The future of events in the age of AI agents

We’re entering a world where AI agents can attend, analyze, and act on event data faster than any human—so do physical events still deserve the massive budgets they command today?

Over the past few weeks, I found myself moving between some of the largest and most influential tech gatherings in the world—AWS re:Invent, Adobe Summit, Google Cloud Next, and NVIDIA GTC. I was there representing Kaltura, meeting customers, partners, and industry leaders. Like many of these trips, it was intense, energizing, and full of conversations that stretched late into the evenings.

But somewhere between the keynote halls, the side meetings, and the endless flow of sessions, a question started forming in my mind—one that stayed with me long after the flights home:

What is the future of events?

Not long ago, during COVID, the answer seemed almost obvious. Virtual events were going to replace physical ones. They were more efficient, more scalable, and easier to measure. And for a while, it really did look like that future had arrived. Entire industries pivoted overnight. Platforms matured rapidly. Audiences adapted.

And yet, something unexpected happened.

Instead of fading away, onsite events came back stronger. Not just back—but central again. CMOs didn’t treat them as legacy channels; they leaned into them. The reasoning wasn’t hard to uncover once you started listening closely. Virtual events could generate reach, sometimes massive reach. But onsite events generated something else entirely—trust. Conversations felt different. Deals moved differently. Relationships formed faster and with more depth.

At the same time, the digital side didn’t stand still. Virtual experiences evolved into highly sophisticated systems—automated journeys, personalized engagement, intent signals flowing from every click and interaction. And events themselves started changing shape. They weren’t just marketing moments anymore; they became learning environments. At any major conference now, you’ll find hundreds of sessions running in parallel, thousands of participants trying to absorb as much as possible. In many ways, learning at scale has become one of the core functions of events.

Which makes the paradox even more interesting. Learning is often more effective online. Selling is still more effective in person. Data works best when everything is digital. And yet, we continue to invest heavily in physical experiences.

After dozens of conversations across these events, I found myself arriving at a simple conclusion. This was never really about efficiency. It’s about human nature. People want proximity. They want warmth. They want to look someone in the eye before they decide to trust them. We still prefer to do business with people we’ve met, not just names we’ve seen on a screen.

But while all of this was happening on the surface, something much bigger was taking shape underneath.

At Adobe, the conversation has already shifted toward orchestrating customer experience through AI agents—systems that don’t just automate tasks but continuously decide and act across the entire journey. NVIDIA is building the infrastructure for agentic AI at scale, turning data into feedback loops that improve every interaction. Salesforce is evolving its platform into a control layer for enterprise agents, while Google is pushing toward open, multi-agent ecosystems. At the same time, Anthropic and OpenAI are shaping the standards and frameworks that allow these agents to connect, reason, and operate across systems.

Put all of this together, and a new reality starts to emerge

We are entering a world where agents will talk to agents, decisions will be made autonomously, and many of the transactions that drive business today will happen without direct human involvement.

And that leads to an uncomfortable but necessary question. If machines are increasingly responsible for discovery, evaluation, and decision-making, what role do physical events play in that future?

If you take a long-term view, the answer is not entirely reassuring. In a fully agent-driven world, the traditional role of events begins to fade. But that future isn’t here yet. Today, humans are still at the center, even as AI begins to amplify every action we take.

Rethinking events

Which brings us to the real opportunity—not in replacing events, but in rethinking what they produce. Because the biggest gap in events today isn’t the experience itself. It’s what happens afterward.

Every major event generates an extraordinary amount of value. Thousands of attendees move through hundreds of sessions. Conversations happen in hallways, meeting rooms, and booths. Feedback is shared. Ideas are exchanged. Signals—some explicit, many subtle—are everywhere. And yet, most of that disappears almost immediately. It remains unstructured, fragmented, and ultimately inaccessible to the systems that are supposed to act on it.

That’s the real challenge.

How do we take something as rich and dynamic as a live event and turn it into structured intelligence that can actually be used?

At Kaltura, this is something we’ve been working toward for years, even before the current wave of AI. We started by helping organizations extend events beyond the physical space—streaming them globally, making them accessible to remote audiences, and repurposing content so it could continue to create value long after the event ended. That alone changed the equation, allowing companies to move from one-time moments to ongoing engagement.

But what’s happening now is a much larger shift.

Today, it’s possible to capture nearly every dimension of an event. Live streams can be analyzed in real time. Slides and visuals can be processed through OCR. Audio can be transcribed and understood. Vision-language models can interpret what’s happening on screen. Customer interactions, campaigns, and conversations can all be connected into a single flow of data.

The real breakthrough, though, isn’t just capturing this information. It’s what you do with it. When you can atomize all of this content, index it, and structure it properly, it becomes something entirely different. It becomes knowledge that can be queried, activated, and—perhaps most importantly—consumed by AI agents.

And that’s where everything starts to come together.

Because in a world of agents, memory is everything. Not just raw data, but structured, contextual, accessible knowledge that can inform decisions in real time. Events, in that sense, stop being isolated experiences. They become high-signal data engines, feeding continuous understanding into systems that are constantly learning and acting.

So while humans will continue to gather, to connect, and to build trust face to face, the impact of those interactions will increasingly depend on how well we capture and translate them into something machines can understand.

The future of events, then, isn’t about choosing between physical and digital. It’s about bridging them. It’s about ensuring that every conversation, every session, every moment of engagement doesn’t just happen—but becomes part of a larger, living system of intelligence.

If the past few weeks showed me anything, it’s that we are only at the beginning of this transformation. The companies that will lead in this new era won’t just be the ones who create great experiences. They will be the ones who know how to turn those experiences into something far more powerful—data that fuels the next generation of customer interaction, whether it’s driven by humans, agents, or increasingly, both.