Everyone in live events is talking about AI right now, but almost all of that conversation is happening at the very top of the market. The biggest ticketing platforms spent this year shipping autonomous agents and AI assistants, while the independent venues putting on most of the shows are still reconciling ticket counts by hand the morning after.
I recently spoke with Backstage Viral about that gap and why Pabs Entertainment is focused on closing it.
The part of the conversation that stuck with me most was how normal the manual work has become. Mid-sized promoters still make staffing calls from gut instinct and last year’s attendance numbers copied into a spreadsheet. Concessions get ordered based on whoever remembers what sold out last time. Guest questions get answered one email at a time. Nobody in that picture is lazy. The tools simply were never built for operators at their scale.
The principle I keep coming back to is that operational infrastructure is the real product. Before Pabs Entertainment, I spent years building automation systems for companies losing hours every week to repetitive tasks nobody noticed anymore. Live events have the same problem. Staffing forecasts, inventory planning, and guest communication are infrastructure problems, and they need solving long before anyone builds a flashy customer-facing feature on top of them.
The numbers show the split clearly. Nearly half of venues now use some form of AI in their operations, and they are seeing less overtime and fewer equipment failures. That also means more than half are not there yet. Enterprise tools assume clean data, integration budgets, and technical staff that a venue running a handful of shows a month with a part-time team simply does not have.
What surprised me was how much of this traces back to golf. On the course, I learned that outcomes rarely turn on one dramatic shot. Small mistakes compound, and so do small advantages. Predicting how many staff you need on a Thursday night is less exciting than a dynamic pricing engine, but for an operator on thin margins, it is the decision that compounds.
So here is the bet. Independent venues should not have to wait years for enterprise AI to trickle down to them. Lighter, purpose-built systems sized for lean teams can close that gap now. The largest vendors are unlikely to prioritize that work on their own, which is exactly why it is worth doing.
Read the full article on Backstage Viral.
The venues that win the next few years will be the ones that treat operations as seriously as the show itself.
