Cvent won Outstanding Contribution to AI in Events for CventIQ™, the AI engine behind the Cvent platform powering the entire event lifecycle.
Ask most of the industry where AI belongs in events and you will hear a list of features: a chatbot here, a translation tool there, a matchmaking engine somewhere else. Cvent’s winning argument was different, and more ambitious. Its contribution is not a feature at all, but AI that sits across the whole platform and quietly reshapes how events are planned, delivered and measured. That breadth, and the discipline behind it, is what earned Cvent the category’s top honour: Outstanding Contribution to AI in Events.
“We want CventIQ to become an event planners’ new favourite co-worker,” said David Quattrone, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Cvent.
“It listens to what customers need, suggests ideas and takes care of everything they need to make their events memorable.”
AI across the whole lifecycle
Rather than bolt AI onto one use case, CventIQ spans strategy and forecasting, content creation, personalisation, feedback analysis and planner-to-venue collaboration. Planners use an AI Writing Assistant to turn rough drafts into polished, on-brand copy for event sites, invitations, app content, surveys and even venue RFPs. AI recommendations help attendees find the right sessions, people, and exhibitors. Live transcripts, Session Snapshots and Takeaways turn talks into reusable knowledge attendees can actually use afterwards. Cvent Assistant allows planners to ask reporting questions directly and get answers without having to run a report. AI-powered video tools turn event and webinar recordings into clips, summaries, and social-ready content, so every live moment keeps working after the event ends. It is, as Cvent puts it, AI turned from a buzzword into a practical coworker.
Events-first, and built to be trusted
The distinction the judges valued most is that CventIQ is events-first, not AI-first. It reasons over event-specific objects, sessions, speakers, exhibitors, RFPs, using models informed by decades of best practice and proprietary benchmarks across millions of events, rather than generic internet content. And Cvent treats it as mission-critical infrastructure, not a lab experiment: tuned transcription with custom vocabularies before summarisation, validation of outputs against known reports, human review, role-based access and continuous monitoring. Responsible AI here is a design constraint, not an afterthought.
Scale gives the contribution its weight
What makes this an industry contribution rather than a single clever product is Cvent’s reach. The company was recently named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Event Marketing and Management Platforms for the third consecutive year. Over more than 25 years, the company has grown to 34,000+ customers and powered 8M+ events, connecting planners, marketers, attendees, hoteliers and vendors in one ecosystem. And that ecosystem has continued to expand: the acquisitions of Goldcast in December 2025 and ON24 in 2026 extend CventIQ into digital events, webinars and content repurposing workflows, meaning the same AI now reaches audiences whether they are in the room or watching from anywhere in the world. When AI is embedded that broadly, and shown working in practice, as with Session Snapshots at Cvent’s own CONNECT event (which caught the eye of a Forbes journalist attending last year’s event), it has a genuine chance to shape how the whole industry adopts AI in day-to-day event work.
The judges recognised exactly that. Shervin Mashayekh called it “a very strong entry for Outstanding Contribution to AI in Events, mainly because it is not presented as a single feature, but as a platform-wide intelligence layer across the event ecosystem.” Taline Jones felt it operated on “a different level to most of the entries,” precisely because AI runs across the whole event set-up rather than sitting in one place.
“This feels like a different level to most of the entries — it’s not one use case, it’s AI running across the whole event setup. A strong contribution that’s making AI part of how events are actually run.”
— Taline Jones, Judge, Event Technology Awards AI Edition 2026
“Winning this award is a huge validation of our vision for CventIQ and the future of the events industry. Utilising 25 years of Cvent customer experience and data, every feature we release is designed to make events more human-led, more measurable and more impactful. It’s not about embedding AI for the sake of it – it’s seeing where event professionals and marketers need it most and designing something that provides the best outcomes based on their needs. AI can’t replicate the power of events, but with CventIQ, it can help supercharge them.”
- David Quattrone, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Cvent
Why it matters for the industry
“Cvent’s win reframes what “good” AI looks like in events. The most convincing contribution is no longer the flashiest feature; it is AI embedded across the operating model, grounded in real event data and governed responsibly at scale.
Since the award was announced, Cvent has made clear how far it intends to take that conviction. At Cvent CONNECT 2026 in Nashville, the company unveiled a new brand identity built around what it calls the Presence Premium™: the idea that as AI floods every channel with synthetic content, the value of real human presence grows, not shrinks. It is a market thesis that CventIQ is purpose-built to support. Alongside the brand launch, Cvent announced 34 net-new AI capabilities across the event lifecycle and a $1 billion-plus investment in technology and product innovation over the next three years, the largest in the company’s history. The award win, it turns out, was a starting point.
If the platform that so much of the industry already runs on treats AI this way, as connected, event-aware infrastructure rather than a bolt-on, it sets a standard the rest of the market will feel. That is what an Outstanding Contribution should do.
About Cvent
Cvent builds technology to power the highest performing events on the planet. With its purpose-built and AI-powered platform, data insights, unrivaled ecosystem, and deep expertise, Cvent helps its customers deliver real event outcomes.
Cvent gives event professionals the technology to run in-person, virtual, and hybrid events of any size, marketers the solutions to deliver event-led growth, and hotels, venues, and destinations a leading global marketplace to win and keep business. With intelligent tools across the event lifecycle, real-time analytics, personalized attendee experiences, and $20B+ in group business sourced through the ecosystem annually, Cvent delivers the AI-driven technology, insight, and scale customers need to power high-performing events and better outcomes.
445,000+ users across 34,000+ organizations rely on Cvent. With enterprise-grade security and compliance, hundreds of industry accolades, leading customer satisfaction, 8M+ events managed, and its third consecutive year as a Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Leader for Event Marketing and Management Platforms, customers around the world trust Cvent to deliver when it matters most.
