Ticketing Professionals Conference 2026

We spent a few days in Manchester this week at the Ticketing Professionals event and there were a few interesting trends that came up.

Obviously, everyone was talking AI, and man, at times like this I take Lyndsey’s view - talking about AI in a few years is going to be like you’re talking about electricity.  It’s everywhere, used in everyday life and will be a key indicator that you are weird.

One speaker stood out for me on AI, Gabe Johnson (Criterion Ticketing), who stated that he used AI but didn’t know much about it.  But really, you don’t need to know about electricity to use it, you just need to know the basics like don’t touch the sparky bits.  Using AI as a ‘playground’ as Gabe put it, is a great way to do it, as you’re in, you’re testing and trying.  It’s the only way to get better.  Using AI to have conversations and bounce ideas back and forth, again, the best way to be using AI.

And having the mentality, as Gabe mentioned, that AI is not going to take your job, is important.  It’s never going to be as creative as you, it may have taken the ideas of a million people, but originality and authenticity is where it is at.  So, if you think that technology, which is basically just really fancy predictive text messaging is going to take your job, then well…

The real key here is to use it to make you better and faster, but you’re still captaining the ship.

And thanks to Robert Webster for flagging this:

Jensen Huang just reframed the entire AI adoption conversation in one sentence.
There's a difference between a job's tasks and its purpose.
A software engineer's tasks are writing code. Their purpose is solving problems. AI takes the tasks. The purpose doesn't just survive. It finally gets the room it deserves.

It’s an important mindset, knowing you are not the task.

Next up, let’s move from the exciting world of AI to data and audiences.

The best speaker here, for us, was Patrick Ratliff (The Glasshouse International Centre for Music), which I will probably massively paraphrase: “People are great at measuring, but not great at understanding”

We have more data about our target audiences than we have ever had before, but it doesn’t automatically mean that we understand them better now than before.  And understanding our audiences is the whole point.  That’s why, at Altair, we build synthetic audiences to help us stress test how well we do know them.  Which leads onto the next quote from Patrick, which I will get wrong as it’s the same as a phrase we constantly say internally: “Data is only useful if it changes the original decision”

Too many people use data to back up the decision they’ve already made, which is easy.  There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.  The real value is seeing if you can get the data to change your mind.  If it does, you’ve learnt something important.  If it does not, then you’ve stress tested your idea and should give you more confidence to move forward.

But moving on from this, one of the big trends across all of the talks that we took away was:

Are the entertainment, culture and venue sectors falling behind other sectors?  And at quite a pace?

This may be controversial but let’s stress test…

A lot of the talks were positioning topics, such as AI and new, innovative consumer buying behaviours, as something new and futuristic. 

But a lot of these subjects have been talking points in our Horizon sessions from over 2 years ago.  So why is this just sparking up now, when we’ve been talking about it for years and other sectors we work in such as long-term behaviour change or B2B having been working on it for years too?  Why are culture and entertainment brands only just starting to pick up on these things?

This is not a sweeping statement meant to cover every single person working across these sectors.  There are some amazing people to some crazily future focused things.  But as a relative percentage, the percentage of people doing these things, at pace, is much smaller compared to other sectors, is the feeling we always get when going to these types of conferences and events.

It cannot be due to marketing teams shrinking, as time, resource and monetary pressures are pressures across all industries. 

We don’t have the answer to this, as it was an observation, but it is something that the sectors should take a look at.  The world is speeding up and you need to pick up and keep pace.

On to more positive factors, I think the best session was: Creative Ways Arts Orgs Are Growing Revenue. 

Great talk from both Jessica Toomey (Frog and Bucket Comedy Club) and Kofi Ohene-Djan (Liverpool's Royal Court).  We particularly loved the bravery of getting rid of the bar and leaning into QR codes and thinking about every way in which we can deliver value to the customer.  Also, more people ordering via a QR code, the smaller the queue at the bar, which means more people spending at the bar too.  Great use of behavioural science.

And finally, a shout out to Queue-it for organising the morning run, in the Manchester rain.  Great idea and we’ve always got time for a free pair of socks.