Man, was I gonna get disappointed!

So I felt like it was my prerogative to dig into this "current' from 2023 outdated AI in Events reality, dissect it to pieces and proof how one piece of content such as this one can 100% weaken your credibility and damage your brand. For all I know, this report was generated by an intern with some mad Canvaskills and ZERO understanding of AI in Events. I bet their report was downloaded 100x more than my fully applicable to today's AI reality content.

But I'm not butthurt by it, I am excited about the opportunity to dig into it and take it apart!

Freeman’s Artificial Intelligence: The Basics presents AI through an introductory lens that may have been useful during the industry’s early wave of AI curiosity, but it no longer reflects the current state of AI use, expectations, or maturity across the event ecosystem.

The report frames AI as a basic educational topic, focused on definitions, familiar consumer examples, and entry-level productivity use cases such as grammar checks, translation, and general planning support.

That framing is now materially behind where the event industry is operating.

Across the many conferences, workshops, and industry sessions I lead as an AI strategist, speaker, and AV production expert, the audience is no longer asking “what is AI?”

The more relevant questions in 2026 are about workflow integration, system design, governance, cross-platform execution, AI agents, live operational support, data visibility, and business impact. This is especially true among planners, agencies, suppliers, venues, event tech teams, and production professionals who are already experimenting with or actively using AI in fragmented ways.

The brand issue is not simply that Freeman’s report is basic. The problem is that Freeman is not a beginner brand. As one of the most visible and established AV production leaders in the industry, publishing AI guidance that reads as if the market is still in 2023 weakens authority, signals distance from current practice, and creates a credibility gap between brand positioning and market reality. For a company operating at Freeman’s level, the standard should not be introductory relevance. It should be industry-leading relevance.

Purpose of This Assessment

This report evaluates Freeman’s Artificial Intelligence: The Basics against the current state of AI adoption and understanding within the event industry, based on repeated audience interaction, polling, workshop participation, and strategic conversations gathered through my speaking and consulting work across industry events.

It also considers broader industry usage patterns reflected in recent event-AI training materials and workshops, where adoption has moved well beyond AI awareness and into practical use, albeit often in inconsistent and poorly structured ways.

The goal is not to dismiss the intent behind the piece.

The goal is to identify where it falls short, why that matters, and why a brand like Freeman Company should be producing a very different level of AI thought leadership right now.

What Freeman’s Report Gets Wrong About Today's Reality

The first issue is the report’s framing.

Freeman introduces AI as something newly front and center because of tools like ChatGPT and focuses on helping readers “understand AI” without complications. That is not where the market is. In live rooms today, event professionals are not sitting in confusion about whether AI exists. They are already using it in content creation, summaries, note-taking, analytics, research, proposal generation, workflow experimentation, speaker preparation, post-event analysis, and increasingly, automation.

The problem is not awareness.

The problem is maturity, structure, and strategic implementation.

Second, the report remains stuck at the level of definitions.

It explains traditional AI versus generative AI and uses examples like predictive text, Alexa, and ChatGPT. That kind of framing may have worked when the industry needed a soft entry point. It does not work now. It is too elementary for a professional audience that is already trying to determine how AI fits inside event operations, event technology stacks, sourcing workflows, audience engagement, sponsorship strategy, and production environments.

Third, the report positions AI mainly as an assistant for better planning and everyday task support.

It says AI can help with grammar, translation, market research, and implementing event tech. That is an underpowered view of what matters today. In current event practice, the real conversation is about AI as an operational layer. It is about using AI to reduce friction, support decisions, connect systems, synthesize post-event insights, improve visibility across stakeholders, and automate high-volume, low-value manual tasks. When a flagship industry brand reduces AI to “helpful assistant” territory, it signals that the brand is not keeping pace with how the work is actually evolving.

Where the Event Industry Actually Is in 2026

From the rooms I am in, the event industry is in a messy middle.

It is no longer at the awareness stage, but it is far from mature.

That distinction matters.

Professionals across the sector are already using AI, but most are doing so in fragmented, reactive, tool-by-tool ways. Recent event-industry training material built around current adoption patterns reflects that shift clearly. Planners using AI regularly nearly doubled in a matter of months, non-users fell sharply, and that positive sentiment toward AI continued to rise, while most event professionals still lacked structure and training. AI is already embedded in production workflows, sponsorship targeting, attendee personalization, accessibility, and sustainability, yet usage remains inconsistent and poorly integrated across teams.

That matches what I see firsthand.

In my sessions, the average room does not need a tutorial on what ChatGPT is.

They need help understanding which tasks should remain human, which should be augmented, which can be automated, and how to build workflows that do not create more noise than value. The conversation has shifted from novelty to judgment. From curiosity to execution. From asking “what is AI?” to asking “where does AI belong in my workflow, my team, my tech stack, and my decision-making process?”

That is the actual state of the market.

The Core Gap in Freeman’s Report

The most important gap is that Freeman’s report explains AI as a concept, while the market now needs AI explained as an operating reality.

The event industry’s biggest pain points are not conceptual. They are operational.

Teams are dealing with disconnected systems, unclear ownership, repetitive admin work, compressed planning timelines, fragmented data, inconsistent handoffs, rising client expectations, and increasing pressure to do more without adding headcount.

