Skift Meetings Podcast

The episode runs 24 minutes but produces only a handful of non-obvious ideas - the 'age of average' for AI-generated content and the human-curator-as-VIP-service model. The rest is padded with affirmations, leading questions, and generic 'AI augments humans' talking points that add no new information.

“we are coming to what we call the age of average. So it's very, very medicore”

“there is a downside of um, too much personalization that I may be feeling overwhelmed”

The 'age of average' framing for undifferentiated AI output and the concept of a human-led guided tour of a trade show as a premium product are mildly fresh, but the overall thesis - AI is a tool, humans provide the creative judgment - is one of the most recycled takes in B2B technology commentary right now.

“we are coming to what we call the age of average. So it's very, very medicore. Um, and to move this to the next level you need to people”

“We do see a rising demand, um, also for our clients, where people like to be led by a human over trade shows, over festivals”

The guest is a genuine senior practitioner from a large international event agency with real operational scale (800 - 1200 events per year for one client, 20-year China operation), which is above a pure thought-leader. However, the depth of insights shared does not reflect that operational experience - answers stay at the conceptual level rather than revealing hard-won practitioner knowledge.

“we're doing for a client, um, between 800 and 1200 events a year for the last 10 years”

“We've been celebrating 20 years in China now and we have three offices in Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai”

A handful of concrete anchors exist - client event volume, named tools like Kling and Capcut, Cvent partnership, China office locations - but no outcome metrics, no ROI figures, no before/after comparisons, and no resolved case studies. Most claims are asserted without data.

“between 800 and 1200 events a year for the last 10 years. Now we want to analyze how many of the speakers have been male and female”

“we do get here from Kling, the um, video creation software, uh, up to everything from TikTok to Capcut”

The host occasionally applies light pressure - flagging scalability concerns around human curation and calling AI-replacement fears 'largely unfounded' - but regularly answers their own questions, uses leading framing ('So what you're talking about there is really personalization, right?'), and lets vague claims pass without follow-up. No productive disagreement materialises.

“So what you're talking about there is really personalization, right?”

“Is that then a VIP version of event? Uh, because I imagine that's not very scalable. Right.”