Meetings Tech Revolution?

"Events are the one channel AI can't replicate," said Cvent CEO and co-founder Reggie Aggarwal at the company's annual customer conference in Nashville this month, where it unveiled a brand refresh and announced a $1 billion investment in AI, product innovation and technology over the next three years.

At first glance, the two messages seem at odds: a new brand identity centered on the irreplaceable value of human connection—what Cvent calls the "Presence Premium"—alongside a $1 billion commitment to advancing its AI capabilities. Yet that apparent tension is increasingly shaping the future of strategic meetings management, as organizations look to automate planning and gain deeper insight from data without sacrificing the human expertise and personal interactions that make meetings (and meetings-related travel) valuable. 

"Meetings bring us back to some fundamentals with authentic moments between people," Aggarwal told BTN at Cvent Connect. "Those moments accelerate relationships and relationships accelerate business—whether that's sales or partnerships—it just comes down to relationships accelerating what you're trying to accomplish between two parties quicker."

Cvent’s latest investment promises to push meetings technology further into the AI era, with a wide-ranging upgrade roadmap that spans Cvent Assistant, its suite of AI capabilities for event organizers; AI-powered attendee experience tools designed to support greater personalization and networking; conversational interfaces within Cvent Essentials that will automate event builds; and AI-powered budgeting and deep data analytics. But Cvent is not the only player making moves. 

TMC heavyweights Amex GBT, BCD and FCM, each with dedicated M&E divisions, are investing in "ecosystems" that connect travel, meetings and expense data with sourcing and attendee management. FCM M&E is trialing a suite of 16 AI tools to support the operational delivery of managed meetings programs. Known collectively as 'Backstage,' the internal tools are currently being put to the test in the agency's Australia business, with rollout planned across the UK and Southeast Asia in Q4.

UK-based Clarity also announced the "convergence" of its proprietary travel and meetings management tools, while tech-led players Navan and Perk have launched event management and reporting tools. Across the board, AI is part of the proposition. 

Meetings management platforms Hubli and Groupize have also made significant investments in AI-powered sourcing, contracting and reporting tools, both touting "end-to-end" offerings. The latter has also launched a suite of 14 agentic AI agents and rebranded as Groupize.AI (read more about these developments here). 

A new wave of "AI-native" start-ups is further disrupting the landscape with intuitive tools designed to automate much of the sourcing process, and large language model-powered interfaces that allow users to query data in natural language.

Aggarwal acknowledges that AI development has advanced "tremendously" but cautions that many start-ups "underestimate" the complexity of meetings management, particularly at enterprise level.

Hubli CEO Ciaran Delaney also stressed the importance of system integrations and the "pipework" required to connect to and transact with suppliers—mechanics that extend far beyond an AI search interface.

"AI is helping from a search and planning perspective, but there's still a disconnect with the hotels and the venues when it comes to transacting the booking," Delaney said. In Hubli's case, he said the company has invested heavily in recent years to build that "transactional layer" with hotels and venues, enabling real-time pricing and availability, contracting terms and the necessary invoicing protocols. "That's the final mile enterprise clients need."

An upshot of this increasingly crowded competitor landscape is greater choice for buyers. 

Groupize co-founder and CEO Alisa de Gaspe Beaubien said the growing number of new technology players is helping to "democratize" meetings management.

"Now that corporates have a choice, they can influence their third parties on what technology to use," she said. "SMM is a relic—it was a product that agencies sold to make more money… [Today], the AI transformation is allowing [corporates] to embrace self-service. So, a travel manager who may have been fearful of the category before, can now embrace it."

Cautious Approach to Re-platforming

But are meeting and event managers ready to embrace this fast-evolving landscape—and are SMM strategies keeping pace? 

According to GBTA's latest poll of business travel professionals, 41 percent of transient travel buyers are proactively identifying and implementing AI use cases. However, data privacy concerns, weak integration with existing systems and broader ecosystem readiness are among the biggest barriers to wider adoption.

