Cvent Tech Roadmap: Candyland of AI Upgrades

Skepticism about AI capabilities remained palpable at the Cvent Connect conference last week. Overheard from meeting professionals were lamentations about AI mistakes, prompt inaccuracies or misunderstandings and the idea that “sometimes it’s faster just to do it myself.” One buyer walking past this reporter in the Music City Center corridor, spoke confidently to her peers when she said, “I don’t think our jobs are going anywhere.”

Yet the audience still erupted into applause when Cvent executives on stage Tuesday morning announced one of the platform’s most tactical AI use cases among the nearly three dozen innovations the company presented on stage that day. This particular AI integration was part of Cvent Assistant, which the meetings technology firm billed as the event organizer’s personal assistant ready to take on a number of rote tasks that consume event managers’ precious minutes in the days leading up to the event.

Here’s what it was: The Cvent Assistant can take an attendee email pasted directly into the Assistant environment and the tech will map every required modification across the platform—registration updates, session swaps, hotel changes, package adjustments—and then present the alterations for one-click approval. Then, the assistant (not the even organizer) will perform all the changes at once. Suddenly what is clearly a planner pain point can be lifted from their shoulders, and the spontaneous clapping for this capability—a singular audience reaction that morning—signaled their eagerness to engage. But organizers will have to wait a little while before Cvent rolls it out. The automated attendee management agent won’t be available until Q3 this year.  

Roadmap: AI Literacy Required

Cvent had plenty of other AI-oriented announcements, previewing from the mainstage a Candyland of 34 net-new AI capabilities just around each bend in the event tech lifecycle. Keying into the import of each one for the client wasn’t as straightforward as recognizing time-suck savings represented by the attendee management proposition. That said, whether Cvent "players" are able to draw the epically overpowered ice cream float card or they get stuck in Lord Licorice's swamp will depend both on Cvent's execution and the player's ability to shuffle some AI know-how into the deck. And they better hurry. Cvent is going full speed with AI re-platforming and most of the previewed capabilities are expected by year's end. Here's how they stack up.

Focus: Event Organizer

Cvent Assistant is the event organizer-oriented collection of AI capabilities. Cvent aims to provide organizers relief from rote tasks while simultaneously improving intuitive usability, even in an environment that has grown increasingly complex. Most of the capabilities will roll our in Q3 this year. Event creation, venue search and attendee management—the latter described previously—are moving to AI automation with natural language search and commands that will allow complete event drafts and venue recommendation lists to be built based on current needs and/or prior-year examples. Attendee management particulars will cascade automatically through the system.  

Facilitating all of this to a certain extent will be a new organization scheme within the Cvent environment. Instead of an event living within each Cvent tech vertical like event creation, venue search, budget or attendee management, Cvent will present the user’s events in a dashboard where all capabilities and information sit inside the envelope of the event itself.

“We never wanted to be in a world where you’ve got one real-world event, but in your software it’s represented 10 different times. But to some extent due to acquisitions we have plenty of situations like that,” Cvent SVP product management McNeel Keenan told BTN. “So we are paying that down and bringing those things together.”

In addition to making life simpler for the organizer, the new sorting scheme brings the information pieces together, making it easier for AI to look across the various pieces of event as well—from both a task perspective and an intelligence perspective.

Attendee registration, participation and experience information will live with each event, along with planning milestones, budget and other critical organizer benchmarks. Organizers will be able to query event data conversationally with AI able to surf across the event data and return insights to the user.

In Q4, Cvent expects to introduce what the company called “Knowledge Base,” which will be a central repository unique to each client that holds documentation of its unique institutional knowledge, policies, event hierarchies, brand standards, operating procedures and other information that will allow the Cvent Assistant to build events specifically to the needs of the organization.

All these changes are working toward a world in which an environment called CventIQ Skills, where AI agents will operate within the parameters of what the tech company called “task packages”  to take an event build or event content strategy from start to finish with minimal human intervention.  

Focus: Attendee Experience & Connections

A number of new AI-powered attendee experience enhancements are available now within the Cvent app or are in selective or open betas with Cvent clients awaiting feedback for full release. The most foundational piece is the global attendee profile capability that takes both declared and behavior-based preferences to accumulate a more comprehensive global profile for each attendee that extends across multiple events. From that profile, many other new capabilities—the personalized Agenda Builder, the Network Builder and upcoming Warm Introductions capabilities—will be continuously refined. Additionally, as profiles become more nuanced within Cvent, AI will refine exhibitor recommendations to the user and enable marketers to refine their lead capture and communications to their prospects and clients that can be delivered inside the Cvent app—no word yet on whether it will enable additional communication channels.

Focus: Non-Professional Planners & Field Marketers

Cvent Essentials—the tech for non-professional users introduced two years ago in beta and rolled out last year—will have an AI makeover this year. With the help of the Cvent Assistant and agentic CventIQ Skills, Cvent expects by the end of Q4 non-professional users will be able to create launch and manage simpler field events entirely through conversational interfaces, where a prompt will trigger event creation, brand template application, invite deployment and registration tracking.

On-the-ground field marketers and sales teams can power lead generation and client nurturing campaigns with AI-generated Jifflenow summaries of their prospect interactions, with decisions, insights and next steps that flow directly into Salesforce. iCapture will help enrich lead with ZoomInfo (existing client subscription required), firmographic data and sales summaries that convert scan into CRM-ready lead records.

Focus: Digital Events

Cvent acquired webinar and video content production platforms On24 and Goldcast earlier this year. It took the opportunity to introduce the capabilities each is bringing to the Cvent environment as part of the mainstage roadmap presentation. The team was particularly keen on the AI content production capabilities Goldcast brings to the table for a “lifecycle” approach to event content strategy. Goldcast can take the raw video produced for webinars on its platform and then spin up snippets and highlight reels for social interactions and other shorter form content plays that allow marketers to extend the power of their in-person and digital events into new online forums. For the On24 acquisition, Cvent underscored its enterprise stability, deep engagement and global accessibility, with AI-powered translation and captioning across 34 languages.

Omnichannel Budget Tracking

Cvent will enable by the end of 2026 a “lifecycle” approach to meetings budget that matches the year-round event lifecycle it has promoted as key to best practice event marketing and engagement. A budget tracking platform will be available aross all event types—field events, webinars and trade shows—creating a single financial record for what Cvent considers a comprehensive event program. It will include AI-powered invoice upload as well as expense capture after events.