At any industry conference, everyone is talking about artificial intelligence, and the data confirms it’s no passing trend. 50% of event professionals now integrate AI into the planning and delivery of their events, according to the latest Meetings & Events Forecast from American Express Global Business Travel, based on a survey of 601 professionals. In the exhibition sector the figure is even higher: 87% of companies use AI in some form, according to the barometer from UFI, the global association of the exhibition industry.
Across the wider Spanish economy, progress is slower but rapid. 21.1% of companies with 10 or more employees used AI in the first quarter of 2025, up 8.7 percentage points on a year earlier, according to Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE).
Virtual assistants, personalised agendas, live translation, data analysis… The list of promises is long, and it’s not always clear what’s useful today and what is still more demo than reality. At Fairplay we organise events and manage communication every day, and we’ve been bringing in AI wherever it saves time or improves the result for the client. Here’s our practical view of where it genuinely adds value and where people remain essential.
1. Where AI already helps: attendee management
The most mature area is everything around the attendee before and during the event. It’s no coincidence that this is the use professionals expect most: 35% plan to use AI for attendee communications and for matchmaking between attendees and sponsors, according to the Amex GBT study.
Registration platforms and event apps can already answer frequently asked questions automatically (timings, access, parking, wifi), send reminders at the right moment and recommend to each attendee the sessions or contacts most relevant to their profile.
For the organiser, that means fewer repetitive emails and more time for what matters. For the attendee, a smoother experience. But it only works well when there’s well-prepared information behind it: if the event details are confusing or incomplete, the virtual assistant will be too. And there’s a legal change worth knowing about. Since 2 August 2026, the EU Artificial Intelligence Act has required users to be told when they’re interacting with an AI. An event chatbot has to make clear it isn’t a person.
2. Languages: the big leap
One of the most impactful applications is live translation and subtitling. It’s now possible to offer subtitles in several languages on screen or on each attendee’s phone, at a quality that was unthinkable a few years ago and at a far lower cost than a full interpreting booth.
It doesn’t replace professional interpreters where every nuance matters, such as a negotiation, an international press conference or an institutional ceremony. But it allows smaller events to become accessible to audiences from several countries. And it greatly improves accessibility. According to the World Health Organization, more than 1.5 billion people worldwide live with some degree of hearing loss, and 430 million need some form of support. The WHO estimates the figure will exceed 2.5 billion by 2050. Live subtitles stop being a nice extra and become a way of making sure nobody is left out.
3. Content: faster, but with judgement
AI is very useful for speeding up content work. It can transcribe talks, summarise sessions, draft event reports, adapt texts to different formats or speed up the editing of event videos. 31% of event professionals plan to use it for content creation, according to Amex GBT. Thanks to AI, a day’s recap can be published the same day, when it used to take a week.
But the key word is “draft”. What a company publishes still needs someone to decide what’s relevant, check the facts and set the right tone. An automatically generated summary published without review may contain errors, or simply sound like everyone else’s. EU rules also require AI-generated content that informs the public on matters of general interest to be labelled as such, unless it has gone through genuine human review or editorial control. So review is no longer just a matter of quality.
4. Data: understanding what worked
Another valuable contribution is analysis: which sessions drew the most people, how long attendees spend in each area, which questions keep coming up and what people say in surveys. 31% of professionals already plan to use AI to track audience engagement. It makes it much faster to cross-reference and summarise this information and turn it into decisions for the next edition.
Caution is needed on privacy here. Any collection of attendee data must be transparent, comply with the General Data Protection Regulation and be justified by a real improvement to the event.
5. What AI doesn’t do: the experience
What people remember about an event is still human: an interesting conversation, a venue that surprises, a talk that moves them, a detail that shows someone thought about them. The data backs this up. According to Freeman’s 2025 trends report, 58% of attendees say networking is what motivates them to attend in-person events, up from 39% in 2021. And 51% say good networking is reason enough to come back.
AI can help organise, but it doesn’t decide what story a brand wants to tell, it doesn’t choose the space that represents it, and it doesn’t handle a last-minute problem with good judgement. At a time when so much communication is digital, in-person events are valuable precisely because of that: direct contact between people. Technology makes sense when it strengthens that experience, not when it replaces it.
Technology where it helps, people where it matters
At Fairplay we bring in the AI tools that improve your events, such as registration management, subtitling, content and analysis. And we keep what can’t be automated: a team with more than 35 years of experience that designs the experience, coordinates every detail and is there on the day.
If you’re planning an event and want to know which technology makes sense for it, let’s talk.