Is AI Fatigue Actually Driving Demand for Live MICE Events?

A study published in September 2025 by BetterUp Labs and Stanford's Social Media Lab surveyed 1,150 full-time U.S. desk workers and found that 40 percent had received, in just the past month, AI-generated work that looked polished but fell apart on closer inspection. The researchers called it workslop, and the fallout was measurable: 42 percent of the people who received it said they trusted the sender less afterward, and BetterUp put the hidden cost at roughly $186 per employee per month in wasted time fixing it, close to $9 million a year for a company of 10,000 people. That research is now doing double duty in the meetings industry. Skift Meetings built its entire 2026 trends report around the idea that fatigue with AI slop is what's pushing budgets and attention back toward live, in-person events. Is that actually happening, or is it a story the industry is telling itself because it's the one AI narrative that doesn't threaten anyone's job?

What Workslop Actually Costs

Workslop is BetterUp's term for AI output that looks finished on the surface, a clean deck, a well-formatted email, a polished session recap, but has no real substance underneath, so the person who receives it has to redo the thinking the AI skipped. The Stanford and BetterUp researchers found it isn't a fringe problem: 40 percent of the desk workers they surveyed had gotten workslop from a colleague in the previous month, and about a third said they were now less willing to work with whoever sent it. Half described the sender as less creative and less reliable afterward. None of that is unique to events, but it lands hard in an industry that runs on trust between planners, vendors, and the people they're trying to get into a room together. A sponsor deck that reads like a chatbot assembled it, a speaker bio nobody proofread, an attendee follow-up email with the wrong event name still in it: those are the workslop moments MICE professionals are already producing, whether or not anyone on the team has read the Stanford study.

Skift Meetings Turned the Backlash Into a 2026 Trend

Skift Meetings published its Megatrends 2026 report in January, and one of its headline calls is what the report titles "Live Events as the Antidote to AI Slop." The argument: as AI-generated content floods inboxes, feeds, and even internal memos, the thing a live event offers that a chatbot can't fake is a room full of people who actually showed up. Skift ties that directly to a number from American Express Global Business Travel's own 2026 Global Meetings and Events Forecast, a YouGov survey of 601 meeting professionals across eight countries fielded in July 2025: 85 percent of respondents said they're optimistic about the year ahead, up from 74 percent the year before, the strongest reading the survey has produced in five years. Skift's read is that a meaningful share of that optimism is coming from planners betting that in-person, unmistakably real experiences are worth more precisely because so much of everything else people encounter now might not be.

The Same Report Shows Planners Leaning Harder Into AI

Here's the part that complicates a clean story. The same Amex GBT forecast that shows record optimism also shows half of meeting professionals, 50 percent, now integrating AI somewhere across planning and execution, a sharp jump from prior years. The two most common uses they reported are event communications and attendee or sponsor matchmaking, each cited by 35 percent of respondents, followed closely by generating creative themes and concepts for the event itself, cited by 34 percent. In other words, the same industry pitching live events as the unfakeable alternative to AI content is using AI to write the invitations, match the meetings, and brainstorm the theme for that live event. That isn't necessarily a contradiction. A planner using AI to speed up a venue search or draft a first pass at a communications calendar isn't shipping workslop to anyone; the attendee never sees that work, only the result. The risk starts when the AI-assisted output goes out the door without a person actually reading it first, because that's exactly the moment a program built on "come experience something real" starts sending emails that read like nobody real wrote them.

What This Means for Your Next Program

None of this means AI has no place in event planning; the Amex GBT numbers say the opposite, that using it well is now mainstream. What the workslop research says is narrower and more useful: the cost of AI output isn't in using the tool, it's in skipping the review step before something reaches a person who's deciding whether to trust you. If your program leans on the "nothing beats being here in person" pitch that Skift's report describes, the fastest way to undercut it is a pre-event email chain, a sponsor prospectus, or a post-event recap that reads like it skipped a human entirely. Before your next send goes out under your event's name, ask who actually read it, not just who wrote the prompt. That's a cheaper habit to build than the one BetterUp priced at $186 a head.

Key Takeaways

• A September 2025 study from BetterUp Labs and Stanford's Social Media Lab, surveying 1,150 U.S. desk workers, found 40 percent had received AI-generated "workslop" in the past month, with 42 percent trusting the sender less afterward and an estimated cost of $186 per employee per month.
• Skift Meetings' Megatrends 2026 report, published in January 2026, names "Live Events as the Antidote to AI Slop" as a defining trend, arguing that fatigue with AI content is raising the perceived value of in-person MICE events.
• Amex GBT's 2026 Global Meetings and Events Forecast, based on a YouGov survey of 601 meeting professionals in eight countries, found industry optimism at 85 percent, up from 74 percent, the highest reading in five years.
• The same Amex GBT survey found 50 percent of meeting professionals now use AI across planning and execution, most often for event communications and matchmaking (35 percent each) and generating creative event concepts (34 percent).
• The tension between those two findings isn't a contradiction, but it does raise the bar: event content that reaches attendees unreviewed risks becoming exactly the kind of AI "workslop" the industry is counting on live events to be the antidote to.

Data sources: BetterUp Labs, Workslop: The Hidden Cost of AI-Generated Busywork, Harvard Business Review, AI-Generated "Workslop" Is Destroying Productivity, Skift Meetings, Megatrends 2026 Report, Amex GBT, AI Reaches Tipping Point in M&E Industry as Optimism Hits Five-Year High, Business Travel News, Amex GBT Meetings Forecast Shows Rising Optimism, Costs, The Incentivist, MICE industry optimism hits five-year high: AMEX GBT report.