I love following David Adler on Substak, and his latest Gathering Point prediction piece asks the question much of the event industry’s current technology conversation is revolving about: who will own the room in 2036? In his latest piece, he looks ahead to 2036 through the forces already pressing on the event industry: automation, convention-center design, venue consolidation, technology platforms, digital pre-production, group housing, carbon reporting, and the changing economics of gatherings.
It is a useful provocation because it asks a question our industry should be asking with much more urgency: who will hold the leverage around the gathering economy?
Read his original piece here: https://www.gatheringpoint.news/p/10-years-out-part-6-who-owns-the
I agree with the direction of several predictions in David Adler’s piece: capital is consolidating, event technology vendors want more of the organizer’s workflow under one contract, venues are becoming more sophisticated at yield management, attendees have less patience for environments that drain their attention before the program even begins, and sustainability reporting is moving from a values statement toward a commercial and procurement issue.
Yet, after more than 20 years in live event production and the last few years building AI workflows with event teams, I think ownership will come down to a more demanding question.
A company can own the building, the software, the equipment fleet, the booking channel, or the model powering an AI agent. It holds meaningful leverage. Yet ownership of an asset does not automatically grant ownership of the relationship, the data, the decision, or the outcome.
It also does not reveal who carried the work before the technology arrived, who will bear the cost after it does, or who still has the authority to intervene when something goes wrong.
Those distinctions will shape the next decade.
The future belongs to organizations that retain choice
The industry is moving toward a world where a planner may use fewer platforms, rely on more connected data, and delegate more defined work to AI. That sounds efficient. It can be. It can also produce a very expensive form of dependence.
If an organizer cannot export usable data, understand how a recommendation was generated, move a workflow to another provider, set limits on an agent’s authority, or challenge an automated decision, then convenience has become dependency.
The event-tech conversation has long focused on features. The next stage has to focus on rights.
- Who owns the attendee data after the event closes?
- Who can access it, enrich it, train on it, retain it, or sell against it?
- Who decides what an AI agent can send, approve, change, cancel, or purchase?
- Who carries responsibility when an automated action harms a relationship, exposes sensitive information, or makes a decision that should have remained with a human being?
Access does not create permission. Convenience does not erase ownership.
These are not future questions. They belong in vendor selection, contracts, procurement conversations, and internal governance now.
AI is the reveal
The visible story of AI is productivity.
Faster drafts. Better analysis. Fewer manual steps. More output.
The background story is what the technology exposes.
It exposes work that was never properly documented because one capable person kept the logic in their head. It exposes thin teams surviving through late nights, experience, and invisible correction. It exposes leaders who want scale without accepting the responsibility that comes with it. It exposes how often “personalization” means collecting more data than an attendee knowingly agreed to give.
AI does not create most of these conditions. It reveals the conditions people were already managing through exhaustion.
That matters in events because the work is full of invisible labor. It is the person who knows the speaker will need another five minutes before walking on stage. It is the registration lead who recognizes an escalating situation before it becomes public. It is the producer reading a room and shortening a session because the energy has shifted. It is the technician noticing a problem before the audience can name it. It is the event manager who understands that a small change in one room will affect three other teams.
AI can help surface missing information, compare documents, prepare options, reduce repetitive work, and make tacit knowledge visible. It can also make it easier for organizations to demand more volume from the same people without giving them more authority, more support, or more room to think.
Speed without clarity simply gives a weak decision a shorter runway.
Robotics will change tasks before it changes live-event judgment
Adler’s prediction that robots will reshape defined, repetitive, physical work is reasonable. Materials handling, deliveries through controlled corridors, basic cleaning, inventory movement, and repetitive preparation are natural candidates.
Live events have a much harder terrain.
Production environments carry safety responsibilities, timing changes, union rules, irregular spaces, changing sightlines, technical dependencies, weather, personalities, and the small moments that decide whether an audience feels cared for or managed.
A producer who shortens a session because the room’s energy has shifted is exercising judgment built through experience. A registration lead handling a missing VIP credential minutes before a keynote is protecting trust in real time.
Technology can give these people better information and take work off their plate. The authority to make the call remains human because the consequences are human.
The question is also economic. If a venue or exclusive provider owns the robotic equipment, automation could reduce labor in one area while creating a new access fee somewhere else. Buyers should be watching where cost is removed, where it is relocated, and who owns the new tollgate.
The sharper question is whether automation relieves people of low-value friction or simply permits organizations to demand more output from fewer people. AI does not resolve that question. Leadership does.
The disappearing apprenticeship
There is another consequence that deserves more attention: AI may remove portions of early-career work that once taught people how to develop judgment.
Nobody should preserve repetitive work just because it is familiar. Much of it is exhausting and poorly designed. It should be improved. Yet early career learning also happens through researching, checking, preparing, organizing, asking questions, noticing gaps, and seeing the consequence of a decision made higher up the chain.
That is how a coordinator becomes a producer. That is how an event marketer learns the commercial realities behind an attendee journey. That is how a junior technician learns to hear the problem before it becomes visible to the audience.
If AI takes away some of that work, organizations need to replace the learning path intentionally. Expertise does not reproduce itself through outputs alone. It requires practice, context, proximity, and responsibility.
A workplace full of senior people reviewing AI-generated work may look efficient for a while. It becomes fragile if nobody is learning how the work is done, why decisions were made, and how to intervene when the technology gets it wrong.
