In a world of AI, events become the trusted source

In an age of AI, Adam Parry thinks events become the trusted, authoritative place to go. What gets published at an event has come from thought leaders, it has been researched, it has been looked at. It is not something somebody generated in a chat window and pushed into the market. That distinction, he argues, is going to matter more, not less.

Which puts organisers in an unusual position: they own a body of credible, on-the-record material at exactly the moment credibility is getting harder to prove. Most of them publish it once and let it go quiet.

For a very long time, he says, driving audience to an event has meant database outreach. Subscription data, acquired data, media partners pushing registrations through their own communities. Everybody in the market will agree it has become harder: staying out of spam and the promotions tab, getting the engagement, getting the click-throughs. Plenty of technology has arrived to prop that up, and it helps. It does not change the underlying problem.

What is changing is the content produced at the event itself. Pure-play trade show organisers will openly admit they are not content machines. “They are not publishers, they are not content creators, they are content curators,” he says. And now content and marketing are coming together to use that material to market, re-engage and keep people connected all year round, rather than taking the content, sticking it on a website, and forgetting about it for twelve months.

The shift

The message stops being “here is the latest list of exhibitors, here is the latest list of speakers”. Organisers become the educators: the mechanism that gets credible, attributable content into the hands of an audience, which is what drives them back to the event.

Nobody talks about bounce rate

Adam's blunter observation is about where the industry's attention sits. Everybody is focused on getting people to the website: SEO, AEO, GEO, content, thought leadership, email database, WhatsApp, AI. That is a genuine challenge and a reasonable thing to focus on. Almost nobody is focused on what happens once they arrive.

“Very rarely do we even hear that conversation about bounce rates,” he says. “We hear about impressions and unique users and all that kind of stuff. But what about bounce rates?”

The failure mode he describes is a visitor landing and being overwhelmed: several places to go, competing information, multiple pages under one subheading, because a menu that listed everything would run the width of the screen. The job at that point is not more content. It is routing, and making someone feel familiar and welcome enough to complete the thing they came for, whether that is registering, applying to speak or asking about exhibiting.

His test for the trusted-source argument is therefore a practical one. Credible content earns the visit; the landing experience decides whether it converts. If the impressions are climbing and the bounce rate is not moving, the authority is being spent rather than compounded.

The role nobody has hired yet

If there is one opportunity in the wider events industry, in his view, it is somebody who sits between the education or content team and the marketing team. Someone who understands the marketing objectives and what needs to happen, but works closely with the content side to find the golden nuggets, the speakers before an event and the thought leaders who can talk about the topics that matter, and turn those into the content marketing can use to drive registrations.

The numbers support it. Thought leadership advertising, particularly when it is genuine thought leadership content with budget behind it, performs extremely well. Adam ran one recently with a click-through rate of around three and a half per cent, far above what you would normally expect.

What AI is actually doing to the industry

Two things at once, he says. On the technology side it is letting people model, iterate and test products quickly: a customer suggests something, you build an MVP, you find out fast whether the feature sticks. Integration is getting easier again, which used to be a genuine sticking point when you wanted your app to talk to your registration system.

The more interesting part is depth. AI is unlocking the knowledge and data around events and layering engagement and touch point data onto attendee records, so organisers finally understand what somebody wanted from an event and what they actually did there. That informs launches, acquisition decisions, and where revenue is being lost.

And then there is the human counterweight. Adam is bombarded with AI sales messages like everybody else. Meanwhile the wider world, including people whose entire careers are built in digital marketing, is talking about the value of in-person again. The net effect of AI on this industry, he suspects, may well be to drive more demand for meeting face to face.

The first touch point problem

Adam is well known in the events industry and freely says so. But he asks organisers to think about somebody brand new to a sector who has never come across their event. Who are these people? Do they really understand the industry? Are they part of it, or are they just selling square metres of floor space to put random people in a room together?

Humanising that first touch point is something he has wanted to do for years. It is what fosters a community rather than a customer list.

Do this next

• Inventory the content your last show produced: sessions, panels, keynotes, interviews. Count what is still live.
• Decide who owns the bridge between content and marketing, even if it is a slice of an existing role.
• Pick three sessions and clip them into short pieces with a publishing date across the quiet months.
• Put budget behind genuine thought leadership content rather than another list-of-exhibitors post.