For years, marketing teams have become increasingly sophisticated at understanding digital behaviour.
They know which pages buyers visit, which emails they open, which content they download, and which campaigns generate engagement.
However, one of the most valuable moments in the buyer journey has remained surprisingly difficult to measure: what happens when people are physically present during interactions.
Factors such as a conversation after a keynote, a question asked during a session, a networking interaction between two attendees, or a decision-maker spending hours engaging with content and peers.
These moments have always carried commercial value, and the challenge has been turning them into meaningful actionable data.
According to Will Kataria, Country Head at Cvent Singapore, this is where the next evolution of event technology is taking shape.
The role of technology is moving beyond managing events and towards helping organisations understand the intelligence created within them.
“Event technology is helping marketing to build on that data, to build on that attendee, that contact’s profile, and know more about them through events,” Kataria explained during a conversation with Enterprise IT News.
As organisations invest heavily in digital channels, automation, and AI-driven engagement, events are emerging as another important source of buyer intelligence, given that organisations can capture and connect the signals generated, in-person.
The Event Data Gap
However, events have traditionally been measured differently.
Metrics such as attendance numbers, registration figures, and post-event feedback have often been treated as the primary indicators of success.
While useful, these metrics provide only a limited view of what actually happened.
For instance, two people may attend the same conference, but their level of interest could be completely different. One may attend a single session and leave. Whereas, another may participate in discussions, explore multiple sessions, connect with other attendees, and engage deeply with the content.
“I’m using an app. I click on sessions. I look at speakers. I try to find someone to network with. I answer some questions. I do a polling answer. I do a answer to a QnA that somebody was asking in a session, or I give a feedback survey. The more I use it, the more I do, the more engagement I have with the event, and the more you can track it.” Kataria explained during a conversation with Enterprise IT News.
Yet the difference between those two experiences contains valuable information.
Kataria believes event technology is helping organisations uncover that missing layer of intelligence by capturing engagement throughout the attendee journey.
Therefore, rather than viewing events as one-time marketing activities, organisations can begin to understand them as a series of interactions that reveal buyer behaviour.
Cvent: From Event Administration to Event Intelligence
The transformation of event technology has been gradual.
When Cvent was founded 27 years ago, the company focused on one of the most practical challenges in event management: automating registration and reducing manual processes.
Over time, the technology expanded, such as with mobile applications changing how attendees consumed content and interacted with events, digital planning tools enabling organisers to visualise experiences before they happened, and venue sourcing platforms simplifying the complex process of finding and selecting event locations.
Moreover, launched in 2009, Cvent’s supplier network has grown into a global sourcing platform with more than 500,000 properties listed worldwide, allowing planners to discover venues and manage sourcing processes digitally.
For Kataria, this evolution reflects a wider trend, because event technology is no longer only about reducing administrative work. It is becoming part of the infrastructure organisations use to create better experiences and understand engagement.
Why Event-Led Growth Is Gaining Attention
The growing focus on event intelligence is closely linked to a broader conversation among marketing leaders: how can organisations prove that activities contribute to revenue?
Events have always represented a significant investment.
However, demonstrating their impact beyond attendance has often been challenging.
Furthermore, Kataria describes this shift through the concept of “event-led growth”, which is known as using events as measurable drivers for customer acquisition, retention, and pipeline development.
However, the difference lies in how engagement is interpreted.
Instead of passing sales teams a list of attendees after an event, organisations can analyse the depth of interaction via metrics such as session attendance, content consumption, networking activity, polling responses, and feedback, which can all contribute towards understanding how engaged someone actually was.
Hence, this creates a more informed handover between marketing and sales, because a salesperson approaching an attendee who actively participated throughout an event has a very different starting point compared with someone who only registered.
Therefore, the conversation becomes less about reaching more people and more about understanding the right signals.
The Rising Value of Human Presence
The rise of artificial intelligence has created an unexpected tension.
For instance, AI can generate content, automate communication, and create increasingly realistic digital experiences. However, these developments also raise questions around trust and authenticity.
Kataria refers to this changing dynamic as the “presence premium”, which is the idea that being physically present with other people becomes more valuable as digital interactions become harder to distinguish and evaluate.
“In person you have people right there in front of you. Those interactions are gold,” he said.
However, this does not mean virtual experiences will disappear.
Instead, the challenge is ensuring that digital experiences provide meaningful engagement rather than passive consumption, with the objective of not replacing human interaction, but understanding it better.
Connecting Event Intelligence with the Revenue Engine
Event data cannot exist separately from the rest of the marketing ecosystem. Therefore, for many organisations, the next challenge is integration.
For instance, a website visit, a content download, and an event interaction all represent different parts of the same buyer journey.
And the more connected these signals become, the clearer the understanding of customer behaviour.
Moreover, Kataria believes event technology needs to sit alongside existing marketing technology and CRM systems rather than operate as a separate function.
“When marketers are realising that the data from events need to move naturally to their marketing system, to their marketing technology, and at the end to their CRM,” he explained.
Hence, this changes the role of event data, because a company no longer simply knows that someone attended an event.
Instead, it can understand how they engaged, what interested them, and where they may be in their buying journey.
For enterprise marketing teams, that context can be the difference between a generic follow-up and a relevant conversation.