When Event Industry News surveyed professionals about their biggest barrier to AI adoption, 30% said training staff. Cost came second at 25%. The technology itself barely registered as a concern.

This isn't surprising. Anyone who walked the floor at IBTM World saw it firsthand. Smart, experienced professionals nodding through demos they couldn't strategically evaluate. Not because the technology was too complex, but because nobody had helped them develop a framework for thinking about it.

The event industry knows that people development is the bottleneck. And yet we keep buying more software.

The 10-20-70 Rule

Boston Consulting Group surveyed 1,000 C-suite executives across 59 countries about their AI implementations. The findings should reshape how every event organization allocates resources.

Seventy percent of AI implementation failures stem from people and process issues. Twenty percent come from technology problems. Only ten percent involve the algorithms themselves.

The companies succeeding with AI invest accordingly. BCG calls it the 10-20-70 rule: 10% of resources on algorithms, 20% on technology and data, 70% on people and processes. These organizations scale more than twice as many AI products across their operations. They expect double the ROI.

Meanwhile, 74% of companies across industries struggle to move beyond AI pilots and generate real value. The difference isn't technology quality. It's where they invested.

The event industry has this ratio inverted. We spend heavily on platforms and allocate days, not months, to developing people's ability to use them strategically.

Why We Keep Getting This Wrong

If everyone knows training is the barrier, why do we keep buying tools instead of developing people?

Three reasons.

Tools are visible.
Development isn't. A software purchase shows up in budgets, in board presentations, in annual reports. "We invested €200,000 in AI capabilities" sounds like progress. "We invested €200,000 in helping our team think strategically about technology" sounds vague, even though it's more likely to generate returns.

Vendors market tools.
Nobody markets judgment. The exhibition halls are full of companies selling software. The booths are polished, the demos compelling, the ROI projections optimistic. There's no equivalent marketing force for people development. No vendor is buying booth space to sell strategic thinking.

Buying feels like action.
Development feels slow. When leadership asks what we're doing about AI, signing a contract provides an immediate answer. Starting a capability development program feels like admitting we'll need twelve months before we see results. In an industry that moves fast, patience is a hard sell.

These aren't character flaws. They're structural incentives pushing us toward the wrong investment.

The Workforce Context Making This Harder

This technology transition is happening against a workforce crisis that compounds every challenge.

According to the Event Industry Council's 2025 staffing outlook, 89% of event professionals report that staffing shortages have directly affected their ability to deliver events over the past year. Hospitality turnover runs between 63% and 80% annually. During the pandemic, an estimated 30-40% of event professionals left the industry permanently.

So we have an industry that lost a third of its experienced professionals now trying to integrate technology that, according to BCG, requires 70% of implementation resources focused on people and processes.

The math doesn't work. Unless we change the investment pattern.

What Strategic Thinking Actually Looks Like

Here's what most event professionals don't realize: evaluating technology strategically doesn't require technical knowledge. It requires clarity about your business and healthy skepticism about vendor promises.

Five questions that separate useful technology from expensive shelfware:

What decision will this help me make better?
Not what features does it offer. What specific decision, today, with my events, will improve because of this tool? If you can't answer in one sentence, you're not ready to buy.

What am I replacing?
Every tool substitutes for something. A process, a workaround, a manual effort. If you can't name what you're replacing, you don't understand the purchase.

What does success look like in six months?
Not what the vendor promises. What specific, measurable outcome would make this investment worthwhile for your organization? Faster registration? Higher satisfaction scores? More repeat bookings? Define it before you sign.

What happens when this fails?
Every system breaks eventually. What's your fallback? If the AI matchmaking goes down the night before your event, what do you do? Technology that eliminates your ability to function without it is technology that owns you.

Who owns making this work?
Not who gets trained on it. Who is accountable for ensuring it delivers value? Who evaluates whether it's actually solving the problem you bought it to solve? Tools without ownership become expensive artifacts.

Notice what's missing. No questions about algorithms. No questions about technical specifications. Just questions about business outcomes and organizational readiness.

Your twenty years of event experience is the foundation for answering these questions well. The person who knows why certain venues work better for certain formats, why some networking sessions create energy while others fall flat, why attendees actually show up, that person isn't becoming obsolete. They're becoming essential. Their contextual judgment is what makes technology useful instead of just expensive.

The Investment Shift Required

The AI in event management market will grow from $1.8 billion to $14.2 billion over the next decade. The technology is coming whether we're ready or not.

If you're leading an event organization, here's the reallocation that follows from the data:

For every unit of budget you spend on technology, spend at least two units on developing your team's ability to use it strategically. Not training on specific buttons. Developing judgment about technology in general. Teaching them to ask the five questions above. Creating space for experimentation without fear of looking foolish.

This means extending implementation timelines. It means declining to buy tools your team isn't ready to evaluate. It means recognizing that the 30% who cited training as their primary barrier were telling you exactly where your investment should go.

The Boldpush and Momentus research found that 35% of venue operators identify staff training as the top need to future-proof their organizations. That's not a complaint. That's a strategic signal.

The Choice

Tracy Judge, whose Soundings research tracked AI adoption across business events, put it directly: "In two to three years, you won't need a survey to tell who used AI and who didn't. You'll know because the people who didn't will be the ones without jobs."

This isn't about whether to adopt AI. It's about whether that adoption will generate value or become another expensive experiment that underperforms.

The BCG data is unambiguous. Seventy percent of failures are people failures. The companies that succeed invest 70% in people. The ones that keep buying tools while starving development join the 74% that never scale beyond pilots.

We know the barrier. We know the solution. The only question is whether we'll act on what we already know.