By Michele Landry
Attendance is up 52% at in-person B2B conferences compared to 2024, a strong indication that face-to-face connection and relationship building remain top priorities across industries. These events provide a vital opportunity to engage with colleagues, stakeholders, and potential customers. While AI offers unprecedented capabilities for planning, brand visibility, and lead generation, its true power is unlocked when combined with authentic human connection and strategic oversight.
AI’s Transformative Value
AI excels at processing data, identifying patterns, and automating repetitive tasks that would overwhelm human capacity. From analyzing attendee behavior in real-time to personalizing content recommendations for thousands of participants, AI provides the analytical foundation that makes modern events more targeted, efficient and measurable.
The technology particularly shines in:
- Predictive lead scoring that helps sales teams focus their energy
- Content personalization that increases engagement rates
- Automated communication that maintains consistent brand messaging
- Real-time insights that enable rapid strategy adjustments
The Irreplaceable Human Element
However, B2B event success ultimately depends on relationships, trust, and authentic connections that only humans can create. AI can identify your highest value prospects, but it takes human intuition to navigate complex business conversations, understand unspoken concerns, and build the long-term partnerships that drive sustained growth.
Critical human oversight areas include:
Strategic Decision-Making
While AI provides data-driven recommendations, experienced event professionals must interpret context, assess brand alignment, and make nuanced decisions that balance multiple stakeholder interests.
Relationship Cultivation
The most valuable business relationships emerge from genuine human interactions: the informal conversations, shared experiences, and moments of authentic connection that happen in person, not in AI-generated touchpoints.
Crisis Management and Adaptability
When unexpected challenges arise such as technical failures, last-minute speaker changes, or shifting market conditions human creativity, empathy, and problem-solving skills become essential for maintaining attendee confidence and brand reputation.
Managing Logistics and Set-Up
Each event has its own event management portal and vendors for ordering all the essentials for a seamless booth set-up, and this requires careful human oversight to ensure everything is ordered and set up properly to create the brand experience you want to deliver to attendees.
Quality Assurance
AI-generated content and recommendations require humans to review and ensure brand voice consistency, cultural sensitivity, and strategic alignment with broader business objectives.
The Optimal Partnership Model
The most successful B2B event strategies integrate AI’s analytical power with human relationship building expertise:
- AI handles data processing and pattern recognition while humans interpret insights and make strategic adjustments.
- AI personalizes initial outreach and content while humans conduct meaningful follow-up conversations and relationship building.
- AI identifies and scores leads while human sales professionals nurture prospects through complex decision-making processes.
- AI automates routine communications while humans focus on high-value interactions with key stakeholders, partners, and media contacts.
AI Tools
The following are some tools for automating tasks and personalizing content.
- Optimize social media targeting with AI-driven ad platforms like Meta Ads Manager and LinkedIn Campaign Manager to analyze user behavior to target your event promotions more effectively. This ensures your ads are seen by those most likely to engage with your brand at the event.
- Leverage AI tools like AdRoll for retargeting campaigns. Use them to re-engage people who have visited your event page but haven’t yet registered.
- Facilitate networking with AI matchmaking tools, such as Grip or Brella to connect attendees with similar interests or complementary business goals. By fostering these connections, your brand positions itself as a valuable facilitator and creates a positive association.
- Personalize outreach through HubSpot AI and Drift, which uses AI to personalize chat messaging and nurture leads on your site post-event.
Embracing AI with Human Touch
For B2B companies, the question isn’t whether to embrace AI in event marketing, it’s how to thoughtfully integrate these tools while preserving the human connections that drive business success. The companies that thrive will be those that use AI to amplify human capabilities rather than replace them.
Viewing AI as a powerful assistant that can handle data-intensive tasks will free up your team to focus on what humans do best: building relationships, creating memorable experiences, and fostering the trust that converts event attendees into long-term business partners.
Reach out if we can help provide guidance or support your event coordination. The Tanis team will be at these upcoming events.
We hope to see you at one of these events!