross-references it against the company’s target accounts. It calculates the fully loaded cost of sending two people, including flights, hotel, registration, and three days of lost productivity at the fully-burdened salary rate, and compares that number against alternative uses of the same budget. It checks whether the key relationships the sales team needs to build are confirmed attendees before committing the registration fee. It does all of this in seconds, without the cognitive bias that makes a human book a conference because she went last year and it was fine, or because the hotel is nice, or because the city is one she has been meaning to visit.
Vendelux already uses AI to score events against company-specific criteria and identify which target accounts will be present, and it is used by enterprise sales and marketing teams to evaluate conference attendance decisions. The organizer whose value proposition does not survive that evaluation is already in trouble. She just does not know it yet because the evaluation is still being done by humans who are susceptible to the persuasion mechanisms she has always relied on.
The Neutral Scoreboard Arrives.
The events industry is the last major experience category operating without an independent measurement standard. Nielsen measures television audiences with methodology that neither the network nor the advertiser controls. Comscore measures box office with numbers that the studio cannot adjust after a disappointing opening weekend. The conference has the organizer’s self-reported attendance figure, which is unaudited and defined however the organizer finds convenient, and a post-event satisfaction survey that the organizer designed, administered, and reports at whatever level of aggregation she finds flattering.
The neutral scoreboard arrives because the AI agent makes it inevitable: the agent needs third-party-verified outcome data to make attendance recommendations, and it will route corporate spending toward the events that can provide it and away from events that cannot. Explori provides post-event research and benchmarking across a network of events, which is the closest existing example of cross-event measurement infrastructure, though it is not neutral in the full sense because it is funded by organizers rather than buyers. The organization that builds the genuinely neutral version will not come from inside the industry, whose revenue depends on organizers, but from the corporate buyer side, whose interest is accurate information.
Event Data Becomes Intellectual Property.
The behavioral data generated by a 10,000-person trade show is an extraordinarily rich asset: who talked to whom on the floor, which booths sustained dwell time versus which generated a scan and an immediate exit, which sessions emptied at the seven-minute mark, which content formats correlated with return attendance the following year. Most organizers currently generate this data and do nothing with it beyond the post-show attendee survey. The platform that aggregates event behavioral data across multiple organizers will have something worth considerably more than the events that generated it, which means the organizer who understands this now and begins treating her data as a strategic asset has a compounding advantage over the organizer who sells her data to the aggregating platform and loses the compounding advantage forever.
Real-Time Translation Becomes Invisible Infrastructure.
AI-powered simultaneous translation, delivered through the attendee’s phone without hardware, operating with sub-second latency in 40 languages, eliminates language as a meaningful barrier to international attendance for any conference that publishes its content digitally. The technology trajectory is clear: Google’s real-time translation operates at conversational speed in over 100 languages, and Kudo, designed specifically for conference interpretation, has deployed AI-assisted interpretation across major international events. The United Nations has deployed AI-assisted interpretation tools across multiple official meetings, with human interpreters reviewing AI output rather than working from scratch, which is the hybrid model that professional conferences will adopt before moving to full AI translation. The event becomes genuinely global at the same moment its physical footprint becomes more locally concentrated.
Community Platforms Become Event Organizers.
The Slack communities, Discord servers, and private networks built around professional identities that have accumulated real audiences over the past decade are reaching a structural inflection point. They have the attendees, the content relationships, and the year-round engagement data that tells them exactly what their members want to talk about. Lenny Rachitsky, whose Substack on product management has over one million subscribers, has organized sold-out in-person events that compete directly with traditional product management conferences. The organizer who built the audience through the event format is now the challenger. The structural advantage belongs to the platform that built the audience and is adding the event, because the platform does not need to spend 30 to 40 percent of event revenue on marketing to find the people who already trust it. Another term that is used will be “Eventfluencers”, the influencers who really become more sophisticated and will see the obvious event connectivity among communities of interest.
Somewhere on a shelf is futurist Marvin Cetron’s book predicting 2010 for the industry. Another futurist and I did a general session for an industry meeting using his book and trends more recently at the time predicted sometime after that. I appreciate, David, your take and the data provided.
Yesterday, I heard two industry attorneys’ takes on AI and RFPs, proposals, and contracts. Thus I chuckled at your note of influence won’t be a dinner out. (Paraphrased.)
Some of the topics noted about content have been discussed for years through ASAE (American Society of Association Executives) in their social media sites. From past experience, their August Annual Meeting will have more AI topics than any others.
Measurements have been needed even before either of us were in the industry. From this I am unsure tho I think affirmative: AI will design the questions that will far exceed “on a 1-5 scale, did the session (lunch, key- or cap-note, trade show etc) meet your expectations?” in scope and method of measurement.
To you: then what? The attorneys mentioned the need for “the human in the room” who is informed enough to read and question the output of an AI generated contract. I ask that of the output of analyzing and instituting all the meeting and trade show touch points noted.
“Then” is now from what you wrote and cited.
And tho I follow Jim (James) Spellos and others on AI, isn’t output biased and dependent on input gathered?
Last thoughts:
-Language translation is a great inclusion feature. Still AI has not fully addressed the needs of disabled people especially those who are DHH, blind or with low vision, and the growing (or better recognized) neurodiverse participants. Google has tools that are to do that; the very diverse world-wide disability community of users provide frustrations and request help frequently for the tools’ shortcomings. “We’re working on it” is the usual answer.
-Water and power are increasing needs for data centers and are decreasing in availability. The Colorado River was a headline today about its
reallocation and who will gain and who lose. Communities are fighting data centers [and detention centers for those the US govt are grabbing for deportation] - NIMBY - and who will prevail.
For me and I think you and I hope others who comment, especially those who “like” when something so meaty is presented, engagement - which returns to one of your first posts - would benefit us all.