Why media battle to get going with AI
And why the events business is already off to a great start
I wrote last week about how, at the recent Definitive AI Forum for Media, Information & Event, I noticed a strategic gulf in mindset between media and event bosses. Same room, same day, same technology. Yet, two completely different approaches. Having now been challenged - from the media side - on what I would describe as the difference between a Northern and Southern hemisphere Christmas, it feels like the right time to rub their nose in it.
Because here’s the rub: the divide between media and events on AI is not about tools, budgets or roadmaps. It’s psychological. It’s a mindset issue long before it becomes a technological one.
If last week’s Substack captured the moment the room split, this piece is about why it split, and why that matters more than any workflow demo or keynote slide. The pattern was not subtle. Media approached AI like a risk assessment. Events approached AI like a construction project. The difference between those instinctive stances is why one industry is accelerating while the other is still patting its pockets for the fire extinguisher.
I’ll break that into four observations.
1. Media sees AI as intrusion. Events see AI as extension.
For media, AI arrives as an uninvited guest: rummaging through archives, scraping decades of labour, rewriting search, destabilising distribution channels they’ve spent ages optimising. The impulse is defensive and entirely understandable. But defence creates a very particular outcome: AI becomes something you manage, not something you use.
Events companies, by contrast, aren’t sitting around worrying about AI creeping in. They’re already building with it. Not because they’re naïve about risk, but because AI fits neatly into a world driven by logistics, data flows, matchmaking, monetisation and operational problem-solving. It’s a toolset, not a trespasser.
Media’s instinctive question is: “What will AI take from us?”
Events’ instinctive question is: “What can we build with it?”
That single shift in question creates two entirely different futures.
2. Media treats AI as workflow optimisation. Events treat it as business architecture.
If you paid attention to the morning (media) sessions at the Definitive AI Forum for Media, Information & Events, most media use cases fell into two polite buckets: “it saves time” and “it helps with admin.” Useful, yes, but those address efficiency, not transformation.
The events firms, by contrast, spoke in the language of product and commercial architecture: new revenue lines, market design, strategic capability. They weren’t using AI to only accelerate old tasks; they were using it to create new ones.
Think about the difference: lead intelligence instead of floor space. Matchmaking engines instead of blind footfall. Always-on insight products instead of post-event PDFs. Churn reduced to zero because the product becomes irreplaceable.
Media tended to look at AI and see a clever helper. Events looked at AI and saw scaffolding. And it’s very hard to build a new business model if the only thing you allow AI to do is fix your backlog.
3. Media waits for certainty. Events start with possibility.
This was the quietest insight of the day, but probably the most telling. Media leaders kept reaching for clarity, standards, regulations, licensing agreements and copyright protections. It was only about the things that bring stability. Events leaders kept reaching for momentum.
Media’s questions sounded like: “What rules will govern this?”
Events’ questions sounded like: “What could we build before the rules arrive?”
One posture produces policy decks. The other produces prototypes. And in the long run, prototypes win. They create the reality that policy later tries to catch up with.
4. The cost of caution is opportunity.
The irony is almost cruel. Media has the storytelling, the content, the archives, the brands and the audiences. Events have none of those inherited advantages. But events have something media increasingly does not: permission to experiment. A culture that says, “Try it, break it, rebuild it, try again.” A culture that treats AI like dynamite to catch fish, not sacred waters.
That’s why the events industry is moving at speed. Unless something changes, media will find itself not replaced by AI, but overshadowed by adjacent industries that simply used AI better.
What this means for media leaders now
If the events industry is already building with AI and the media industry is still negotiating its feelings about it, the gap will widen fast. In fact, the gap widens every second of every day.
So here’s the mindset shift the media world needs, urgently: move from protection to creation, because AI cannot only be something you guard against; from certainty to experimentation, because waiting for perfect conditions guarantees arriving too late; from workflow to product, because efficiency alone does not justify investment and only new value will; and from framing everything as risk to framing it as opportunity, because copyright matters, but so does continued relevance.
None of this requires abandoning caution. But it does require abandoning paralysis.