When it comes to AI taking our jobs… we’re in events… so we’re safe. Right?
I keep saying that and I hear it from others in this space. And I’ve been sitting with a question I can’t shake: is that actually true, or is it the calculation every generation of professionals makes before the floor shifts under them?
The fear I keep returning to is that maybe the conviction that person-to-person can’t be replaced — that what we do in this industry is fundamentally irreplaceable — is itself a previous generation’s idea of what the future should look like, not based on any evidence of what it will be. Every generation remodels the world in their own image. And every time that happens, the people whose livelihoods depended on the old model find reasons to believe the new one still needs them. Eight-track was better. Physical media would never die. The old dinosaurs say the same thing on the way out.
We make our living doing this. Wanting it to be true is not the same as it being true.
Which parts of live events can AI actually replace?
The mass-broadcast experience — keynote stage, jumbotron, passive audience in rows — is the format most exposed to substitution. YouTube is coming for it. A recorded stream is a legitimate alternative. If the purpose of your general session is to move information from stage to seat, that transaction doesn’t require everyone in the same building.
The Theatrical Earns Its Place Every Time
Collective emotional response does.
When a room full of people emotes together — laughs at the same moment, goes quiet at the same moment, feels the weight of something at exactly the same time — the message lands differently than it does through a screen. There is a greater power in group emotional response. It’s why people love sports. It’s why they pack arenas for concerts they could watch at home in better resolution. People don’t laugh at movies when they watch them alone. Put one other person in the room and you laugh out loud. The collective response amplifies the signal, deepens the connection to what’s being communicated — and that is something you cannot stream.
“We were there when it happened.” The theatrical format earns its place by being irreducibly shared.
But only when the design is actually reaching for that.
The App Doesn’t Care If You’re Following Along
Digital learning has solved access. Tutorials, masterclasses, certification programs — available anywhere, anytime, self-paced. The argument that in-person events are uniquely valuable for skill-building because they’re the only place to find good instruction has been dead for years.
What digital hasn’t touched is accountability.
There’s a specific pull that forms when a human being is standing in a room, present specifically to help you understand something. The platform doesn’t know if you’ve disengaged. The pre-recorded session plays the same either way. But when someone has given their time and presence to be in the room with you, the stakes are different. You feel the obligation to meet that effort — to try, to follow along, because a person is there and they can tell whether you are.
Access is what the platforms sell. Accountability is what the live educational event delivers.
Those aren’t the same product.
Digital Gets You to the Table. It Can’t Be the Table.
The most interesting trend I’m watching right now is about contraction as opposed to scale.
Private dinners. Tables of eight, assembled deliberately — a specific mix of buyers and sellers, people with complementary needs and interests, curated so carefully that the walls come down before anyone has said a word. I spoke recently with someone who had shifted his entire event model away from large-format conferences toward exactly this kind of gathering. He wasn’t lamenting it. He was reporting that intimate, match-made, in-person events were moving buyers and sellers down the pipeline faster than anything else he’d tried.
Digital has gotten very good at the matching layer — figuring out who should sit with whom, surfacing shared context before anyone’s in the same room. That infrastructure is real. But it’s facilitating the experience. It cannot be the experience. Getting eight carefully matched people around a table — digital doesn’t have an answer to what happens next.
The curated gathering works because design removed the friction before anyone walked in. That’s a deliberate outcome you knew would happen before it did. And right now it’s the most defensible format in this industry.
Cocktail Hour Isn’t Safe. And That’s OK.
I produce events for a living. I really appreciate a drink at most of them. That’s true.
However.
The cocktail hour is a structurally bad product for a large portion of the people in the room. It’s alcohol-dependent in an era when a significant and growing percentage of attendees don’t drink — which means an alcohol-based event is already excluding people before a glass is poured. It completely favors extroverts and people who thrive in unstructured social environments. The socially confident get more confident. Everyone else finds the edges of the room, checks their phone, and leaves without the conversation they came for. The rich get richer. The rest of the room gets nothing.
The obligation, as an organizer, is to counter-program it — to actively design for the people that format structurally ignores, so you’re not leaving half your room’s potential on the table.
The bad version of any experience is the first thing that better tools make irrelevant. Undesigned serendipity already has better alternatives — smarter matching, curated formats, events that treated connection as a design problem instead of a social inevitability. What survives isn’t the format that’s been on the program the longest. It’s the experience intentional enough that everyone in the room could actually get something out of it.
We’re in events. We’re safe. But only where we’ve earned it — and only for as long as we keep earning it.