Current AI adoption is happening inside that context. Any serious report for this market should therefore address real-world use cases such as workflow automation, operational visibility, attendee data interpretation, sponsor intelligence, content repurposing, proposal support, reporting acceleration, contract and RFP review, internal knowledge retrieval, and multi-step AI orchestration across platforms.

Freeman’s report does not go anywhere close to there.

It also does not account for where sophisticated event teams are heading next, which is toward agentic behavior, persistent systems, and AI-enabled operating models.

My most popular AI workshop material is currently aimed at event professionals now includes discussion of AI agents, workflow automation, and cross-app processes because the market is already moving there.

Freeman’s report remains rooted in the era of AI as a static tool.

That is the heart of the gap.

Why This Reflects Poorly on the Freeman Brand

For a smaller or less established company, an introductory AI explainer might read as harmless.

For Freeman, it reads as behind.

Freeman is not a peripheral player.

Freeman is one of the names people associate with scale, production leadership, industry visibility, and enterprise credibility. That comes with higher expectations. When a brand at that level publishes a report that feels like it is explaining the internet to people already building websites, the market notices.

Maybe not everyone has the guts to say it out loud, but they notice.

The damage is subtle but real.

• It suggests the brand is reacting late.
• It suggests the brand is publishing from a distance rather than from inside current practice.
• It suggests the company may understand event execution better than it understands where event intelligence, automation, and AI-enabled operations are heading.

That is not the impression a leading AV and production provider should leave in market, especially at a time when clients are actively evaluating which partners can help them navigate technology with clarity. Put plainly, this is not just outdated content. It is an authority problem. And for a brand like Freeman, authority is part of the product.

What a Current, Credible AI Report for the Event Industry Should Cover

A current report should start where the market actually is, not where it was.

That means acknowledging that most event professionals have already used AI in some capacity and that the central challenge is now integration, governance, workflow design, and business relevance. It should separate AI as a tool from AI as augmentation, automation, and operational infrastructure. It should speak directly to planners, suppliers, AV and production teams, agencies, venues, DMCs, CVBs, marketers, and event tech stakeholders, each with use cases tied to real pressure points.

A credible 2026 report should also go beyond content generation and basic productivity.

It should address AI in sourcing, project management, attendee intelligence, sponsor value, session planning, post-event reporting, risk reduction, system interoperability, and the growing importance of human judgment in increasingly AI-assisted environments.

It should also include a realistic view of current adoption, which is neither AI illiteracy nor AI maturity, but a fragmented middle where experimentation is happening faster than organizational alignment.

That is the report the market needs now.

And it is not the report Freeman put out.

Strategic Opportunity

The upside here is that this gap can be corrected. In fact, it creates an opening. Freeman Company an has the brand recognition, market access, and industry stature to publish something meaningfully stronger, sharper, and more aligned with where event professionals are now. That updated work would carry far more weight if it came not just from a general content lens, but in collaboration with someone operating directly at the intersection of AI strategy, AV production, event technology, and live event execution. And that is the lens I bring.

My perspective is grounded not only in research and teaching, but in the rooms themselves, in the questions people are actually asking, in the polls they are responding to, in the operational realities they are dealing with, and in the difference between AI content that sounds current and AI guidance that is current.

Conclusion

Freeman’s Artificial Intelligence: The Basicsis polished in presentation, but it is materially years behind the event industry’s current reality. It reflects an earlier stage of AI understanding centered on definitions, awareness, and entry-level utility.

The market has already moved past that.

Event professionals today need guidance on integration, workflows, automation, decision support, system design, governance, and real business application.

For a company of Freeman’s stature, publishing outdated AI thought leadership does more than miss the mark. It weakens brand authority at a moment when the industry is actively looking for leadership that is sharper, more practical, and more honest about where AI in events actually stands.

Freeman has an opportunity to fix that.

But it needs a more current voice, a more operational lens, and a more grounded understanding of where the event industry really is now.

If you want to see what that actually looks like in practice, join us on May 12th for a live session where we’re not talking about AI tools, we’re building real workflows, step by step, the kind that sit inside your day-to-day operations, from daily event ops briefings to show workflows to buyer acquisition pipelines. Because that is the line the industry is crossing right now, and most teams are still operating on the wrong side of it.

Freeman’s report reflects that exact gap, it explains AI at the surface level, while the reality on the ground is far messier, teams are already using AI across fragmented workflows, without structure, without systems, and without a clear understanding of where it creates real leverage versus more noise.

This is not about calling out a single report, it’s about calling out a pattern, the industry is moving forward, but the thinking around it is lagging behind, and that disconnect is where inefficiency, confusion, and missed opportunity live.

If we want better outcomes, we need to move the conversation forward, from tools to systems, from outputs to decisions, from awareness to execution.

👋 Hi, I’m Anca. I help teams harness AI for smarter workflows, stronger content, and better decisions, without the overwhelm or cognitive overload, via one-on-one consultations, bespoke AI workshops, both virtual and in-person, as well as global keynotes + workshops.

I offer tiered consultation packages so your team stays ahead. I show up weekly and break down the latest AI news, tools and systems released that month so you don’t have to chase trends. tailor AI system recommendations based on your actual workflow, so everything I show you is relevant, not random. I train you on the tools, agents and systems you actually want to use, saving you dozens of hours you’d lose watching high-level webinars with no tactical substance. 📩 Let's connect to see which tier is the right one for you.