As AI becomes more ubiquitous, live events’ capacity to create and foster human connection will grow more valuable.
In two unrelated Convene Podcast conversations recorded months apart and on opposite sides of the world, the same theme emerged: The more content AI generates, the more valuable human gathering becomes.
The two conversations — one with Convening APAC keynote speakers Sandra Peter, Ph.D., and Kai Riemer, Ph.D., co-directors of Sydney Executive Plus business school and authors of the 2026 Skills Horizon report, and another with Convening LATAM keynote speaker Álvaro Meléndez, CEO and co-founder of the AI-powered creative company CRANT — approached the future of work from different angles. Yet both pointed toward the same emerging reality: In a world increasingly shaped by information overload, fractured attention, and generative AI, events may be taking on increased importance, becoming much more significant than content-delivery platforms.
Some of the key insights from those conversations:
AI is creating abundance — making it more difficult to maintain our attention.
Peter and Riemer describe the current moment as “the decade of disorientation,” where professionals are navigating an environment overloaded with signals, competing narratives, and constant interruption.
“It’s become increasingly harder to actually find the right signals,” Riemer said. “There’s so much noise out there in the environment that we have to pay way more attention to [identifying] signals.”
Peter points out that abundance itself has become part of the challenge. “There’s the need to stay informed on more stuff than ever before,” she said. “But everyone’s attention is strained.”
Generative AI, Meléndez said, is responsible for much of the overload. “Everywhere you look — on LinkedIn, if you look at white papers, if you look at scientific papers, everywhere, your email, anywhere you look — you’re being flooded with AI-generated stuff,” he said. “So that becomes infinite.”
As AI lowers the barrier to producing content, Meléndez believes audiences are already beginning to emotionally disengage from it. “The more you’re … exposed to that content,” he said, “the more you’re going to get numb to it and you’re going to stop caring about it.”
In an AI-saturated world, events are seen as spaces for trust and curation.
For Riemer, one of the biggest risks emerging from being surrounded by AI-generated content is the erosion of trust itself. “The information environment is increasingly broken,” he said. “Social media gets inundated with misinformation, disinformation, AI-generated slop. So, people are looking for trusted sources of information.”
That shift, he believes, creates a more strategic role for events and event organizers. “I think events can have a big role to play in that space by curating speaker lineups, by favoring established voices, expertise, and diverse lineups of people who bring really good and interesting perspectives,” Riemer said.
Peter sees event professionals becoming increasingly important guides in helping audiences navigate complexity and identify signals within the noise. “Finding the signal in the noise,” she said, means “here’s what you need to pay attention to — here it is in a form that’s digestible and that’s accessible to you.”
She added: “Event organizers have been doing this for a very long time. I just think now their work is more important than ever.”
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As content becomes commoditized, human experiences are more highly prized.
Meléndez thinks the business events industry is uniquely positioned to benefit from this shift precisely because it operates through real-world human interaction rather than digital scale. “You guys are one of the few industries that actually operate on human relationships,” he said. “You have people together in the room, literally.”
That physical presence, he argues, will become increasingly rare — and increasingly valuable. “That’s going to be very scarce and that’s going to be very premium and very valuable because that’s the only way that human relationships get made, through spending meaningful time together,” Meléndez said.
He cautioned event professionals against focusing too much on spectacle, logistics, or AI for efficiency alone, thinking that they need a bigger screen, a bigger stage, or “a more famous speaker — and that’s all I care about,” Meléndez said. “But that’s not what it’s about.”
Event professionals should make it their job to design environments where relationships can form intentionally, he said. “The event is just the vehicle — the event is not the goal.” The real opportunity, according to Meléndez, lies in helping people create meaningful human connections in an increasingly artificial world. “How do I make what I’m doing unforgettable? How do I turn this into a human relationship-building machine?”
For Meléndez, that shift may ultimately redefine the long-term value of live events altogether. “As AI commoditizes content and most of marketing,” he said, a face-to-face event “becomes almost like a work of art. It becomes almost like something that you will collect.”
Magdalina Atanassova is digital media editor at Convene.
