In 2026 – your events won’t need humans

This post is sponsored by Rebel & Soul.

Remember when everyone panicked that robots would steal our jobs? Well, for some, it’s beginning to happen, and they’re coming for your events too. Except here’s the delicious paradox: they’re about to make them wonderfully, unforgettably human.

Trend forecasters for 2026, and beyond, are talking about everything from “synthetic realities” to “human connection”. I believe they’re both right, and both wrong. Because 2026’s most memorable events won’t choose sides, they’ll seduce both.

Picture this: You walk into an event. AI has already predicted the traffic pattern that nearly made you late and has quietly pushed your personalised welcome back by seven minutes so that you will arrive to a cold glass of something refreshing.

The event knows you’ll drift towards the terrace at 8:15pm (you always do at these events) and so does the sustainability director you’ve been trying to meet for six months. Coincidence? Adorable that you’d think so.

A conversational AI concierge answers your nerdy question about the product with surprising depth, and then seamlessly hands you to a human expert who shares a behind the scenes product story with you when you’re ready to buy. The tech is everywhere. You notice none of it. You just feel ... seen.

Our prediction for 2026 events? Scale still matters, but only at the extremes. The Las Vegas Sphere delivers The Wizard of Oz spectacle that leaves audiences genuinely breathless. When you can wrap 580,000 square feet of LED around people and make them feel like they’re inside another universe, scale is the experience. Awe replaces the need for connection.

But very few brands have Sphere-sized budgets. For everything below that jaw-dropping threshold, the traditional 500-person gala is a thing of the past, sumptuously replaced by intimacy. Real or perceived. Today’s audiences, whether they’re buying B2B software or bubble tea, crave meaningful connections in a world that’s more tech-heavy than ever. They want experiences that whisper directly to them, even in a highly crowded room.

But here’s the twist: “boutique” doesn’t mean “small”. It means making 1,000 people feel like they’re at a dinner party for 10. It means AI orchestrating 1,000 micro-moments while humans deliver the punchlines. Forrester says Asia Pacific will drive 40% of global B2B spending by 2026 and what they’re not spending it on is dull conferences with bad coffee.

At Rebel & Soul, we’re obsessed with what happens in your brain during peak experiences. We call it “hyper-focus” – that delicious state where time stops, phones disappear, and your brand becomes the only thing that matters.

The Sphere achieves it through sheer sensory overwhelm. For the rest of us, it’s intimacy that gets us there, the feeling this moment was crafted just for you and the memories follow because you’re surrounded by people you can share them with.

Here’s the bit that should make you blink: This works for everyone. Launching an app? Create intrigue. Selling insurance? Add novelty. B2B software demo? Inject surprise. Our neuroscience-backed INVOLVE® framework has proven that memories don’t care about your industry – they care about moments that make synapses sizzle.

Gartner predicts 60% of enterprises will use AI in events by 2026. We predict that 100% of unforgettable events will use AI so invisibly, so seductively, that guests will swear it was human magic. AI is the great intimacy scaler, it’s what allows you to create that dinner-party-for-10 feeling at a conference for 1,000.

A few of the invisible AI elements we love include:

• Hyper-personalisation at scale, where AI analyses guests’ purchase histories, event attendance patterns, and social aesthetic preferences to craft individually tailored experiences – from champagne selections to art installation colour palettes – without anyone realising the environment is responding uniquely to them.

• Predictive logistics that border on clairvoyance with AI monitoring hundreds of variables throughout your event, including anticipating traffic delays for VIP arrivals, tracking catering consumption rates, flagging crowd-flow bottlenecks, enabling your team to fix problems before they exist.

• Conversational AI concierges sophisticated enough to discuss engineering specifications with enthusiasts, design heritage with collectors, and seamlessly adjust their depth based on who they're talking to.

• Creative AI as a collaborator where brands mine 75 years of archives to suggest new creative directions while preserving DNA or real-time generative art that responds to crowd sentiment.

Here’s what we believe keeps CMOs up at night: 85% of customers are more likely to buy after attending an event and 70% become repeat customers, yet most brands are still sending email newsletters like it’s 2019.

Global trend forecaster Lindsey McInerney said it beautifully: “In a world where AI is rewriting the rules, be unapologetically human.”

While your competitors are building virtual worlds nobody visits, you could be creating physical and phygital moments that people can’t stop talking about.

The brands winning in 2026 won’t be the ones with the biggest budgets or the fanciest AI. They’ll be the ones brave enough to use technology to amplify humanity. To create experiences that feel like inside jokes. To make a product launch feel like a first kiss. To turn a B2B demo into a story worth sharing at dinner.

Unless you’ve got Sphere money, intimacy is your superpower. And thanks to AI, you can now deliver it at any scale.

Whether you’re selling SaaS or streetwear, whether your budget is $10,000 or $10 million, the formula remains beautifully simple: Make them feel something and make them feel seen.

The author is Kristy Castleton, founder and chief memory maker of Rebel & Soul: MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’s gold Experiential Agency of the Year.

Image credit: Dentsu, Neuromance Event, Rebel & Soul.