🥸 The Fraud Economy Is Coming for Your Conference

Less than three minutes — that’s how long it takes to build a convincing fake conference website using an AI tool. The misuse of AI is creating serious challenges for the industry, including social media advertising for festivals that don’t exist, fake registration pages for international medical conferences, and a grad student cheated out of her savings for a program that was never going to happen.

Skift Meetings’ Andrea Doyle digs into why generative AI is collapsing the cost of running a scam like this — and why your team is no longer simply tasked with protecting your official website. Looking ahead, organizations may need to consider broader monitoring services across domains, social accounts, and advertising.

Head below for the full story, along with stories that are significantly less scary, including one DMO’s new approach to a customer advisory board and a look at the need to ditch the stale gold-silver-bronze sponsorship system. — David McMillin

The scam works because the events industry runs on deadlines and trust, and AI just made faking both nearly free. At Skift Meetings Forum, planners take that problem onstage in a session on how AI is arming scammers faster than the industry can defend against it.

Nirjary Desai of KIS (cubed) Events leads the conversation, in a room where 77% of attendees are director level or above.

Did you miss the webinar yesterday? No worries. We’ve got you covered with a free on-demand recording featuring insights from Elaine Lou Cartas and Monique Ruff-Bell on how to accelerate women leaders in the industry.

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Will Your Attendees’ AI Travel Agent Actually Book Within Your Room Block?

Skift's Rafat Ali flags a line buried in Mark Zuckerberg's new AI manifesto: an AI agent should work for the person using it, not the company that built it. That’s not how travel AI works today. Booking.com’s trip planner, airline chatbots, and hotel concierge bots are all built to drive bookings and upsells for the companies that made them, not a true personal agent working for the traveler. Of course, Zuckerberg’s consumer empowerment angle is worth plenty of skepticism: Meta makes nearly all its money from advertising. Can AI agents actually act for the end user in an online economy driven by commissions and click attributions?

If the answer winds up being a yes, planners may be in for some hiccups. Let’s say someone asks an AI assistant to “book my hotel for the conference.” Will it surface your negotiated group rate and room block? Tough to say, but it’s a fair bet most AI travel tools aren’t optimized to protect your attrition numbers. It’s worth watching this space, and in the meantime, make sure the group booking link the easiest option in your registration and housing instructions, not the “official” one buried three clicks deep.

Great events are built on strategy, innovation, and the right resources. The Skift Meetings Toolkit is your go-to hub for best practices in managing meetings and events.