Five AI-fueled, non-obvious questions for 2025

By Henry Coutinho-Mason , author of The Future Normal and Trend-Driven Innovation. Henry is also the creator of VisuAIse Futures, which he’s bringing to IMEX Frankfurt 2025 as part of our education program. 

Keeping up with things is hard. Especially at the moment, when AI has made the hamster wheel of innovation spin faster than ever. One signal: There’s An AI For That (a directory of AI tools) currently lists 24,468 tools covering 15,786 tasks. It’s dizzying.  

One secret I learned in my decade running a global consumer trend agency is that the best innovators are thieves. They look to adjacent industries, spot emerging customer expectations, then use these to create compelling new experiences for their own audiences.  

So, instead of a high-level 2025 event trend piece (there are enough of those flying around!), let’s look at some recent AI innovations from outside the event industry and ask what they’ll mean for you and your audiences in 2025.  

What if… every attendee had a second screen with an AI-powered personalized stream of extra context and relevant insight?  

Microsoft’s Copilot Vision is a multimodal AI (which means it can see and hear what’s on your screen), offering guidance and answers in real-time. Google’s NotebookLM draws on your personal knowledge base to give more focused answers. Combine these and it’s not hard to imagine an event where what is said on stage is instantly linked back to every attendee’s current business challenges and contexts.    

What if… audiences could learn useful skills while also solving real-world challenges at the same time?  

Fruitpunch AI invites people to learn technical AI skills while tackling social or environmental issues for NGOs such as the United Nations and the WWF—think monitoring audio recordings for signals of elephant poaching, or detecting toxic emissions from factories. How energized would your attendees be if you transformed dry educational content into a chance to do good?    

What if… your audience could co-create a vision of the future, together?

Generative AI’s unpredictability can make it hard to deploy reliably. Adobe’s Project Concept embraces this by using generative AI to allow graphic designers to mash up and explore more creative ideas, faster. 

VisuAIse Futures brings this to events—turning participants’ rough analog sketches into “better” digital versions, before bringing them all together on the big screen. What if you used AI to augment the live experience by enabling every attendee to contribute? 

What if… AI agents could help attendees make authentic connections?  

You’ll hear a lot about autonomous AI agents in 2025. For example, LinkedIn’s Hiring Assistant AI agent claims to handle 70% of recruiters’ administrative workload, helping them spend more time with candidates and employers. How will you avoid creating AI agents that just add to the digital noise? One idea—what if an AI agent could search every attendee’s public posts and match people to a specific conversation starter? What if it could also curate small groups to watch specific sessions together?  

What if… robots could (finally) enable the industry to have fewer people working better jobs, at higher wages?  

While in-person events are likely to remain resilient from AI-related job losses in the short term, the NY-based fast casual dining outlet Kernel offers a glimpse of how robots could change the industry. Its founder, Steve Ells (who previously founded Chipotle), believes that robots will enable Kernel to operate a restaurant with just three staff, rather than the typical 12-20; he claims that this will allow the brand to pay higher wages and attract the best staff. This won’t be most industry professional’s reality in 2025, but it’s a future normal worth working toward.    

As you look to 2025, don’t buy into the media fearmongering about AI. Even Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has observed that “humans are wired to care about other humans”. The future for the event community is a bright one—but only if you remember that AI needs to be a tool, not a goal itself.