If you're not using AI to help manage or plan your events, you're missing an opportunity to make a lot of the work easier.
I'm not saying you should use AI for every part of your event. There are plenty of things that still need a human touch, especially when you're working with vendors, attendees, sponsors, and your event team.
But AI can be incredibly helpful for some of the more tedious administrative, marketing, research, and planning tasks.
Here are 12 of our favorite AI tools that we use or recommend for event planning.
1. ChatGPT
ChatGPT is probably the AI tool we use the most.
For events, we mainly use it for writing. You can use ChatGPT to create event announcements, vendor emails, social media posts, FAQs, sponsorship outreach, event descriptions, vendor instructions, and other copy you need throughout the planning process.
For example, instead of spending 20 minutes writing an announcement letting vendors know when setup starts, you can give ChatGPT the important details and have it create a draft for you.
We still recommend reviewing and editing everything before sending it. AI works best as a starting point, not something you blindly copy and paste.
2. CapCut
If you're promoting your event on TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, or Facebook, CapCut can save you a lot of editing time.
We use CapCut heavily in our own social media workflow.
Its AI editing tools can help with captions, trimming footage, removing pauses, creating clips, improving audio, and putting together promotional videos much faster.
You can take footage from your previous market or event and turn it into short promotional videos for your next event without needing to be an experienced video editor.
3. Claude
Claude is another AI assistant we use regularly, but we tend to use it differently than ChatGPT.
One area where Claude can be especially useful is website development.
If your event has its own website, Claude can help you build pages, make website changes, troubleshoot code, create layouts, and work through technical problems.
We've used AI coding tools extensively when building our own websites.
For most event organizers, you probably won't need Claude unless you're managing your website yourself. But if you are comfortable working with code, it can save a lot of time.
4. Canva
Canva has added AI throughout its design tools, and it can be useful when you're creating event graphics.
You can use it to brainstorm or create:
- Event flyers
- Social media graphics
- Vendor announcements
- Sponsor graphics
- Event schedules
- Signs
- Posters
One thing I would caution against is publishing completely AI-generated designs without editing them.
We've seen plenty of backlash toward obvious AI-generated graphics.
Use AI to get ideas or speed up the first draft, then go back through the design yourself. Add your branding, real event photos, accurate information, and your own style.
5. Marketlly
If you're running a vendor market, farmers market, or community event with vendors, this is where Marketlly comes in.
Marketlly helps organizers manage vendor applications, payments, booth layouts, communications, workflows, and other parts of vendor management.
It also includes an AI assistant that can help organizers manage their markets and handle administrative tasks.
Instead of piecing together Google Forms, spreadsheets, payment links, emails, and separate tools, you can manage your vendors from one platform.
This is especially useful if you're processing dozens of vendor applications for every event.
6. Gamma
Gamma is useful when you need to put together a presentation quickly.
Let's say you're organizing a festival and need to present your plan to sponsors, city officials, a board, a venue, or other stakeholders.
Instead of spending hours designing a presentation from scratch, you can give Gamma your information and use AI to create an initial deck.
You can then go through the presentation, change the wording, add your branding, replace images, and make it fit your event.
It's especially helpful when the presentation itself isn't the main project and you just need something professional to communicate your ideas.
7. Wispr Flow
Wispr Flow is one of those tools that becomes more useful once you get used to speaking instead of typing.
We use it for brainstorming, taking notes, writing ideas down, and working through projects.
When you're planning an event, you might have ideas coming to you while you're looking at the venue, meeting with vendors, or discussing something with your team.
Instead of stopping to type everything, you can dictate what you're thinking.
Its AI cleans up your speech as it turns it into text, which makes voice notes much more usable.
I personally like it for getting ideas out quickly and then organizing them later.
8. Gemini
If your organization already runs heavily on Google Workspace, Gemini can be useful.
You might already be planning your event using Google Docs, Sheets, Gmail, Drive, Calendar, or Forms.
Gemini gives you another way to work with the information you're already keeping inside Google's tools.
For example, you could use AI to help summarize information, work through spreadsheet data, draft communications, or organize planning documents.
If you're still managing vendor applications through Google Forms, there are dedicated event-management platforms that can handle more of the workflow, but Gemini can make an existing Google-based setup a little easier to manage.
9. Notion AI
Notion can work well as the central planning space for an event.
You can keep your event timeline, vendor information, sponsorship notes, marketing plan, meeting notes, task lists, and internal documentation together.
Notion's AI Meeting Notes can also transcribe and summarize meetings, keeping those notes alongside the projects and documents your team is already working on.
For a larger event with several people involved, having one place where everyone can see what has been decided can prevent a lot of confusion.
You could create pages for marketing, vendors, sponsors, logistics, entertainment, permits, and day-of-event operations.
10. Zapier
Zapier is less about creating content and more about connecting everything together.
It lets you create automated workflows between thousands of apps. A trigger happens in one application, and Zapier can automatically perform actions in another.
For event planning, that might mean automatically creating tasks, updating spreadsheets, organizing attendee information, sending notifications, or moving information between the different tools you're using.
Zapier even has workflows specifically designed around event attendee data, RSVPs, communications, calendar syncing, and other event-management tasks.
The more tools you're using to run your event, the more valuable automation becomes.
You Don't Need AI for Everything
The biggest mistake would be trying to automate your entire event.
Events are still built around people.
You're dealing with vendors, attendees, volunteers, sponsors, employees, venues, and community members. Those relationships shouldn't suddenly become completely automated just because AI exists.
Instead, look at the repetitive parts of your event process.
If you're spending hours writing the same emails, organizing applications, taking meeting notes, editing promotional videos, creating presentations, researching information, or copying data between different tools, that's where AI can make a real difference.
Start with one or two tools that solve an actual problem in your workflow.
Once those are saving you time, start looking for the next task you can simplify.