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ATLANTA, Georgia, October, 2026 – The biggest obstacles to AI in event management are not cost or resistance to change, but knowledge and trust, according to the State of Enterprise Events 2026 report from InEvent, the enterprise event management platform for in-person, hybrid, and virtual events. 62.7% of event professionals name a lack of knowledge as a barrier to adopting AI, and 52.9% name data privacy, well ahead of cost and budget and resistance to change.
The barriers sit alongside clear momentum as respondents expect their organization's use of AI to increase, and say AI has already improved planning efficiency, and say it allows them to focus on higher-value work.
Event marketing is the clear lead, cited by 62.4% of respondents as an area where AI is delivering value. It is followed by data analysis, communications and attendee matching, content creation and logistics.
The report also points to measurable gains where AI is applied well: a 40% increase in satisfaction from AI-driven personalization and a 30% reduction in operational waste.
The report distinguishes between two kinds of AI. Generative AI creates content such as copy, images, session descriptions, and email sequences, and is now well understood and broadly adopted. Agentic AI takes actions on a user's behalf, including scheduling, follow-up, matchmaking and reporting, and the report calls it the next frontier of AI impact in events.
Looking ahead, respondents see the most impactful applications as predictive attendance forecasting, real-time engagement scoring, automated post-event reporting and AI-powered matchmaking.
"Most event teams aren't short on interest in AI. They're short on clarity about what it should do and confidence that their data is safe," said Pedro Góes, CEO and Co-Founder of InEvent. "The answer is to start with one repeatable task, keep people in the loop, and use AI inside the systems teams already work in, not as one more tool to learn."
The report's guidance for event leaders is to start small but start now, beginning with marketing, data and communications, and to choose technology with AI embedded in existing workflows rather than added as separate tools with new logins. It also highlights the compliance standards enterprise teams expect, including GDPR, CCPA and LGPD, alongside content approval workflows and audit trails.
InEvent applies this approach across its platform, from the AI Registration Assistant that builds registration forms from plain-language instructions, to InEvent MCP, which lets teams work with event data through AI assistants they already use, and the wider InEvent AI suite.
The State of Enterprise Events 2026 report is based on InEvent's proprietary analysis of enterprise event industry data, aggregated from surveys of more than 2,000 event professionals across multiple regions and market segments, collected between late 2025 and Q1 2026.
InEvent is an enterprise event management platform for in-person, hybrid, virtual, and webinar experiences. Organizations worldwide use InEvent to manage event registration, websites, attendee communications, on-site check-in and badge printing, mobile event apps, engagement, analytics, and AI-powered event workflows from one connected platform. Learn more at inevent.com.
