Industry Signals
Most Event Businesses Are Using AI at the Surface, and That's Fine for Now
New enterprise research shows most organisations are still drafting and summarising with AI, not redesigning how work actually happens. For events businesses that is a reasonable place to be, as long as you know it.
Two numbers worth sitting with
Deloitte's State of AI in the Enterprise report landed last month, and one split in it is worth pinning to a wall. Organisations fall into roughly three groups: thirty seven per cent are using AI at the surface, drafting and summarising and light assistance. Thirty per cent have gone further and redesigned a process around it. Thirty four per cent have made deeper business model changes. Sixty six per cent report real productivity gains, whichever layer they're on.
Put that next to the ONS figure from this summer: twenty nine per cent of UK businesses now use at least one AI technology, up from twenty one per cent a year earlier, rising to forty nine per cent among firms with two hundred and fifty or more staff.
Read those together and the picture for events businesses is fairly clear. Most agencies, venues and suppliers are small, which the ONS data suggests puts you well below that forty nine per cent figure. And of the businesses using AI at all, the Deloitte split says you're most likely sitting in that thirty seven per cent surface layer group.
None of that should feel alarming. It's simply where the average small business sits right now, events or otherwise. What matters is what you do with that information, not how it makes you feel reading it over coffee.
That is a completely reasonable place to be
I want to say this plainly, because it's easy to read numbers like these and feel like you're failing at something. You're not. Drafting proposal copy faster, summarising a client call, tidying an agenda: that's a legitimate, useful first layer of AI use, and it's where almost everyone starts.
The problem isn't being at the surface. The problem is not knowing you're at the surface, and assuming that's as far as this goes.
The step that actually matters doesn't need new AI
The move from surface use to process redesign, the thirty per cent group, is the one that changes what a business actually looks like day to day. And here's the part that surprises people: it usually doesn't require a new tool.
It requires the process getting written down. Most events businesses don't have their quoting process, their handover from sales to delivery, or their post event follow up documented anywhere. It lives in people's heads, slightly differently in each head, and gets reconstructed from memory every single time.
You cannot redesign a process that has never been written down in the first place. AI can speed up a documented process enormously. It cannot speed up a process that doesn't exist yet as anything other than habit.
This is the part that gets skipped, because writing down a process is unglamorous work, and it doesn't feel like progress the way installing a new tool does. But it's the actual bottleneck for most of the businesses I meet. The AI conversation gets all the attention. The documentation conversation is where the real gains sit waiting, mostly untouched.
Which layer are we actually on
A quick, honest self-test, three questions, no scoring needed, you'll know the answer as soon as you ask them.
- Is AI use in our business individual, something people picked up themselves, or is it built into how we actually run a job from brief to delivery.
- If our best person left tomorrow, would the way we do things leave with them, or is it written down somewhere anyone could follow.
- Have we changed a process because of what AI makes possible, or are we just doing the same process slightly faster.
If the honest answers are individual, it would leave with them, and slightly faster, you're at the surface. That's not a criticism. It's a starting point.
What moving up a layer actually looks like
For a venue sales team, surface use looks like drafting proposal responses faster. Process redesign looks like a documented, consistent way of qualifying an enquiry, checking capacity, and handing a confirmed booking to operations, with AI doing the drafting inside that structure rather than instead of it.
For a small agency, surface use looks like summarising client calls. Process redesign looks like every brief following the same format regardless of who took the call, so a producer picking up a project midway through isn't reconstructing context from three different people's memories.
Neither example needed a new AI subscription. Both needed someone to sit down and write the process out properly, once.
That's usually a week of focused work, not a quarter long project. It's also the kind of work that's easy to keep putting off indefinitely, because the business keeps running perfectly well without it, right up until the day it doesn't.
Where this goes next
This is exactly the ground we'll be covering at CHS Manchester at the end of the month, one sentence on it here and the rest on stage: what actually separates surface use from structural change in this industry, and why most of the gap has nothing to do with which AI tool you bought.
If you want to work out which layer your own business is genuinely on before then, that's the first conversation in a Discovery Lab.