Planners already source venues with AI

of planners already use AI tools in venue sourcing, and 69% expect to increase that use. 90% describe themselves as optimistic about the industry's state.

The trend

A majority is no longer an experiment. At 54% adoption with 69% expecting to increase their use, AI in venue sourcing has crossed from early adoption into standard practice, and the direction of the second number says the remaining minority is a shrinking position rather than a stable one. The 90% optimism figure frames the adoption correctly: these tools are not being taken up defensively, by an industry trying to cut its way through a hard year. They are being taken up by planners who describe their industry's state in optimistic terms, which means the tools are becoming part of how a confident profession works, not part of how a frightened one saves money.

Venue sourcing is also a revealing place for the change to land first. It is the stage of planning where a large field of options is screened against constraints: capacity, dates, geography, price. Work shaped like that, many candidates, clear criteria, a shortlist as the output, is exactly where software assistance compounds fastest. The desk reads this number as a marker for the planning workflow as a whole: the screening stages of event work are being mechanized in order, starting with the most screenable, and each stage that mechanizes changes what the human stages downstream receive.

What this means for a planner booking a speaker this quarter

The venue desk has been screened by software for a while; the speaker desk is next in the same queue, and in many organizations the same tools are already summarizing the field. For the planner, the implication is not that a machine should choose your keynote. It is that the materials your committee reads are increasingly being gathered, summarized and ranked before a human sees them, which raises the value of proof that survives summarization: a talk with a stated problem, a clear structure, a watchable film, and a one-sheet that carries the argument intact. A speaker whose case depends on a long conversation to explain will lose rounds they never know they were in.

There is a defensive use of the same trend, and it belongs to you rather than the tools. Use the software the way 54% of your peers already do: to widen the field and screen it against your constraints, dates, format, audience, fee structure, and let it produce the long shortlist. Then spend the committee's human hours where software is weakest: watching the films, reading the talks against your room's problem, and judging what a room will do the week after. This quarter, the planners who gain from the adoption curve are the ones who automate the screening and protect the judgment.

The one move

Run your next speaker search in two passes: let the tools build the screened longlist against your written constraints, and reserve the committee's time exclusively for watching the finalists' films in full.

Source: Cvent 2025 Planner Sourcing Report, Europe edition · Period/scope: Reported 2025 · UK & Europe planners · Desk reviewed: October 24, 2026

Readings are published with their source, reporting period, and geographic scope, and are labeled with the date the desk last reviewed them. Historical readings are never presented as live. Desk updated October 2026.