That is not the story the industry likes to tell about itself. The show floor still sells the visible layer: the headset demo, the projection-mapped tunnel, the drone swarm drawing a logo over a stadium. But the ambition, and increasingly the budget, has moved backstage, into the systems that decide who gets in, what gets programmed, and what happens to the content once the house lights come up.
The money is real, if still modest. Grand View Research sizes the immersive segment of events and experiential at roughly $1.9 billion in 2024, rising to about $9.3 billion by 2030. The more telling signal is in how events are now made. In American Express Global Business Travel's latest Meetings and Events Forecast, half of planners said AI now runs through their work from planning to execution. It has moved from a feature in the attendee app to part of the production desk.
The backstage layer
Five shifts carry most of the change.
Attendee intelligence. Badge scans, session check-ins, and app behavior now feed platforms that show organizers an event as it unfolds: which rooms are overflowing, which halls are dead, where the coffee queue is breaking. The best producers treat this as a live instrument, adjusting programming and flow on the day rather than filing a report a month later.
Pre-testing. Coca-Cola offers the clearest case. Working with Reach3 Insights, the company adopted the Brand Experience Predictor, a research tool that gauges consumer response to an activation before it is built, captures reactions on site, and recontacts attendees afterward. Coke's measurement team presented the approach at the ARF's Audience x Science conference in 2025, describing how findings from the first year of a large festival program shaped a bigger presence in the second. The principle is overdue in this industry: test the concept before committing the budget, not after.
Identity at the door. Airports have conditioned the public to venues. IATA's 2025 Global Passenger Survey found that half of travelers have used biometrics somewhere in their airport journey, and the vast majority were satisfied. Arenas and stadiums are following with face-based entry and payment. The friction removed at the gate goes unnoticed, which is precisely the point.
Content at the speed of the event. Generative tools have collapsed the distance between something happening and something being published. Recap reels, galleries, and personalized follow-ups that once arrived a week later now arrive the same evening. For many events, the content cycle has become part of the product.
Agents in operations. Hospitality is the bellwether. A 2026 study by the consultancy h2c found AI in use at nearly every hotel chain it surveyed, with AI agents among the top innovation priorities for the next two years. Event production is likely to follow along the same lines: vendor coordination, attendee communication, on-site logistics. The returns are early and largely unmeasured, and anyone quoting a precise cost saving is getting ahead of the evidence.
The measurement problem
The backstage layer has one conspicuous weakness, and it is the very thing it is supposed to be good at. Take the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Karla Otto and the influencer platform Lefty reported that the festival's social footprint grew sharply year on year. Kolsquare, tracking a different window and a different set of signals, reported that Instagram value around the festival had fallen. Neither firm was necessarily wrong. They were measuring different things and calling both by the same name.
Until event metrics are as consistent as advertising metrics, the promise of the invisible layer will run ahead of its proof. The producers who win the next phase will be the ones who can show, credibly and comparably, what an experience actually did.
The visible layer
None of this means the spectacle is going away. AR and VR installations, projection mapping and drone shows remain fixtures of major activations. Drone shows in particular have displaced fireworks at a growing share of large brand and civic events, for reasons that are more operational than aesthetic: easier permitting, no debris or smoke, quieter skies and total control over the image in the air.
But the evidence base for the visible layer is thinner than its marketing suggests. The figure most often cited for VR's emotional pull, 27 percent higher engagement than a flat screen, comes from a 2016 Nielsen and YuMe lab study of 150 people watching the same clip on a headset and on a television. It is a decade old and measured something far narrower than a branded experience, yet it still circulates as if it were fresh.
The visible layer is easy to buy and easy to copy. That is the definition of a commodity.
What the screen cannot replace
The other lesson of the past five years is about where technology belongs. The wave of virtual-world brand activations that drew so much attention in 2021 and 2022 has largely receded, while the in-person programs running alongside them kept growing. Planners' own forecasts still treat the in-person gathering as the default format, with digital extending its reach rather than standing in for it.
Technology earns its place when it supports a human experience in a room. It loses ground when it tries to replace one.
The fringe test
The main stage at Cannes Lions, Art Basel or a fashion week is now heavily instrumented. The fringe around it is not. The dinners, salons, satellite talks and invitation-only rooms where much of the actual business of those weeks gets done still run largely on group chats, guest lists and word of mouth.
That is where the invisible layer will be tested next, and where its absence is felt most. For anyone trying to find the right room, discovery is the first piece of infrastructure. It is the territory the Frynge was built to cover.
The next phase
For brands and producers, the strategic implication is straightforward. Invest in the operational layer: attendee intelligence, pre-testing, frictionless entry, fast content and, cautiously, agents. Treat the drone show, the AR filter and the VR booth as finishing touches rather than strategy.
The visible technology is the cheap version. The invisible technology is the durable one. The brands building toward the latter are the ones the next decade will reward.