Most organizers read an optimistic industry as one that has already adopted the tools it is optimistic about. The October 2026 numbers say otherwise. Optimism and practice were measured in different surveys, by different companies, and they do not move together.

American Express's 2027 Global Meetings & Events Forecast, reported by Event Industry News in October 2026, found that 93% of meeting professionals remain optimistic but also realistic about the future, and it named technology, including AI, as one of the industry's greatest opportunities. A week earlier, a survey of 380 event professionals by EventsAir, reported by Exhibition News in October 2026, found that 26% are not using AI at all.

These are two samples, and one figure cannot be subtracted from the other. Read side by side, they describe one pattern. Belief in AI is widespread. Application of it is uneven. The distance between the two sits inside teams, not inside the market, and it shows up in which jobs on a show get AI and which do not.

This piece reads both surveys, the revenue case Informa Markets made at IMEX America, the attendee research Freeman presented on the same show floor, and what the gap means for the people who run conferences, exhibitions and venues.

The 93% Is a Reading of Mood, Not of Practice

The American Express forecast is a sentiment instrument. Its headline finding, as Event Industry News reported it in October 2026, is that 93% of meeting professionals remain optimistic but also realistic about the future, while organisations keep adapting to geopolitical uncertainty, climate-related disruption and rising costs. That is a statement about how the industry feels heading into 2027, measured against a set of pressures that have not eased.

The forecast does put AI at the centre of its trend list. One of its key trends is the integration of AI alongside human talent, with meeting professionals using the technology to create more seamless attendee experiences while relying on human judgment and empathy to deliver meaningful outcomes. The report frames AI as an opportunity and as a working partner for planners. In the coverage, it does not report what share of those meeting professionals use AI today, or for which tasks.

Paul McDonnough of Amex described the tension the survey picked up: "We're all feeling more resilient than last year but the main challenge for those surveyed is how to balance the creation and delivery of great experiences with that resilience, while costs are rising and a variety of factors are competing against each other." His prescription was a strategic meetings management framework to work through that complexity.

Resilience, rising costs and competing factors are the context. Optimism is the mood. In the Event Industry News coverage, the American Express figure of 93% does not say how many of those optimistic meeting professionals have changed the way they work. For that, the industry has to look at a survey that asked about use, not outlook.

A Quarter of Respondents Have Not Started, and They Say Why

EventsAir, the event management software company, surveyed 380 people across EMEA, Australia and New Zealand, and North America. As Exhibition News reported in October 2026, 72% said AI was valuable or essential for improving their events, and 26% said they were not using it at all. Exhibition News summarised the finding as more than a quarter of event professionals not using AI, even though most think it is useful.

The barrier data is the more useful half of the survey. Lack of knowledge was cited by 63% of respondents. Worries about data privacy and security followed at 53%. Around three in 10 pointed to cost. In this sample, the inability to apply AI ranks well ahead of the price of it.

That ordering matters for how the gap gets closed. A cost barrier is solved with budget. A knowledge barrier is solved with time, practice and someone accountable for both. A privacy barrier is solved with a policy that tells a planner which data can go into which tool. The EventsAir respondents put knowledge on top, which means the constraint in their teams is not the purchase order.

Mehdi Khalili, chief AI and technology officer at EventsAir, put it in one line: "Interest in AI is strong and belief in its potential is widespread, but confidence in how to apply it is still developing." That sentence is close to a summary of the two surveys together. The Amex figure captures the interest and belief. The EventsAir figure captures the confidence that has not caught up.

The same pattern appears outside events. TalkValue has tracked the gap between daily AI use and formal AI training in marketing teams, where tools spread faster than the knowledge to use them well. EventsAir's 63% is the event-industry version of that finding, from a different sample and a different company.

The Adopters Point AI at Marketing, Not at the Floor

Among the EventsAir respondents who do use AI, the distribution of tasks is lopsided. Exhibition News reported in October 2026 that marketing was by far the most common use, named by 62% of those using it. Data analysis and reporting followed at 38%. Logistics and operations came in at 15%. Personalising the attendee experience was the least common use in the survey, at 13%.

