Smarter Events, Smarter Scams: What Event Pros Need to Know About AI
The events world is buzzing about AI. On the concerns side, there’s everything from AI’s environmental impacts to data privacy concerns to market impacts raising eyebrows. And on the opportunities side, AI adopters taut the potential to save time while also producing better work.
Unfortunately, the same technology that’s saving us time is also giving scammers a terrifying advantage. And the more we rely on AI to work smarter, the more cybercriminals are relying on AI to trick us.
Let’s talk about both sides of the AI coin.
The Upside: AI Is Making Event Planning Faster, Easier, and More Creative
With the rise of both event-specific AI tools and the proliferation of general-use large language models, event professionals are beginning to report the various ways they’ve adopted AI into their workflow.
A May 15th, 2026 discussion in the National Meeting Planners Group on Facebook highlights the real experience of using AI for events work. Respondents report using it for a wide variety of creative and logistics assists, including: creating marketing emails, drafting board reports, researching menu layouts, breaking down invoices, generating Excel formulas, turning RFPs into comparison spreadsheets, and much more.
The ability to use AI tools for these tasks is part of a critical professional skill: digital literacy. The Tech Times reports that having a strong foundation of basic digital skills - like using productivity tools and troubleshooting - is key to employability and promotional considerations, as it indicates an efficiency and adaptability to new tech tools that is critical in today’s workplace.
But while we’re busy finding smart, helpful applications for AI, scammers are too. And without building awareness of the darker side of these tools, even experienced event professionals could put their events and organizations at risk.
The Downside: Scammers Are Using AI to Target Event Planners
The same technology that helps us streamline work also helps scammers create shockingly convincing attacks. Most planners have, by now, learned to spot a suspicious email address or an unexpected attachment. But AI-generated deepfakes are a different challenge entirely.
Skift Meetings’ article “Deepfake Scams are Coming for Events” highlights the dangers of the deepfake scam - a situation where AI is used to generate video, photo, or audio content that looks and sounds exactly like the real people you know. That means you could receive phone calls and voicemails that actually sound like a vendor you’ve worked with, requesting a change in payment information, or your CEO requesting that a payment get processed for a last minute change. What used to be easy to spot - a typo, a weird greeting, a suspicious link - now looks and sounds like legitimate phone calls and voicemails.
How We Can Stay Ahead
Event professionals are not new to cyberscams, because we operate under three conditions that make scams easier:
- We often work quickly with many partners, which means small warning signs can get missed.
- We rely heavily on email, digital documents, and phone communication, rather than in-person discussions in the event-planning stage when many payments get processed.
- We manage large quantities of payments, high-dollar transactions, and sensitive data.
Cybersecurity scams thrive in high-pressure moments, which many of us face on a regular basis, which is why staying ahead of scams usually involves slowing down. Many classic cybersecurity precautions still apply to AI deepfake scams:
- Always verify payment or banking changes using a known phone number.
- Treat every urgent request with caution, especially if it involves money.
- Confirm speaker or executive messages through a second communication channel.
- Educate seasonal staff, volunteers, and vendors on common scams.
- Strengthen basic digital skills: MFA, secure Wi-Fi, password hygiene, phishing awareness.
- Watch for odd audio/video artifacts that indicate potential manipulation.
The Bottom Line: AI Is Both Our Best New Tool and Scammers’ Best New Trick
AI is a new tool in event professionals’ toolbox, providing ways to be more creative, more efficient, and more strategic. But it’s also giving scammers unprecedented power to impersonate, manipulate, and deceive.
As cyberscams continue to target everyone from healthcare to local government, event professionals are just one population that needs to stay up to date on cybersecurity and digital literacy. Staying informed, slowing down, and approaching financial and urgent requests with caution can protect your organization, your event, and your attendees.
These are skills that grow with intention and repetition. Over time, the same instincts that alert you to an unexpected attachment or suspicious link will help you recognize new forms of digital fraud - even ones powered by AI.
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The MPI MN feature articles cover the people and stories happening in Minnesota's events community. Have a story idea or know someone who should be featured? Send it to Ellie Hartmann at ehartmann@lmc.org.
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