Attendee expectations are changing. They want, and frankly they need, to accomplish more at the events they attend. More connections. More insight. More serendipity. Every incremental opportunity matters, because conferences are expensive, calendars are tight, and ROI is being measured more rigorously than ever.
That shift is the reason AI in event apps finally has real momentum. The question isn't whether AI belongs in the experience. The question is what kind of AI actually moves the needle.
In late 2024, Highbar shipped the industry's first chatbot event app. It was a moment for us. The product worked. The agent was smart. We were ahead.
And then attendees didn't use it.
Not in the numbers we expected. A small slice of power users loved it. Everyone else looked at the chat icon, wasn't sure what they could ask, wasn't sure if it was worth the effort to find out, and went back to scrolling the schedule. Same as they've always done.
That's the painful learning: AI features that require effort on the attendee's part will only ever serve the small slice of attendees who like to tinker. The geeks geek out. Everyone else gets nothing.
If we wanted AI to actually change the attendee experience, we needed a different starting point.
The shift we made is simple to describe and hard to build. Instead of asking attendees to engage with AI features, we make the AI engage with them.
The moment an attendee opens the app, a personalization layer is already in place. Recommendations are waiting. No profile to fill out. No survey to answer. No prompts to write. Just open the app and see who you should meet, which sessions matter for you, and which sponsors are worth your time.
We call this AI Curation. As of today, it's live for every Highbar event.
We previewed this approach a few weeks ago at Julius Solaris' Boldpush AI Demo Day, and the reaction from the room confirmed what our early customers were already telling us. This is the direction the rest of the industry should be heading.
Under the hood, AI Curation is a team of agents working in the background. They don't need much to start. A company name and a title is enough. From there, the agents surface:
Each recommendation comes with a plain-English reason. Not a confidence score. Not a model output. A sentence an attendee can read in two seconds and decide whether to act on.
For attendees who want to go deeper, the agents will keep going deeper. Set a specific goal, something only the attendee knows matters to them, and the agents work to find the needle in the haystack that delivers on it.
The other half of the painful learning was that organizers don't want another product they have to operationalize. AI features that require setup, configuration, content tuning, or attendee onboarding don't get used at the organizer level either. The team running the event is already underwater.
So AI Curation is zero setup on both sides. Zero for attendees. Zero for organizers. You launch your event on Highbar and the agents come along for the ride.
That's the bar we set ourselves. A modern event app should be simple, accessible, and deeply personalized, without a heavy lift on either side.
AI Curation is the first piece of a bigger shift. As agents get more capable and as the cost of running them keeps falling, the entire model of event apps changes. The work moves into the background. The experience moves into the foreground.
The shiny AI feature era is closing. The passive AI era is starting. We think the events that adopt this shift early will deliver experiences their attendees actually remember, and the ones that stick to chat icons in the corner will keep wondering why their AI investment isn't moving the needle.
Take AI Curation for a spin at Highbar.ai, or get in touch if you want to see it on your own event.
