What do you do when you're considered the legacy event-tech provider, the 800-pound gorilla in a room that has now opened the door to any event professional with some basic tech and a Claude account?
You rebrand. Cvent CEO and cofounder Reggie Aggarwal kicked off Cvent Connect 2026 this morning in Nashville with the rather surprising announcement that the oh-so-familiar blue Cvent logo is now a thing of the past. The future is all about Cvent green. And, of course, AI.
This is a rebrand that references the company's legacy while freshening its image for the future. The company is planning to invest more than $1 billion in innovations over the next three years, largely in AI. But neither is the company hiding its greys. Aggarwal repeatedly made reference onstage to Cvent's 27 years in the business in his keynote, a point reiterated in the executive panel that followed, most notably by CTO and cofounder David Quattrone.
Cvent is speaking to the seasoned event professionals in the room: AI is a fantastic boon to productivity, but you should trust us because of our expertise in the industry. And when Cvent talks, it appears event profs still are listening. This year's Connect has exceeded the attendance of 2019's previous high point. Nearly 5,000 people traveled to attend in person, and Cvent estimates that with virtual attendance they will approach 10,000 in total audience reach.
Putting AI at the forefront
Not one of those 10,000 audience members was surprised to hear that Cvent's innovative use of AI would be the overarching theme of the new features and product roadmap. That said, in recognition of the fact that most of us already have seen plenty about the potential of AI, Cvent made a point to focus on the reality of what they're doing with their AI framework known as Cvent IQ — not just the potential of what can be done.
"AI is everywhere," acknowledged Cvent senior vice president of product management McNeel Keenan. "What sets you apart is the data, the context, the expertise that you bring to it." Cvent, he added, is the platform built to provide that context and capture the data that makes the AI sing.
As an aside, even long before AI became the driving force of Cvent's innovation and feature set, these product-roadmap sessions often could be a confusing conglomeration of what's newly available and what the company might ambitiously hope to introduce over the coming year. So I truly appreciate the transparency the company added by acknowledging that mix today, and labeling slides to indicate whether the feature being discussed was available now, in public beta, in closed beta or simply on the 2026 roadmap. That's definitely a helpful distinction.
Improving the overall experience
Cvent's product managers delivered a bevy of pitches and demos from the main stage during the Event Marketing & Management Product Roadmap session. Each of which underscored how the platform is harnessing the power of AI to improve the experience, both for attendees and organizers.
Conveniently, the attendee-facing upgrades were easy to experience firsthand in the event app. Whether attending in person or virtually, participants can follow along in-app with the live sessions, seeing the transcript in real time, a breakdown of the content covered in each, and AI-generated notes available immediately afterward.
The slick Snapshot feature, which Cvent has been teasing since last fall, allows attendees to capture any moment from a session that resonates. So instead of raising their phones to photograph a slide, for instance, attendees simply click the "Take snapshot" button. The slide is captured, along with about a minute of the transcript from the same time frame. It's incredibly useful, particularly for journalists and anyone else who wants to refer to session content after the fact.
Rethinking planner use
But the biggest shift for planners will be Cvent's revamped user interface and experience. The AI-powered Cvent Assistant is meant to simplify a user's every interaction with the platform, where organizers no longer need to spend weeks or months learning Cvent. The objective, which currently is being built as part of the 2026 roadmap, will be for organizers simply to describe their intent, using natural language, to the Cvent Assistant, and that request will then be executed within the platform. New-event tasks that currently must be set up manually, for instance, will be created automatically based on intent and context.
This will be accompanied by a new, cleaner view of a company's Cvent dashboard, in which different event types and content will be accessible via a central hub. Crucially, the plan also provides Cvent with a better opportunity to integrate the many pieces of tech the company has acquired over the years — where functionality such as that provided by Passkey or Jiffle now will be accessed from the same screen.
Recognizing that many companies are actively using generative AI platforms outside of Cvent, Cvent IQ Skills will integrate with platforms such as Claude, allowing AI agents to execute tasks within the central platform. It's a savvy acknowledgement of the AI work many event professionals are doing themselves — and allows for better overall integration with the many touchpoints of user data Cvent can provide.
