Freeman研究：五分之一参会者已用AI发现会议，组织者需自查AI对活动的认知

Skift Take

New research from Freeman shows that one in five attendees now uses AI to find conferences. Will it be able to find the right information about yours?

When Ken Holsinger, senior vice president of strategy at Freeman, recently worked with an event organizer, he asked an AI platform what it knew about the organization. One of its major events had moved to another city, and the old event website had been shut down.

The AI concluded that the event had been canceled. It hadn’t.

The example illustrates a new challenge for organizers. Event information has traditionally been tightly controlled, often distributed through registration platforms, temporary websites that change from year to year and gated attendee portals. AI systems, however, are trying to make sense of information distributed across the wider internet.

Attendees are beginning to rely on what those systems are finding. Twenty percent have already used AI to discover events, according to new research from Freeman. Among those who have, 53% said AI changed which events they considered.

That means an organizer’s next prospective attendee may not begin on the event website. Instead, they may start by asking ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini which conferences to attend.

“You may be using AI to do external things, but you need to turn it on yourself,” Holsinger said.

His advice: Ask the major AI platforms what they know about your event.

Is the date correct? The location? The speakers? Do they understand who attends and why someone should go?

Organizers may also need to rethink how they structure event websites. An event that creates a new URL each year, removes old pages, or buries basic information beneath marketing language can be harder for both humans and machines to understand.

Holsinger said event content needs to become more searchable, more structured, and easier to interpret.

Using AI to Design the Experience

AI’s role could soon extend well beyond event discovery.

Two-thirds of attendees surveyed said they would like AI involved in preparing for an event, including identifying exhibitors, building personalized schedules and finding people to meet.

Holsinger is already experimenting with what that future might look like. He has created what amounts to a digital twin of himself in Claude, feeding it 10 years of his research, everything he has written, videos of speaking appearances, and information about his interests, travel preferences, food and family.

The goal, he said, isn’t to create an artificial persona. It is to give the AI enough context to understand him so that AI may eventually help determine who he should meet, what he should see, and how he should prioritize his limited time.

That points toward a potentially profound change for event organizers. Attendees could increasingly arrive with agendas created not by an organizer’s event app but by an AI that understands their interests, business objectives, and relationships.

Asked whether the industry is headed toward a world in which attendees arrive with AI-built agendas, Holsinger said the question for organizers is whether they will influence what those systems recommend.

“It’s basically up to you to decide: Are you going to have the influence on that?”

Attendees aren't the only ones using AI. Learn how your peers are using it to compare host destinations for their programs and what the shift means for the industry.