The AI readiness checklist for event teams
Twelve checks you can run in an afternoon, grouped into documentation, workflows, people, and guardrails. Each one is pass/fail with a concrete way to test it. Count your passes at the end and you will know where to start. This is the checklist version of the full AI readiness assessment guide.
Documentation & data
AI works with what you can hand it. These checks measure whether your team's knowledge exists anywhere outside people's heads.
1. Your three most repetitive workflows are written down
How to check: Open your docs. If the run-of-show process lives in a template with steps, you pass. If it lives in “ask Dana,” you don't.
2. Past event artifacts are findable in under two minutes
How to check: Time yourself finding last year's sponsor deck and the final timeline from your last event. More than two minutes of digging means AI will inherit the same mess.
3. You know which data is safe to paste into an AI tool
How to check: There is a stated answer, even a one-line one, about attendee PII and contract terms. “Nobody has asked” is a fail.
Workflows
Readiness is workflow-by-workflow, not team-wide. Score these against your five core workflows: timelines, decks, run-of-show, attendee comms, post-event analysis.
4. You can name the workflow that eats the most hours
How to check: Not a guess, a number. “Deck production takes ~8 hours per sponsor” passes. “Everything takes forever” fails.
5. At least one workflow has a reusable template or prompt
How to check: Someone built something the second person can use without asking the first. That is the difference between a tool and a habit.
6. One workflow has a before/after time measurement
How to check: Any workflow where you know what it cost before AI and after. Without one measurement, you cannot tell adoption from activity.
People
Tools do not adopt themselves. These checks measure whether the humans are set up to make AI stick.
7. Someone owns the outcome
How to check: A named person is responsible for “we save N hours a month with AI,” even informally. If it is everyone's job, it is no one's.
8. The team already experiments on its own
How to check: At least half the team has used ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini for work in the past month without being told to. Curiosity is the raw material.
9. There is a place to share what works
How to check: A Slack channel, a doc, a standing agenda item. Wins that are not shared die with the person who found them.
Guardrails
The checks that keep the first mistake from becoming the last experiment.
10. AI output gets a human review before it ships
How to check: Anything attendee-facing or sponsor-facing has a named reviewer. The standard is the same one you would apply to a new intern.
11. You have a rule for what AI must not do
How to check: Even two lines: no unreviewed replies to attendees, no pasting contracts with confidential terms. Written beats assumed.
12. Leadership expects hours back, not magic
How to check: The sponsor of this effort talks about recovered hours and fewer late nights, not “AI transformation.” Wrong expectations kill good pilots.
Scoring your checklist
0–4 passes: start with documentation, not tools. Write down how your top three workflows run. Everything else depends on it.
5–8 passes: you are ready for one workflow. Pick the one with the most hours and least judgment, build one shared template or prompt, and measure before and after. Most event teams land here.
9–12 passes: you are ahead of most of the industry. Your next lever is consistency: standardizing what works across every event. That is the band where the 0–10 framework and a structured sprint pay off fastest.
Prefer the 3-minute version?
The free self-assessment runs these checks as a short questionnaire and returns a 0–10 score with the hours you could recover, per task.
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