Cvent commits $1 billion to AI-powered event tech as new research shows 70% of planners say live events matter more in an AI-saturated world

Cvent brought 10,000 attendees, 5,000 in person, 5,000 virtual, to its annual CONNECT conference this month and used the stage to announce more than 70 product innovations, 34 of them AI capabilities, alongside a $1 billion commitment to product development over the next several years. At the same time, the company launched the Cvent Center for Event Insights, a new research arm whose first commissioned study, conducted by Forrester Consulting in June 2026, produced a figure that cuts against the prevailing AI anxiety narrative: 70% of event professionals say live events matter more, not less, as AI floods every channel with synthetic content.

The dual announcement positions Cvent not as a platform that competes with AI, but as one that argues AI makes its core product more valuable. The company's new brand platform, which it calls the "Presence Premium," frames in-person meetings as one of the few remaining venues where trust gets built in real time, a deliberate counterpoint to a world where AI can automate content, pitches, and even relationship outreach at scale. Cvent founder and CEO Reggie Aggarwal articulated the thesis directly, telling attendees that in a world where AI can generate almost anything, people are craving something real, according to Skift Meetings.

CventIQ goes cross-platform with Claude, ChatGPT, and Agentforce

The centerpiece of the product rollout is CventIQ, the company's AI engine, which is built into the event management platform rather than layered on as a separate tool. According to Skift Meetings, CventIQ supports event creation, venue sourcing, attendee engagement, networking recommendations, exhibitor matching, benchmarking, and post-event analytics, covering the full lifecycle rather than isolated tasks.

The more operationally significant move for enterprise teams may be the platform's new openness to third-party AI agents. Cvent IQ Skills will allow agents built on Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Salesforce Agentforce to execute tasks directly inside Cvent's platform, briefing sales teams, building event structures, and amplifying content, without requiring planners to toggle between systems. For organizations already running Salesforce Agentforce deployments, that integration collapses what has historically been a manual handoff between CRM and event execution. McNeel Keenan, Cvent's senior VP of product management, told Skift Meetings that what makes the platform distinctive is that it is built to capture the data that event planners actually need, implying that third-party agents operating inside that data layer get more relevant context than they would working from a CRM or marketing automation system alone.

For hotels and venues, Cvent added AI-assisted workflows covering sourcing opportunity identification, proposal creation, business event orders, room-block management, and hotel profile optimization, according to Skift Meetings. All announced capabilities are either already available, in beta, or scheduled for release before year end.

The data gap is the real problem: only 36% integrate event data fully

The Cvent Center for Event Insights, announced July 15 via Business Wire, is designed to generate the kind of evidence that planners increasingly say is missing. The center's first output, a commissioned Forrester Consulting study whose preliminary findings were previewed at CONNECT, quantifies the performance gap that has long plagued event programs. Only 36% of organizations fully capture and integrate event data across all their events, and 71% say managing events across disconnected tools leaves them with limited visibility into program performance, according to the Forrester study cited by Business Wire.

The gap between AI adoption and proven outcomes is particularly sharp. The same study found that 59% of respondents already use AI for event content, but only 37% say it is delivering results. That 22-point spread between deployment and demonstrated value is the operational problem Cvent is betting its research center can help close. Amy Lucia, Cvent's chief marketing officer, said in the Business Wire announcement that the events industry does not need more noise, it needs clearer proof of what drives performance. The center is intended to deliver flagship research, ongoing commentary, and benchmark-style insights on a rolling basis.

Practitioners push past demos and want proof

Reaction from practitioners at CONNECT reflects a profession that has moved beyond being impressed by AI capability counts. Anca Platon Trifan, CEO of Tree-Fan Events Production, told Skift Meetings she was encouraged that Cvent's announcements focused on practical workflow improvements, natural language venue sourcing, lifecycle-embedded AI, and attendee assistants with real event context, rather than feature demonstrations. But she noted that meeting professionals now expect proof that AI will reduce manual hours, improve decision-making, and produce measurable business outcomes, not just reduce friction on isolated tasks.

Jess Hopp, an event strategist at Vendelux, told Skift Meetings the industry's evaluative lens has shifted. The question is no longer whether a platform has AI, but whether it meaningfully improves execution and business results. Hopp framed the challenge as a set of concrete operational tests: Does it reduce planning hours? Does attendee engagement improve? Can exhibitors and sponsors quantify better returns? Can marketers demonstrate event influence on pipeline? Those are the questions enterprise event teams will be putting to CventIQ integrations over the rest of 2026.

Cvent's scale gives the research arm real data to work with. The company's platform supports 445,000 users across 34,000 organizations, has managed more than 8 million events, and sources more than $20 billion in group business annually through its ecosystem, according to Business Wire. It has also been named a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for Event Marketing and Management Platforms for the third consecutive year. The Center for Event Insights will have direct access to that base for future benchmark studies, making its research harder for competitors to replicate and giving enterprise buyers a credible external reference for evaluating platform ROI.

What this means for your team

• Evaluate the Agentforce and ChatGPT integrations against your existing CRM and marketing automation stack: if your organization already runs Salesforce, the native Agentforce connection inside CventIQ collapses a manual handoff that most teams currently manage through data exports.
• Audit your event data integration posture before committing to any AI workflow tooling. With only 36% of organizations fully connecting event data across programs (Forrester/Cvent, June 2026), most teams will find that the AI output is only as useful as the data pipeline feeding it.
• Request outcome benchmarks, not feature lists, in any vendor evaluation. Practitioners at CONNECT explicitly flagged hours saved, attendee engagement lift, and pipeline attribution as the proof points that matter, use those as the evaluation criteria in RFPs.
• Watch the Cvent Center for Event Insights for its full Forrester study and future benchmark releases, which should provide external comparables for setting internal KPIs on event program performance.