I’ve just finished reviewing the product announcements from this year’s Cvent CONNECT, and there was a lot to digest. AI was the big story with the launch of CventIQ, a suite of integrated AI capabilities across the entire Cvent ecosystem. Rather than present Cvent IQ as a standalone product, the team looked at it through the lens of four strategic themes: empowering the field, delivering high-impact attendee experiences, increasing user efficiencies, and managing the event lifecycle. Here’s my take on each of those areas:
Empowering the field. Cvent officially rolled out Cvent Essentials to help field teams execute smaller local events more consistently and do more with the data they’re generating. This is timely, as Forrester data shows that 59% of organizations plan to run more of these smaller field events over the next 12 months. Cvent Essentials will also be part of Events+ (together with Cvent Webinar), encouraging clients to move to more centrally managed event programs. While the Essentials announcement makes sense, it will be interesting to see how Cvent positions Splash within its portfolio and how it differentiates it from Essentials.
Delivering high-impact attendee experiences. Cvent made two standout announcements here. It will apply CventIQ to its global contact profile to identify “discovered interests” and use dynamic audience segments to deliver more personalized attendee experiences. This aligns with Forrester’s Q1 2025 State Of B2B Events Survey, which found that 79% of event leaders are prioritizing personalization this year (a 4% year-on-year increase). Cvent also announced a personalized AI assistant agent powered by a hierarchy of connected agents. These agents include an event expert, brand ambassador, content curator, and network navigator. The array of different agents was slightly confusing, although attendees aren’t exposed to this. It will be interesting to see the uptake that Cvent gets, as Forrester data shows that only 22% of event planners and marketers either currently offer, or plan to offer, attendee assistance via an AI-powered chatbot over the next 12 months.
Increasing user efficiencies. Cvent announced improvements in AI-driven productivity including content development, attendee modification management, and (most interestingly) event reporting and insights. The most notable announcements around reporting and insights were natural language report generation, improved session analysis, enhanced cross-event analytics, and predictive registration analytics (later this year). Cvent had been trailing in this area, but these updates close the gap. While this is good news for many organizations, leading enterprises will still prefer to extract and manipulate event data outside of their event platform.
Managing the event lifecycle. Here, Cvent focused on expanding support for tier-one events, and three announcements stood out. Clients will be able to promote events via LinkedIn using existing audience segments — a smart move. Secondly, in addition to air travel, Cvent now supports attendee rail bookings. While only 38% of event leaders cite reducing the environmental impact of their events as a priority, younger attendees increasingly value this, and this is another welcome addition. Finally, Cvent announced a “data bridge,” offering real-time access to event data with flexibility in terms of what data syncs to where. Doing more with event data has been identified as a top priority in Forrester surveys covering event trends for the past two years, so this is exciting, and I would have liked the team to spend longer digging into this.
Forrester clients interested in learning more about event technology can read our latest evaluation of the space, The Forrester Wave™: All-In-One Event Management Platforms, Q4 2024, or schedule a guidance session with me.