Exhibition News called the 38% figure for data analysis somewhat striking, given how well AI lends itself to automating analysis and reporting. It also noted that concerns about privacy and legality complicate that work, which links back to the 53% who named data privacy and security as a barrier.

Read in order, the four numbers describe distance from the floor. Marketing copy is outbound, low-risk and easy to review before it ships. Data analysis touches registration and attendee records, where privacy questions start. Logistics and operations touch the live event, where an error costs a session, a room or a queue. Personalisation touches each attendee directly. The further a task sits from the floor, the more likely the respondents are to hand it to AI.

EventsAir's own product announcement in the same article shows what the operational use case looks like. Its Planner Assistant lets planners ask questions about their event data in plain English instead of building reports. The company's example is a planner asking which sessions are on course to be over capacity, then asking the tool to move one to a bigger room in the same conversation. That is a logistics task, on site, in real time. It is also the category only 15% of AI-using respondents have reached.

The point is not that marketing is the wrong place for AI. It is that adoption so far concentrates where the stakes are lowest, and the work of running a show sits mostly outside that zone.

Informa Markets Added Revenue Without Adding Headcount

The third story from the October 2026 coverage moves the argument from efficiency to revenue. Event Industry News reported from IMEX America in October 2026 that for the past three years AI in events has been about productivity, and that the conversations on the show floor pointed to a shift toward revenue growth.

The work in question is sponsor and exhibitor acquisition. Before a sponsorship deal is signed, someone has to identify suitable companies, research their priorities and reach a decision-maker with a reason to talk. Industry and AI expert Max Gabriel, quoted in the same Event Industry News piece, described the imbalance: "For event organisers, prospecting, outreach and securing interest is what consumes 80% of the effort, and delivers 20% of the value. AI promises to reverse that." The 80% and 20% are his characterisation of effort and value, not a measured result.

Informa Markets is the company that put a result next to the claim. According to Event Industry News, Informa Markets has been deploying Super Benji, a UK-based AI company that specialises in securing sponsors and exhibitors, to grow exhibitor and sponsorship revenue for one of its larger events. The article reports that 2026 revenues for that event grew significantly without increasing headcount. It gives no revenue figure, and none exists for this piece. Both sides of the arithmetic are in words: what was added was exhibitor and sponsorship revenue on one event, and what was not added was staff.

Carola Fiameni of Informa Markets described the change in method: "Super Benji has genuinely revolutionised the way we run campaigns at Informa. In just one year, it has allowed us to scale our ABM approach at speed." A Chief Revenue Officer quoted anonymously in the same piece said the tool puts a level of research and personalisation into every touch-point that the sales team wished it had time for.

David Harrison, CFO of IMEX Group, framed the priority: "AI has immense potential to make our industry more efficient, but efficiency alone isn't the prize. The real priority is using it to personalise the experience for every sponsor and delegate. Get that right and the numbers fall into place."

Set this against the EventsAir data. Personalisation was the least common AI use among respondents, at 13%. The Informa Markets case is personalisation applied to sponsor outreach, the revenue side of the show, and it is the one case in the October coverage with a reported commercial outcome. The question of how marketing leaders weigh AI budget share against their readiness to scale it has the same shape: spend is easier to commit than the capability to use it at volume.

Attendees Are Arriving With Their Own AI

While organizers debate adoption, attendees have moved. At IMEX America, Ken Holsinger presented The Freeman Trends Report: Understanding the Participant Journey, reported by Event Industry News in October 2026. Freeman found that AI use among some attendees is growing quickly, particularly younger audiences, and that younger generations are both the most frequent users of AI and the most sceptical about its outputs. The coverage reports these as findings in words, with no percentages attached.

Holsinger's operational warning was direct: "We're finally on the cusp of true personalisation at scale but the problem is your event content isn't AI-ready." He explained that attendees may increasingly use their own AI tools to navigate schedules, content and resources rather than relying only on event-specific applications.

