Singapore MICE Forum Asks Whether AI Is Making the Industry Lazy — or Liberating It
Source: TTGmice
Singapore's business events industry runs on a simple bet: that people will keep paying to meet each other in person. But as AI tools get cheaper and better at the administrative work behind every conference — registration, surveys, follow-ups — the sector is being forced to ask what it's actually selling.
Singapore's business events industry runs on a simple bet: that people will keep paying to meet each other in person. But as AI tools get cheaper and better at the administrative work behind every conference — registration, surveys, follow-ups — the sector is being forced to ask what it's actually selling. That question took centrestage at the Singapore MICE Forum 2026, where a panel of founders and tech leaders debated whether AI is making the industry lazy, or freeing it up to do more.
The panel, titled "Lazy or Liberated", brought together Zachary Wang, co-founder of AI startup Level3AI; Mohan Belani, CEO of tech media platform e27; and Rachel Teo, APAC alliances lead at Google DeepMind Impact Accelerator, moderated by Errol Lim of Singapore event-tech firm Jublia. Wang argued that AI lowers the barrier to starting an events business by solving labour and efficiency bottlenecks — but cautioned that the industry must watch what kind of work AI replaces and where that labour shifts. His example: AI can compile post-event survey results in seconds, but it cannot interpret them the way a human organiser can. The role does not disappear; it evolves.
The discussion surfaced a widening gap between large and small players. Belani noted that bigger events companies with dedicated in-house AI teams benefit from centralised, structured execution — particularly because they handle so much data — while smaller firms risk falling behind on infrastructure and organised adoption. Teo, drawing parallels with the science sector, argued that data ownership ultimately stays with human experts, because only real-world specialists can validate what AI produces. All three agreed that conversations about data privacy, guardrails, and zero-retention policies are happening too rarely, with Belani calling for urgent upskilling and warning that algorithmic bias in customer-facing tools could quietly damage the attendee experience.
For a country that markets itself as Asia's meetings capital, this matters well beyond the conference floor. Business events are a multi-billion-dollar pillar of Singapore's economy, employing tens of thousands across venues, agencies, and hospitality. If AI adoption is led by a handful of large players while smaller organisers fall behind, the sector's reputational edge — reliability and service quality — is what erodes first. The forum's consensus, summed up in Wang's closing line that "you can outsource your thinking, but you can't outsource your understanding," points to a division of labour rather than a replacement: machines handle the volume, humans own the judgement.
Why it matters for Singapore: The MICE sector is one of the clearest test beds for how AI reshapes a service industry here — it is data-heavy, client-facing, and dominated by small and medium players, much like the wider economy. How events companies answer the "lazy or liberated" question will set a template for other service sectors negotiating the same trade-offs, from hospitality to professional services. Watch the adoption gap between large and small firms: it will show up in the quality of events long before it appears in any official AI adoption statistic.
