AI Everywhere – Are We Overdoing It in Ticketing?

Doesn't it annoy you, too? Suddenly, AI is everywhere. Generic thought pieces flood LinkedIn. Friends name-drop ChatGPT in every afternoon chat. Even vacation plans come pre-packaged from an AI. It feels like not every creation or daily tool needs to be infested with artificial intelligence. Sometimes a human story or a simple tool does just fine. A hand-crafted website can still feel more special than any generic AI-generated page. So why are we in the ticketing industry also more and more fixated on slapping “AI” on everything?

Let’s take a step back from the hype and look at what really matters in ticketing technology – and where AI does make a difference (and where it doesn’t).

Do Your Digital Homework Before Chasing AI — All of Us

Before we get carried away with the latest AI trend, let’s face an uncomfortable truth: many organizations haven’t mastered the basics of digital transformation yet. We tout futuristic AI solutions, yet we still wrangle daily with Excel exports and manual processes to get work done. Digital maturity isn’t achieved by chasing shiny new tech — it comes from steadily adding business value through proven digital improvements.

Consider these realities in 2025’s business world:

• About 60% of businesses (in the U.S.) still rely on Excel spreadsheets for critical functions
• 75% of logistics leaders admit a large share of their processes are still analog and manual, stuck in paperwork and email
• More than 40% of all work could be automated with today’s tech, yet it remains manual in practice

Despite living in an era of cloud software and AI tools, companies are “still operating like it’s 2005” in many areas. In fact, while 91% of businesses have some digital initiative, only 30% of digital transformations fully succeed in delivering their goals. The rest get bogged down because they “digitize their existing chaos” without fixing underlying processes. The result is often “automation theater” — fancy tech demos and dashboards, but behind the scenes, everyone is still emailing spreadsheets around.

The lesson? Before over-focusing on AI, organizations should get their digital house in order. Modernize the basic workflows — creating ticketing reports for the board; uploading discount codes into the backend; assigning ticket contingents to partners — with reliable, user-friendly tools. Digital maturity comes from solving real pain points, not from hyping the latest buzzword. As Simon Weber put it, at this years TBF “Manual exports ≠ real-time decisions. Integration ≠ ownership. You can’t control what you can’t see.”

Stop Putting “AI” in Front of Everything

It seems every product nowadays is marketed as “AI-powered,” whether it truly uses artificial intelligence or not. In the ticketing world, too, vendors big and small have been eager to rebrand routine features as “AI this” and “AI that.” But let’s be clear: just because something involves a computer doesn’t mean it’s genuine AI.

Real artificial intelligence involves machines performing tasks that normally require human intelligence – things like learning from data, pattern recognition, decision-making under uncertainty, natural language understanding, etc. It’s not just a bunch of if-then rules or basic statistics. As Jonathan Cohen of Robocap noted, many companies claim to have AI, but “they might have an algorithm, but they don’t have machine learning, and they don’t have neural networks.” In fact, almost one-third of companies hyping “AI” lack real AI capabilities — a wave of “AI washing” that risks becoming as hollow as greenwashing.

The problem? It sets unrealistic expectations and erodes trust. Not every tool needs the AI label. Some well-crafted rule-based systems solve problems effectively without being actual AI. Overhyping undermines credibility — and makes it harder to recognize real innovation when it appears.

Call it AI only when it beats the status quo on speed, clarity, and relevance. If it doesn’t feel faster or smarter than what buyers used five minutes ago, it’s not value.

Data Is the New Gold: What to Do Before AI

If AI is the glitter, then data is the gold beneath it. Without data, AI is useless. And without digital maturity, your data is locked away in silos, manual exports, or vendor black boxes. This is where the real homework lies.

Forward-thinking organizations in ticketing are already showing what it means to take control:

• Bad Bunny concerts in Puerto Rico: Tickets were restricted to residents by creatively combining coupon codes distributed locally with our digital ticketing tech. That’s not AI magic — it’s smart data usage to protect fans and ensure fairness.
• Schalke 04: Implemented NFC ticketing that links entry directly to fan IDs, reducing fraud and enabling super quick entry, expanding this even to season tickets with new chip cards. Again, no AI, just data in practice.
• Leading U.S. universities & sports clubs: Many now segment fans based on purchase behavior, churn likelihood, and loyalty potential — running campaigns on top of live ticketing data rather than static lists directly from within our ticketing platform.

These examples prove a point: control of first-party ticketing data lifts the experience to the standard set outside our industry. AI can then amplify what already works — predicting churn, adjusting offers, or automating retention. But without the basics, AI is just noise.

Keeping Our Focus (and Keeping It Human)

The real goal? Winning the experience game and let technology handle complexity so people can focus on the human side — curating experiences, building fan relationships, and making strategic decisions.

Not every pain point in ticketing is a candidate for AI. Many need better UX, smarter workflows, better collaboration between stakeholders or manage their marketing activities from within the ticketing platform without having to rely on sloppy sync between systems. That’s where digital maturity comes in, and where vivenu places its roadmap focus. Just take a look on what we have done to audience segmentation.

Yes, AI has potential. But it’s most powerful when it supports staff — not sidelines them. Used thoughtfully, it saves time, handles routine work, and lets teams focus on the irreplaceable human touch that makes live events great.

Where Could AI Really Help Ticketing Next?

There are exciting frontiers, if tackled with purpose:

• Personalized Marketing: Use behavior and demand signals to surface the right event and seat first. If it doesn’t shorten the path to “Buy,” it’s not personalization.
• Smarter Support: 24/7 AI agents could answer ticketing questions in natural language — and escalate to humans only when needed. It’s fast, scalable, and customer-friendly.
• Bot Detection: Anomaly detection algorithms could automatically flag suspicious purchases or bot behavior in real time, without relying only on static rules.
• Faster and more Efficient Data Analysis: real-time decision making, opportunity identification, data visualization, and reports.
• Better In-Venue Experience: AI can recommend food, predict crowd flow, and customize content. The Golden State Warriors, for example, already use 100M+ data points to tailor each fan’s experience.

These are areas where AI could truly help. But the bar must remain high: does it solve a real problem better than existing tools? If yes, great. If not, skip the hype.

Conclusion: Data First, AI Second

The truth? Technology is a means, not an end. AI should help us build better experiences, not distract us from the essentials. But before AI can deliver value, businesses need to get their foundations right: clean, accessible, and actionable data.

Because without data maturity, AI is just theater. With it, you unlock real control, deeper insights, and match the experience bar for future-ready growth.

So let’s say it clearly: In ticketing, data is still the gold you need to mine. AI is only worth its shine if you’ve done your digital homework first. Data first, experience next, AI as the multiplier.