Northstar Meetings Group quarterly Pulse survey of meetings professionals turned up some similar overall results, with 44 percent of meeting planners saying they used generative AI applications in the course of planning and managing meetings and events. Their main activities incorporating AI appear to be discrete and not necessarily attached to strategic systems. For example, about one-third use AI to generate content for website creation and marketing assets. The same percentage tapped AI to analyze structured and unstructured attendee feedback. Thirty-one percent used AI for initial sourcing purposes, like venue search, but less than a quarter carried AI capabilities through the RFP analysis and negotiation process.  

That's not necessarily surprising, since AI capabilities have only recently been applied to the systems that facilitate such processes, and driving adoption or reconfiguring workflows around new capabilities takes time, especially when innovation must play nice with other technologies. That said, half of companies are spending more money on meetings management technologies than they did a year ago, which means they are ready to invest in some new tools.

Groupize's de Gaspe Beaubien acknowledges the challenge of innovating around legacy enterprise systems. While Groupize has long touted its "deep" integration with Concur Travel and Concur Expense, that also obliges the meetings player to "straddle the line of delivering innovation," she said. 

"The banks, Concur, etc. they're not going to be AI native even in five years—not because they can't be, they just won't be." As a tech partner with that platform, Groupize will have to bide its time in terms of rolling out its full set of improvements to shared clients. "Having AI with those deep legacy player integrations [takes time] … because nobody's ripping SAP out of their program." 

On the flip side, the biggest challenge for corporates is balancing innovation and stability, said Nicole DiSarno, who manages customer experience and engagement, travel and events at consultancy Festive Road.  

DiSarno described the meetings technology landscape as "incredibly dynamic and complex because legacy players offer stable programs—it's tried and true, less of a risk—whereas some of these newer AI companies are completely disrupting the industry, but you don't want to have to completely change your program every time a new tool or piece of technology comes out."

The trick for travel and meetings managers, according to DiSarno, is finding tools that can be easily integrated into a flexible program architecture "to allow you to remain fungible and dynamic with the market without having to continually redo and manually recreate workflows."

The pace of innovation is clearly accelerating, and capabilities only beginning to emerge today could become table stakes within months. That makes flexibility in technology contracts increasingly important, giving corporates room to adapt and adopt new tools as they mature.

That may be easier said than done. Planned, one of the AI-powered platforms shaking up the market, predicts AI will shorten the lifecycle of meetings technology from four to six years to three to four years, after which improvements in integration, vendor innovation or broader market shifts could warrant a "major upgrade or platform change"—at least according to the company's own marketing materials.

Buyers are responding to this shifting technology landscape in different ways. Some are taking a more deliberate approach to sourcing, demanding more from technology and agency partners. Others are layering on their own tools to extract data and identify trends from existing platforms, while those with smaller budgets are taking a DIY approach, building their own meetings tools with readily available enterprise AI subscriptions.

Tech Focused Agency Approach

Henry Ryan Sope, senior manager for global travel and expense at Coty Inc., is carefully examining the market as he builds out the company's SMM strategy. Sope joined the beauty conglomerate in September 2024 with a mandate to optimize and consolidate its global travel and expense program across 36 countries. Nine months ago, that remit expanded to include meetings and events.

"We're at the beginning of our strategic meetings management journey," Sope said. The company recently implemented Cvent to manage small and simple meetings, however newer AI-powered platforms such as Hubli and Nowadays have also piqued his interest with a promise of "advanced functionality" and "transparent" pricing. 

"If these newer players can demonstrate their stability in the marketplace, that's definitely something we may consider," he said. 

His longer-term priority is to gain greater visibility over the company's portfolio of large-scale events, which are currently managed locally through multiple agency partners. 

Collectively, Coty’s meetings and events program represents around €50 million in annual spend, primarily across air travel, accommodation and event production.

"We want to leverage that spend, and one of our main priorities is to centralize it so we have much better control over event management and can build strategic partnerships with suppliers, rather than working on a project-by-project basis," Sope said.

To support that strategy, Sope hopes to launch a global RFP for a meetings and events agency capable of delivering greater global brand consistency, improved spend visibility and—critically—strong technology capabilities. 

Sope may prove to be evidence of de Gaspe Beaubien’s prediction that buyers will help drive specific technology adoption of their chosen agencies. 

