Zdeněk Hesoun on why AI has devalued business presentations

Artificial intelligence can summarize any presentation in a matter of seconds, which is why the value of classic business meetings is falling fast — and personal trust is becoming the real scarce commodity, says Zdeněk Hesoun, co-founder and head of the Czech company Happenee, which develops a platform for managing corporate events.

According to him, companies can no longer justify holding an in-person event simply to "show people some content" — after all, AI can now prepare, condense and personalize a report, a product presentation or a data summary in a couple of seconds. If someone still spends half a day travelling to an event, they expect to get something they wouldn't get in the office: live discussion, workshops, networking, a chance to meet the specific people they need to meet.

Hesoun points to a paradox revealed by research carried out for the Cvent platform: 85% of marketers admit that the growth of AI-generated content is making it harder to build trust, yet 87% of those same marketers increasingly trust the output of AI tools when they use them themselves. In other words, we don't trust someone else's AI content, but we're quite happy to trust our own.

At the same time, large companies are running into an operational problem: they hold dozens or even hundreds of events a year, yet manage each one as a separate, isolated project. "The critical moment comes when you realize you're organizing almost the same event for the third time — and starting again almost from scratch," Hesoun says. That, in his view, is why a new discipline called event operations is gaining ground: companies are moving away from improvising with events and starting to manage them as a single connected system, the same way they have long managed accounting or customer relationships.

Happenee's platform competes in exactly this segment of corporate event-management software with major international players such as the American firm Cvent. A telling example of this kind of centralization in Czech business is Česká spořitelna, which holds more than 500 events a year and is building a unified ecosystem with a shared calendar, processes, technology, a production team and data, according to Miloslav Tuček, the bank's head of communications and production.