The intelligence layer will matter more than the number of platforms
I expect major event platforms to expand through acquisition and embedded AI. Many organizers will gladly trade an exhausting set of disconnected tools for a simpler experience and one accountable support relationship.
The market will still resist complete consolidation.
Events vary by sector, geography, risk tolerance, audience, language, accessibility needs, business model, and production complexity. A single platform will not serve every requirement equally well. The more likely outcome is a smaller set of major platforms surrounded by specialized tools and an intelligence layer that allows information to move across them.
The organizers who fare best will build for portability. They will know where their data sits. They will document their workflows. They will keep meaningful access to their own history and decisions. They will avoid giving one provider control over every participant relationship simply because the interface is pleasant.
The winner will not be the company that forces an event team to live inside one ecosystem. It will be the company that lets the team work across its chosen tools without losing context, ownership, or speed.
By 2036, portability will be a form of negotiating power.
Digital doubles should become useful before they become beautiful
Digital pre-production is already a practical advantage for tours, large-scale productions, sports, entertainment, and complex brand experiences. Event professionals should not wait for a perfectly rendered virtual world to use the underlying capability.
A useful digital double can test attendee movement, registration pressure points, room flow, sightlines, accessibility, signage, lighting conditions, queueing, content transitions, staffing needs, sponsor pathways, and the show flow itself. It can expose friction while changes are still inexpensive.
The mid-market opportunity is not a cinematic sizzle reel. It is a way to make better decisions before trucks arrive, rooms are built, and people are placed in positions that leave no margin for error.
Used well, digital pre-production allows teams to see what could fail before they ask people to absorb the failure on site.
The best venue will reduce cognitive load for everyone in it
Adler is right to call out cognitive load. Convention centers and hotels are often designed around square footage, circulation, and revenue per room. People experience them as a sequence of decisions: where to enter, where to go, where to find information, which floor, which hallway, which room, which line, which app, which next step.
Each unnecessary decision pulls attention away from the reason people came.
This needs to extend beyond the attendee journey. Event teams, exhibitors, speakers, contractors, and venue staff all operate under compressed timelines and information overload. A building can reduce friction through wayfinding, intuitive circulation, rest spaces, visibility, lighting, accessible routes, staff coordination, and better handoffs between physical and digital information.
The future venue will be judged partly by how much mental energy it gives back.
A building may be technologically sophisticated and still exhaust every person inside it. A venue that protects attention, removes needless decisions, and creates room for recovery will earn loyalty in ways a floor plan alone cannot.
Venue consolidation raises the value of buyer intelligence
As venue management and ownership consolidate, the familiar relationship-based model of negotiation will change. A local sales director may still be excellent, but decisions around availability, pricing, concessions, and account value will increasingly be informed by centralized revenue logic.
Planners and producers need their own intelligence in the room.
That means knowing market alternatives, identifying demand patterns, understanding contract terms, tracking total event cost beyond the venue line item, and seeing what was agreed across previous years. It means using AI to review and compare documents, surface omissions, prepare questions, and calculate scenarios, with a person retaining final authority.
The buyer’s leverage will come from preparation, credible alternatives, usable data, and a willingness to walk away when the terms do not serve the event.
It will also come from understanding that every technology decision is a power decision. A platform that knows more about an organization’s audience, pricing, behavior, and history than the organization itself has acquired leverage that will eventually show up in the terms.
Carbon accounting will become part of event design
The carbon conversation will mature when it reaches the budget, the sourcing process, and the boardroom. It cannot stop at attendee travel.
Freight, venue energy, food and beverage, fabrication, hotel stays, local transport, power, waste, labor, and digital production all carry a footprint. The reporting boundary will differ depending on the organization and the event, which is precisely why simplistic claims will not be enough.
Organizers who understand their footprint will be able to make better design choices. They can reduce waste, rethink freight, source differently, choose locations with intent, and show clients what changed as a result. Those who wait for a reporting requirement to force the work will be trying to build capability under pressure.
The same discipline applies to AI. If we intend to measure the cost of the event, we should also examine what the technology used to run it extracts from people: data, attention, learning opportunities, creative ownership, and the capacity to make thoughtful decisions.
My prediction for 2036
By 2036, the event industry will be shaped by organizations that preserve choice and protect what should remain human by design.
- They will own their data or have contractual rights to retrieve it in useful form.
- They will grant AI agents limited authority, inspect their work, and keep a named person accountable for outcomes.
- They will choose partners who make information portable rather than proprietary.
- They will treat attendee consent as a responsibility rather than a box to check.
- They will build new learning paths as automation changes entry-level work.
- They will measure an event by the quality of decisions, relationships, access, learning, and business outcomes it produces, not only by the efficiency of the machinery behind it.
The room will belong to the organizations that can move, audit, decide, and take responsibility.
That is a far more durable form of ownership than a building, an app, or a robot fleet.
It is also the deeper story behind the AI output: what people were asked to surrender, who benefited from that exchange, and whether anyone with authority had the courage to say no.
About The Author
Anca Platon Trifan is an AI strategist, keynote speaker, and CEO of Tree-Fan Events Productions, with over 20 years of experience in event technology and AV production.
Her work sits at the intersection of AI, systems thinking, and real-world execution. She helps organizations reduce cognitive overload, redesign how decisions are made under pressure, and implement AI in ways that actually support teams instead of overwhelming them.
Anca is also the host of Events: Demystified, a Top 5 podcast in the AV and event technology space, where she breaks down how technology, leadership, and execution come together behind the scenes of high-performing events.
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