The £Billion Gap in the AI for Events Map

Two things happened in the AI world this week that, taken together, tell you exactly where the smart money is going in 2026.

First, OpenAI quietly launched a consulting arm called OpenAI Deployment Company. Its first move was to acquire Tomoro AI, a two-year-old Scottish AI consulting firm. The biggest AI company in the world just decided that selling tools wasn't enough. They needed people to make those tools actually work inside businesses.

Second, Julius Solaris, one of the most respected voices in the events industry, published a map of every company building AI for events. Thirty-nine companies across planning, marketing, media, networking, session transcription, venue management, lead capture, and facial recognition.

Both stories are pointing at the same truth. The truth nobody selling AI tools wants to say out loud.

The Implementation Gap is the Real Business

OpenAI's acquisition of Tomoro is a tell. If GPT-5, GPT-6, and beyond were going to drive AI adoption on their own, OpenAI wouldn't need a consulting arm. The fact that they're building one says the gap between AI tools and actual business outcomes is huge, and bigger than the models can close on their own.

This is not a new pattern. Every major technology wave has played out the same way. The infrastructure gets built (cloud computing, mobile, internet). Then there's a gold rush of tool vendors. Then the consultancies appear, because most businesses cannot translate the technology into measurable outcomes on their own. Accenture, Deloitte, and McKinsey didn't build the internet. They got rich helping companies use it.

AI is following the same playbook, just faster.

What's interesting about Tomoro specifically is that it was only two years old. A small specialist consultancy with deep domain expertise got acquired by the most valuable AI company in the world. That tells you something about how the market values implementation knowledge right now.

The Gap in the AI for Events Map

Now look at Julius's map of 39 AI for events companies. Read it carefully and you'll notice something missing.

Every category is about running events. Planning operations. Marketing campaigns. Media and content. Networking apps. Session transcription. Venue management. Facial recognition for check-in. Lead capture on the show floor.

What's not there is the commercial side. The "how do we actually sell the sponsorship to fund this event, and fill the seats so the sponsors get value" layer. There is no AI prospecting tool on the map. No AI sponsorship outreach platform. No automated outbound system designed for event organisers. No AI-assisted proposal builder for selling sponsorship packages.

This is not because the technology doesn't exist. The same tools that automate B2B sales (Apollo, Instantly, Clay, HeyReach, Fathom) work just as well for event organisers as they do for SaaS companies. The gap is not in tooling. It's that nobody has built the implementation expertise to apply these tools specifically to event and sponsorship sales. I've written a full breakdown of the AI sales tools that make up this stack and how each layer fits.

Forty event tech companies and not one focused on the commercial layer. That's a £billion gap.

Why This Matters for Event Organisers

If you run a B2B event or media business, here's the practical implication.

Your competitors are also looking at AI right now. They are reading the same listicles, attending the same demo days, watching the same keynotes. Most of them will spend the next 12 months buying tools that don't talk to each other and wondering why nothing changed.

The ones that win will be the businesses that figure out the implementation question first. Not which AI tool to buy, but how to stitch together a system that actually generates pipeline, fills sponsorship spots, and gives the sales team back the hours they currently lose to admin.

This is the gap that nobody on Julius's map is filling. The event tech vendors are competing for budget on the planning, marketing, and operations side. The sales tech vendors are mostly selling to SaaS companies who already have RevOps functions. The result is that event organisers fall between two stools. They know AI matters. They don't know how to apply it to their specific commercial motion.

What This Means for the Industry

Two predictions, both based on what's already happening.

Prediction one: Vertical AI consultancies will eat the events space.

In the next 18 months, you'll see specialist consultancies emerge that focus specifically on AI for events. Not generic AI consultants. Not generic sales agencies. People who understand sponsorship sales, delegate marketing, and the specific commercial rhythms of event businesses, and who can build AI systems tailored to that.

OpenAI's acquisition of Tomoro is a signal that the big AI companies see this coming and want to be in front of it. McKinsey and Accenture will eventually offer this as a service to enterprise clients, but they will be too expensive and too slow for the mid-market event businesses that need it most.

Prediction two: The event tech vendors will start adding "commercial intelligence" features.

Bizzabo, Cvent, Goldcast, Swoogo. All of them will eventually add modules that try to address the sponsorship sales gap. They'll buy startups in this space or build the features themselves. The first vendor to crack this properly will be acquired for serious money.

But here's the catch. Bolting a sales feature onto an event platform is not the same as building a proper AI sales stack. The teams that figure out the integration question first will own the next decade of event commercial operations.

What to Do About It

If you're running commercial operations at an event or B2B media business, here's the practical move.

Don't wait. The companies that build their AI sales infrastructure now will spend the next two years compounding the advantage. The companies that wait will spend those two years explaining to their boards why competitors are growing faster.

Don't buy a single tool. A single AI tool will not transform your commercial operation. You need the full stack: CRM, prospect data, email infrastructure, outreach automation, LinkedIn coordination, call intelligence, workflow automation. Each layer matters. Integration is the value. If you want a step-by-step walkthrough of how this comes together for events, see the guide on sponsorship sales automation.

Don't try to build it alone. This is what OpenAI just admitted by acquiring Tomoro. Even the company building the AI realised that businesses need expert help to actually deploy it. If the world's leading AI lab thinks implementation expertise is worth nine figures, your business probably shouldn't try to figure it out from scratch on your own.

Do find people who understand both AI tools and your specific commercial motion. Generic AI consultants will sell you generic AI solutions. They'll be expensive, slow, and built for someone else's business. What you need is someone who has actually run the sales motion you're trying to automate.

That's the gap. That's the opportunity. And right now, the businesses that move first will have an enormous head start.

The Final Word

OpenAI's acquisition of Tomoro and Julius's events tech map are two halves of the same story.

Tools are mature. Demand is enormous. The constraint is implementation. The businesses that win are the ones that close that gap fastest.

For event organisers and B2B media businesses, the specific opportunity is the commercial layer. The sponsorship sales engine. The delegate marketing system. The proposal generation workflow. The pipeline visibility for managers. None of this exists on Julius's map because the event tech vendors haven't built it. Nobody on the AI sales tools side has built it for events specifically either.

That's the gap I've been working in for the past few years.

If you want the whole picture in one place, get the AI Sales Stack Cheat Sheet. One page, the full framework, what to use, what to skip, and what is actually worth paying for. New writing goes out to the same mailing list.

Either way, don't wait for the big consultancies to figure this out. By the time they get to you, your competitors will already be 12 months ahead.

About the author: David is the founder of AI Sales Stack. Senior sales leader with 23+ years driving multimillion-pound growth across B2B media and events. Pioneered AI-enabled sales operations at Terrapinn and Clarion Events, integrating tools across prospecting, outreach, CRM automation, and proposal generation to shorten sales cycles and increase conversion. Currently Commercial Director at Ocean Media Group, where his brief includes embedding AI tools across the commercial function. Writes here about what is actually working in AI-enabled B2B sales, and what is being oversold.