AI is in every event platform's marketing. Some of it saves real hours; some of it is a chatbot that answers questions about the product rather than about your event. The difference is whether it can see your data.
What it is genuinely good at today
- Drafting. Session descriptions from an abstract, a speaker bio from a CV, the eighth version of a reminder email. You edit rather than write, which is roughly a third of the time.
- Summarising. Two hundred free-text feedback responses into five themes, in seconds. This is the clearest win in the whole list.
- First-line answers. "Where is my ticket", "what time does registration open", "is lunch included" — with a handover to a human for anything else.
- Scheduling suggestions. Given sessions, rooms, tracks and speaker constraints, proposing an arrangement without clashes is a solved problem. You still make the judgement calls; see building an agenda.
- Asking questions of your own data. "Which sessions did premium ticket holders attend most?" answered in a sentence rather than an export and a pivot table.
Where it produces confident nonsense
- Anything requiring judgement about people. Ranking submissions, choosing keynotes, deciding who gets a bursary. Use it to organise, never to decide.
- Numbers, unless it is reading them from your database. A model asked to estimate attendance will produce a plausible figure with no basis.
- Facts about your event it was not given. If the assistant cannot see your agenda, it will invent a plausible one.
- Matchmaking that nobody asked for. Suggested connections work when people opted in and are told why they were matched — see networking that works.
The question that separates useful from decorative
Is it reading my event's data, or is it a general model with my logo on it? An assistant that can answer "how many of my speakers have not sent their slides?" is doing work. One that answers "what are best practices for speaker management?" is a search engine in a box.
Ask the data questions before you switch it on
- Is attendee data used to train anyone's model? The answer should be no.
- Where is it processed, and is that compatible with your obligations? See event data and GDPR.
- Can you turn it off per event?
- What does an attendee-facing assistant do when it does not know — guess, or hand over?
Keep a human in front of attendees
An assistant that answers logistics questions at 11pm is a real improvement. One that handles a complaint, a refund or an accessibility request is a problem waiting for a bad review. Draw that line explicitly.
Gathervo's assistant answers from your event's own data — your agenda, your attendees, your tickets — and hands over rather than guessing. Try it free.