Open Forum

Do your attendees walk into your big event and think, “Where should I go next?” or “Who here is actually worth meeting?” — you’re not alone.

Attendees are juggling packed agendas, competing sessions, and endless networking opportunities. Planners are doing their best to design great experiences, but there’s only so much they can manually personalize at scale.

That’s why event apps are quietly transforming into AI assistants.

With intelligence layers like CventIQ™ embedded across platforms such as Cvent Attendee Hub, event apps are moving beyond static agendas and maps. They’re starting to think alongside each attendee — recommending sessions, surfacing connections, capturing notes, and automatically summarizing the day’s value.

Let’s unpack what that means in practice, and how it translates into real, measurable outcomes.

From digital brochure to personal event co-pilot

Traditional event apps functioned like digital brochures: helpful, but mostly passive. AI changes that.

By combining attendee profile data, registration details, behavior in the app, and engagement across sessions and exhibitors, platforms like Attendee Hub can now act more like a personal co-pilot for each participant.

Think of it this way:

• The app knows your attendees’ roles, interests, and past behavior.
• It learns which sessions they’re drawn to, which topics you search for, and which exhibitors you click into.
• Then it uses that context to answer questions like “What should I do next?” and “Who should I meet?” — in real time.

That’s the shift: from “here’s everything happening” to “here’s what you should do next.”

1. Smarter content discovery: “Stop scrolling, start attending”

One of the biggest attendee pain points is the agenda: long lists of sessions, overlapping time slots, endless FOMO.

AI-powered session recommendations tackle this head-on. The app analyzes each attendee’s profile, interests, and behavior — plus patterns from similar attendees — and then surfaces the most relevant sessions for them, automatically.

Instead of scrolling through dozens (or hundreds) of sessions, your AI assistant can:

• Highlight a short list of “best fit” sessions
• Auto-fill open time slots with relevant options
• Continuously refine recommendations as the attendee engages throughout the event

Why it matters (and how to measure it)

You can tie this directly to outcomes like:

• Higher session attendance for strategic breakouts and product sessions
• Better room utilization and fewer under-attended sessions
• Increased content engagement, visible in session enrollment and attendance reports

Over time, you should see:

• More evenly distributed attendance across the program
• Stronger engagement metrics (check-ins, watch time, chat, Q&A, polls)

2. AI that takes notes for you

Ask any attendee what gets lost after an event, and they’ll tell you: the details.

They remember the big ideas, but not the quotes, frameworks, or session names — and certainly not which exhibitor product did what. That’s where AI transcripts, snapshots, and summaries come in.

Modern event apps can now:

• Provide live session transcripts, so attendees can follow along and search later
• Let attendees capture “snapshots” — key moments they want to bookmark during a session
• Use AI-generated summaries to recap the important points for each attendee, based on what they actually attended and engaged with

Layer on features like AI Daily Summaries in My Event — which roll up sessions attended, exhibitors met, appointments scheduled, and more — and every attendee essentially walks away with a personal “event wrapped.”

Why it matters (and how to measure it)

On the attendee side:

• Higher perceived value of attending
• They can show their manager a concrete summary of what they did, who they met, and what they learned.

On the organizer side:

• Stronger justification for event investment
• When attendees export or share their summaries, you’re giving them proof points that help secure budget for next year.
• Content and feedback insights at scale
• AI can also summarize sentiment and feedback across sessions, so you know what landed and what didn’t — without manually reading thousands of comments.

3. A single, intelligent “home base” for each attendee

All of this intelligence has to live somewhere. Increasingly, that’s in a personalized event center inside the app — often called something like “My Event.”

In Attendee Hub, for example, My Event acts as a centralized, AI-powered dashboard where attendees can see:

• Their personalized agenda
• Recommended sessions, people, and exhibitors
• Their Daily Highlights or summaries
• Important messages, reminders, and next steps in one place

As AI capabilities expand, this home base is evolving into a full event assistant that can answer questions, suggest next actions, and continuously refine recommendations based on real-time behavior.

Why it matters (and how to measure it)

When attendees have a single intelligent hub:

• App adoption and repeat usage go up
• Track: app logins, daily active users, time spent in-app, and feature usage across recommendations, networking, and summaries.
• Drop-off between registration and attendance goes down
• Track: registration-to-attendance conversion, especially for key segments that engage heavily with AI recommendations and My Event.
• Engagement becomes easier to score and share
• Track: holistic engagement scores that combine sessions, meetings, exhibitor touches, and content interactions for each attendee or account.

This is where the story stops being about “cool AI features” and starts being about predictable, repeatable performance metrics.

4. Turning AI-powered experiences into ROI stories

At the end of the day, AI in event apps has to do more than impress attendees. It has to move the needle on the metrics that matter:

• Pipeline and revenue influenced
• Sponsor renewals and upsells
• Attendee satisfaction and NPS
• Content performance and program design decisions

Because AI assistants sit on top of a unified data spine — combining registration, agenda, engagement, and exhibitor interactions — they don’t just guide attendees. They also feed richer, more contextual data back to marketers and planners.

You can start to answer questions like:

• Which AI-recommended sessions produced the highest engagement and post-event opportunity creation?
• Did attendees who used recommendations and Daily Summaries have higher satisfaction scores than those who didn’t?
• Which accounts showed the strongest multi-touch engagement across sessions, meetings, and exhibitor visits — and how did that correlate with pipeline movement?

When your app behaves like an AI assistant, it’s not just improving the experience; it’s generating the proof you need to defend and grow your event investment.

The bottom line: Every attendee gets an assistant

The big shift is this:

Instead of asking attendees to do all the work — build their agenda, find the right people, take notes, remember everything — the event app now shares the load.

For attendees, that means less stress and more impact.
For organizers and marketers, it means higher engagement, clearer insights, and stronger ROI stories.

And that’s why, in the AI era, your event app isn’t just where the agenda lives — it’s where event intelligence and impact come alive.