That changes where the organizer's AI gap shows. A team that uses no AI internally still has attendees querying its programme through AI tools. If the session data, speaker pages and registration details are not structured for those tools to read, the attendee gets a thin or wrong answer, and the show never sees the question. TalkValue has written about registration pages that AI search cannot read, which is the same problem at the point of purchase.

Holsinger also described what this audience responds to: precise information about learning opportunities and whether people like them will attend, not messages about size or scale. His recommendation was phased content drops, sharing what can be shared early and often, instead of waiting for the full programme, to pull registration earlier than the late behaviour he called the new normal.

The scepticism finding sits beside this. The heaviest AI users in Freeman's research are also the least willing to take its outputs on trust, which matches TalkValue's reading of buyers who warmed to AI but still want to be told when it is AI. An organizer who uses AI to generate attendee-facing content is writing for the audience most likely to check it.

On the same opening day, Michelle Orlando of Elevoque described the cost of not offloading routine work: "At events, our team turns into more of a help desk instead of the host, which is what we should be doing." Her question was how to get that work off the team's plate so people can spend time on strategy and real-life experience.

Where the Gap Sits Inside Your Show

The EventsAir 26% describes 380 respondents across three regions. It does not describe your team, and it should not be quoted as if it did. What it gives you is a frame for counting. Inside that frame, the October 2026 coverage maps onto the functions of a show in a specific way.

Sponsor and exhibitor sales is where the Informa Markets case lands. If prospecting on your show is still researched by hand, the work Max Gabriel describes as most of the effort sits there, and the one reported revenue outcome in the coverage came from automating it.

Marketing is where AI use among EventsAir respondents is most common, at 62% of those using it. If your team uses AI anywhere, it is probably here. That is the function least likely to be holding the gap open.

Data, reporting and operations are where adoption thins, at 38% and 15% of EventsAir's AI-using respondents. These are the jobs closest to the floor: capacity, room moves, registration reporting. The Planner Assistant example describes exactly that kind of on-site question.

Attendee experience is where adoption is lowest, at 13% for personalisation in the EventsAir data, and where Freeman says attendees are already using their own tools. Content readiness belongs here too, because a programme AI cannot read is a programme the most active AI-using attendees cannot find.

The EventsAir barrier data says what is usually holding each of these back: knowledge first, privacy second, cost third. That points to people, not purchases. The single action from this piece follows from it. Check which people on your team use no AI tools at all, and assign each of them one specific AI task inside their own function this cycle, with someone accountable for reviewing the output.

A named task closes a knowledge gap faster than a licence does, and it surfaces the privacy questions early, in a controlled setting, instead of on the floor during build.

Optimism Without Practice Becomes a Cost Line

The American Express forecast places the industry's optimism against rising costs, geopolitical uncertainty and climate-related disruption. Those pressures do not wait for teams to gain confidence. A show that holds headcount flat and keeps prospecting, reporting and attendee communication manual absorbs rising costs with the same hours. Informa Markets reported the opposite trade on one event: more exhibitor and sponsorship revenue, no added staff.

The vendor side is not waiting either. Event Industry News reported from IMEX America in October 2026 that Markus AI is applying the technology to the attendee experience, Clarity Media Partners to sponsorship onboarding, and Planned, a Canadian tech company, to registration and reporting. Vlad Ciurca, co-founder of Techsylvania, described the direction: "We're starting to see AI re-invent the entire sponsor and delegate experience, resulting in a more seamless, integrated and highly personalised experience for everyone."

The tools for every function on the show list now exist in the market. The October 2026 data says the constraint is not supply. It is that 63% of EventsAir respondents name lack of knowledge as their barrier, while the American Express sample stays optimistic about an AI-shaped future. Optimism is a forecast. Practice is a line in next year's budget, either as revenue gained without headcount or as hours spent on work that the rest of the industry has moved off its plate.

TalkValue practices conference engineering, and this is the part of the work we see most often: the distance between what a team believes about AI and what it has assigned to it. The industry's 93% will be tested against its 26% at the next renewal cycle, not at the next forecast. If you want to read your own show against these figures, book a call.