Big Tech Cracks the Meetings & Events Market

The tech landscape for Meetings & Events has long been poised for disruption. Several of the “major” tech players have been tantalizingly close to entering the market but haven’t yet taken the leap. By major, think Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Amazon, IBM, Apple, Dell, Salesforce, Adobe, ServiceNow, SAP, etc. 2025 will be the year that we see at least one finally make the leap. 

Why Is Now the Time?

It all comes down to AI. Adoption of AI is skyrocketing with more companies investing in it. This includes the household names in Meetings & Events tech who are adding AI as “bolt-on” capabilities. While the state of AI is fluid, it’s stable and—more importantly—it’s mature enough to tackle the core generative and agentic AI use cases for the $1 trillion-plus Meetings & Events market. For context, generative AI focuses on creating new content like text, images or even code based on patterns in data. Whereas generative AI requires prompting, agentic AI focuses on autonomous decision-making and action-taking, allowing systems to interact with their environment to complete tasks without constant human intervention. It's designed to be more like a human than generative AI systems, which are programmed for specific tasks. Big tech started AI initiatives years ago and is primed to deploy new capabilities. Meetings & Events present a great opportunity, but there are some different paths to get there.

Microsoft Leads the Way in Big Tech

Microsoft was a major force in bringing AI to market even before its recent announcement of an $80 billion investment to build data centers, deepen partnerships and create new purpose-built models. Microsoft is deeply established in workplace apps that planners and marketers use every day for various planning tasks, and has partnered with the likes of Amadeus (via Cytric Easy), Marriott and Air India. It won’t be long before the end-to-end meetings workflow could be powered by Microsoft Azure’s OpenAI service with a handy agent companion in Copilot. Microsoft could continue its current path, which is clearly working, or perhaps accelerate it via a strategic acquisition of one of the current Meetings & Events tech providers. Google (Gemini), IBM (Watson) or Oracle (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) could follow similar paths. 

Platform Players Taking a Different Approach

Several major platform players already support Meetings & Events workflows, and their investments in AI will only make those stronger. ServiceNow successfully evolved from the tool of choice for the IT Help Desk to power a range of workflows including sourcing, procurement, HR and—more recently—marketing. Salesforce can power various workflows like budgeting, inventory management (think ticketing, room management, etc.) promotions and follow-up. Some of the platform players also create opportunities for enterprising tech entrepreneurs to build on top of these platforms:

• Tenon is built on the ServiceNow platform and extends the legendary ServiceNow workflows to various marketing use cases, including events (Tenon has received funding from ServiceNow Ventures)
• Blackthorn.io is a Salesforce-native events app built entirely on the Force.com platform utilizing Salesforce infrastructure for hosting, app management and delivery. This enables Blackthorn customers to leverage data across the Salesforce ecosystem and create more data-driven events.

These platform options not only reduce risk and improve performance…you guessed it…they bring the massive investments in “near-native AI” (ServiceNow AI, Agentforce) directly into the Meetings & Events workflow. Users of apps like Tenon and Blackthorn will get the benefit of that investment in Agentic AI by Salesforce and ServiceNow. Adobe (Sensei), HubSpot (Breeze), and Zoom (AI Companion) could follow similar paths. Much like big tech, platform players could be enticed to enter the market in a bigger way via strategic acquisition.

New “Native AI” Entrants will Emerge

Building new apps in the age of AI presents unique opportunities, and the next entrant into the Meetings & Events sweepstakes will most likely be true “Native AI.” There are a few different ways to add AI to a system. For current players in Meetings & Events tech, the options are 1) add some AI-based ‘controls’ to the existing system, 2) replace existing components of the system with AI-based components, 3) add a new AI-based component onto the system, or 4) re-build with AI-native architecture. Options 1 and 2 are “bolt-on” options. This is what most of the current players are doing. For platform players, the approach was Option 3—to "bake in" AI more deeply. But native AI represents a paradigm change.

Bolt-ons must consider the current state of things—perhaps a non-intuitive workflow, lack of relevant data, integration difficulties and all the inherent challenges—and then try to make the best use of AI considering these limitations while ‘retrofitting.’ Near-natives take this a giant leap farther. Players like Salesforce and ServiceNow are baking in their own AI models into workflows and processes across platforms they already control. They also can partner with AI providers like Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, to extend capabilities further. Near natives are excellent options for leveraging AI, but nothing like what native AI represents. 

Without “current-state” limitations, native AI will enable a new entrant to completely re-imagine the experience for Meetings & Events (and travel and hospitality!). An AI-native architecture places intelligence throughout the product at every layer and touchpoint. Think about the next time you need to go to a conference. The App…

• is voice prompted that you will attend
• knows your schedule, travel and expense policy, valuable content and people you’d like to meet on-site, etc.
• registers you via a secure, encrypted “token” sharing only the information you authorize
• behaves intelligently, making decisions you would make yourself, doing the work for you and triggering the best possible experience
• books travel with your preferred airline, hotel in the room block (with preferences), an Uber and makes a dinner reservation on Tuesday after the close of sessions
• tracks relevant sessions and content, and provides notes once you get back to the office

We’re not so far off from this reality, and this is just the beginning. My bet is we see at least one native AI new entrant in 2025. The major players have several paths to enter this market in 2025 as well—and I’m hopeful we’ll see at least one join the fun.