Field Notes
Three Things I Heard at The Meetings Show
Two days at ExCeL, six thousand people, one debate that split the room in half, and one question I heard more than any other at the coffee stands. Here is what actually stuck.
Back from ExCeL, still sorting through the notes
The Meetings Show ran at ExCeL London this week, close to six thousand industry professionals and over five hundred and fifty exhibitors, by far the biggest two days I've had on a show floor this year. I also sat down for an interview with the CHS team on the Wednesday, which was a nice reminder that Manchester in September is getting closer.
I came home with pages of notes. Once I sorted through them, three things kept rising to the top.
One: the most useful AI in the building, and nobody called it AI
Live captioning ran across several of the stages this year, quietly, on screens most people glanced at without thinking twice. It just worked. Speaker talks, words appear, nobody in the audience misses a beat even in a hall with the acoustics of an aircraft hangar.
Nobody stood up and announced it as an AI feature. It wasn't badged, demoed or pitched. It was just there, doing a genuinely useful job, and I'd argue it did more for more people over those two days than anything on any exhibitor stand with AI printed across the top of it.
There's a lesson in that. The AI that earns its place is usually the AI you stop noticing, not the AI you're told to be impressed by.
I stood at the back of one session for a few minutes just watching the captions run rather than the speaker. Not a single typo I could catch, keeping pace with a fast talker without lagging. If you'd told that room it was AI doing the work, most people wouldn't have thought to ask. They'd just have been glad they could follow along from the back row.
Two: the debate split the room, and both sides were arguing the wrong question
The education programme included a debate billed as "The Reckoning", on AI's impact on the events industry, and the room split roughly down the middle. One side: it will replace planners. The other: it will never replace planners. It got lively.
Both sides were arguing a question that doesn't have a useful answer yet, because it's really a question about ten years from now dressed up as a question about today. The honest answer, the one that would have actually helped anyone in that room plan their next quarter, is much duller: it is already changing what a planner's Tuesday looks like. Not replacing the planner. Changing the shape of the day. Less time on first drafts and chasing suppliers for basic availability, more time on the judgement calls that actually need a human in the room.
That's a smaller claim than either side of the debate wanted to make, and it happens to be the true one.
Debates like that make for good theatre, which is presumably why they get programmed. But I left thinking the organisers had picked the wrong axis to argue about. The useful question was never replace or not replace. It was which parts of the job are shifting, and how quickly people notice the shift has already started under them.
Three: the question I heard more than any other
Away from the stages, at the coffee stands between sessions, one question came up again and again, from people at very different types of business: "what should I actually do first".
Fair question, and one worth answering properly rather than waving at.
Start with the task you already do every single week that you've stopped noticing costs you time. Not the exciting AI use case, the boring recurring one. The event brief you retype from a client email into your own template. The follow up summary you write after every call. The venue capacity check you do by hand because the spreadsheet is three versions out of date.
Pick one of those. Get it working properly, end to end, with one tool, before you touch anything else. Resist the urge to solve five problems at once, because that's how most AI pilots quietly die: not through failure, through nobody finishing the first one.
The reality check worth remembering
It's worth saying plainly: most of the industry is still early. The ONS reported this summer that around twenty nine per cent of UK businesses now use at least one AI technology, up from twenty one per cent a year before. That's real growth, and it also means well over two thirds of businesses aren't there yet.
If you're one of them, you are not behind some invisible curve everyone else has already crossed. You're roughly where most of the room at ExCeL actually was, whatever the panels made it sound like.
What I'm carrying home
The best AI in that building was invisible. The best answer to "what should I do" was the least exciting one on offer. And the honest read on where this industry is sits somewhere quieter than either side of a stage debate wants to admit.
If you want help finding your own version of that first boring task worth fixing, that conversation is exactly what a Discovery Lab is for. And if you want to build confidence with the tools before you commit to anything, Zoby OS is free and open to anyone in the industry.