"The objective isn't just to reduce costs," he said. "It's to create more meaningful events with better insight into how each event impacts the business… We expect an M&E agency to use technology to help us maximize both return on investment and return on experience."

He added: "We want to be able to measure delegate satisfaction and engagement after an event and correlate that experience with sales outcomes across the business. The idea is to leverage AI as much as possible [to track those post-event outcomes] because, as a company, we're very forward-thinking. AI is embedded across our organization, so we want to use it wherever possible… And an agency's AI capabilities would be among our top five requirements for an upcoming RFP."  

Buy or Build—or Both?

Some buyers aren't waiting for established platforms to complete their AI roadmaps before putting the technology to work. Marybeth Roberts, senior director, global travel and meeting services at software company Autodesk, is pairing existing meetings technology with frontier generative AI models to optimize operations for which the company's current technology providers haven't yet rolled out a solution.

Roberts explains how her team uses an enterprise LLM AI tool equipped with the required corporate guardrails around data, security and governance, to expedite workflows in one area of the program to free up resources elsewhere. It's part of what she describes as the "AI mindset" that Autodesk encourages employees to adopt.

Roberts is responsible for Autodesk's global travel and meetings program. She and her colleagues oversee the firm's travel management company, hotel requests for proposal and airline negotiations. The team also handles sourcing, contracting, and increasingly, meeting planning (thanks in part to the recent success of an annual meeting, which Roberts' department planned), for events ranging in size from 10 sleeping rooms to over 12,000 attendees and up to 42 hotels.

While Roberts uses platforms such as Cvent (large events) and Hubli (self-booking option for small and simple meetings) for hotel sourcing and conference room allocation, a recurring pain point continued to vex her team: hotel contract review. As a result, Autodesk’s IT team created a prompt that uses an Enterprise LLM AI tool to compare contract language against Autodesk’s approved hotel addendum and highlights potential gaps for human review.  

The AI Workflow reviews each clause and assigns a traffic-light assessment: Red, a required provision is missing or unacceptable; Yellow, the language could be improved but is not necessarily critical; or Green, where the contract language matches Autodesk’s requirements.

After AI reviews the clauses and helps the team make the necessary adjustments, "the workflow builds a contract summary for the internal stakeholder and our sourcing workbook, which puts in all the costs and the savings," Roberts explains. "Internal testing indicates the workflow can reduce initial contract review time by 75 percent." That's time the team can use to address the rising demand for meeting planning services, allowing employees to focus on higher-value planning and supplier relationships.

DIY AI

Not every organization has the budget to invest in specialist meetings technology. Increasingly, however, generative AI is enabling buyers to build lightweight alternatives themselves.

One US-based corporate buyer, who BTN granted anonymity because they did not have permission to speak on behalf of their company, recently developed a bespoke travel auditing agent using Microsoft Copilot Studio to support a recurring employee engagement program that brings managers from across the country to the company's Michigan headquarters each month. Because many attendees are infrequent business travelers, the meetings require a high-touch booking process, with each traveler completing an intake form before reservations are made either by the internal travel team or its agency partner.

The AI agent compares those intake forms against booked itineraries, automatically checking flight dates, airports, arrival times and duplicate reservations before flagging discrepancies for review. 

Since going live in January, the tool has uncovered "significant issues," including duplicate tickets and return flights booked to the wrong airport, saving "a couple of thousand dollars" in avoidable costs while helping protect the employee experience. It also eliminates around 45 minutes of manual itinerary reconciliation for each monthly meeting, allowing the travel team to focus on higher-value tasks. "It's something that I don't need to do now," the buyer said. "And even if it flags one or two items inappropriately, it still saves a lot of time [and] you can always tweak it behind the scenes." 

The buyer has continued to refine the AI agent's prompts as new scenarios emerge, even using other AI models to critique and improve the instructions. 

"When first carving out the system, it was struggling to catch some of the duplicates, the split carriers," they explained. "So, I took the prompts that I had, put them into Gemini, and asked it to review the instruction set and make any suggested revisions."

For others facing similar budget constraints, the buyer's advice is to "be a little scrappy… If your company's already paying for an AI enterprise subscription—and they probably are—then just go in and see if you can piggyback off any of the tools that already exist."