Thought Leadership
11 min read
Contents:
  • Dynamic Pricing
  • Upselling & Cross-Selling
  • Predictive Analytics
  • Facial Recognition
  • Chatbots
  • What Does the Future of AI in Ticketing Look Like?
  • Final Word

We’ve seen artificial intelligence advance in leaps and bounds in various industries over the last few years — from the popular ChatGPT, AI-powered art, and even a Chinese company that released a song by an AI singer that was streamed a record-breaking 100 million times across the internet.

With AI technology advancing at break-neck speeds, how will it impact the ticketing and events industry? We will explore the most popular recent developments of AI use in the industry and what we believe will soon emerge.

Here are five ways AI is transforming the ticketing industry:

Dynamic Pricing

Dynamic Pricing, powered by artificial intelligence, continues to reshape ticketing strategies by enabling real-time price adjustments based on factors such as demand, presales, and search trends.

This approach, comparable to how airlines or hotels price their offerings, can maximize profitability for venues while providing opportunities for fans to save when demand is lower.

Ticketmaster has leveraged AI since 2016, starting with its "Verified Fan" feature, which combats bots and prioritizes genuine buyers. Its more recent AI-powered tools, such as "Platinum Tickets," dynamically adjust prices based on market demand.

While these tools have driven higher revenue and filled venues more effectively, they’ve also sparked consumer frustration over price spikes for high-demand events. In September 2024, the European Commission launched an investigation into Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing practices, underscoring concerns about fairness and transparency.

Despite the controversy, AI-powered pricing offers significant benefits, including the ability to sell out events efficiently and maximize revenue. However, challenges remain, such as ensuring predictive accuracy and mitigating customer dissatisfaction due to fluctuating prices.

As these systems evolve, they will continue to balance advantages and drawbacks while reshaping the ticketing landscape. For better or worse, machines will continue to quickly identify patterns and inform pricing decisions for ticketing.

Mobile phone displaying features in the event ticketing system with verified fan text overlay.

 

Advantages and Disadvantages of Dynamic Pricing Using AI

Pros

Cons

  • Adjusts ticket prices in real time based on demand and other factors, maximizing profitability.
  • May lead to customer dissatisfaction due to perceived unfairness or frequent price changes.
  • Helps sell out events more effectively by lowering prices during periods of low demand.
  • Requires extensive data and high-quality algorithms to function accurately and effectively.
  • Can potentially increase overall ticket revenue by optimizing pricing.
  • Predictive accuracy may vary, leading to potential pricing errors or losses in some cases.

Upselling & Cross-Selling

AI can help utilize your past event and consumer data to enhance your future events. Many large-scale companies use artificial intelligence to power their ticketing platforms, by tracking the kind of attendees they have to up-sell and cross-sell.

Artificial intelligence can be used to analyze data sets for concerts, sporting events, and theater tickets, such as:

  • Face value ticket prices vs resale prices
  • How fast tickets have sold
  • Historical concert attendance stats
  • How well tickets historically sell at a given venue.
  • How well do tickets historically sell in a given city

Event organizers and ticket vendors can build nuanced customer profiles by combining information such as historical data of past event attendance, responses to post-event surveys, or even information as simple as providing an email to a website but not making a purchase, and match those profiles with future events and other offers.

With customer data, organizations can pair traditional cross-sell models with artificial intelligence to understand future customer behavior and choose channels in which to engage them. The majority of consumers (83%) are willing to share their information to create a more personalized experience.2

Investing in personalization to build customer relationships and create a better experience can pay off well. Personalization can persuade an existing customer base to spend more on related goods and services through cross-sale and up-sale recommendations. Approximately 9 out of 10 consumers are more likely to shop with brands that supply offers and recommendations that are relevant to them.2

Besides tickets, artificial intelligence solutions can help with selling concessions and merchandise by selecting products relevant to the tickets in the purchaser’s online cart, encouraging impulse buying. 

Screenshot of an event ticketing system displaying the option to purchase event merchandise.

SimpleTix, Bold Upsell, and Algolia Recommend are examples of AI-powered solutions that can help platforms seamlessly upsell merchandise, discounts on future purchases, season passes, or memberships. SimpleTix estimates that upsells can increase a business’s revenue by 10-30%.3

Predictive Analytics

Selling a ticket does not end with the purchase. Artificial intelligence can help event organizers better understand where their patrons are in the patron journey, even helping to predict and mitigate no‑show trends down to the seat.

Seatcycle is a real-world example of this AI use case. With historical data and trends, artificial intelligence systems can predict the who, where, and when that might affect how full a venue may look for different performances. This technology, along with orphan-seat prevention algorithms, can help improve venue mapping and ensure that entertainers and event managers are confident a venue will be beneficial for them.

Illustration of SeatCycle system displaying a venue with predictive analytics, forecasting future ticket sales

Source
 

Beyond predictive analytics, Seatcycle offers a chat function that allows event organizers to gauge the possibility of a patron’s attendance; sometimes, all it takes is an automated reminder an event is coming up. Ticket holders can even be incentivized to share their status, and if they need to return the ticket, vendors can offer a refund or a donation.

In an interview with INTIX4, Mike Lorenc, the head of Google's ticketing, said:

"ML is showing great promise in predicting demand for certain shows/artists in different markets. The ability to analyze — in real-time — inputs such as video views on YouTube, search trends on Google, streams, and social media activity along with past purchase history has the potential to impact not only optimal venue capacity but also pricing models for yet-to-be announced shows.”

AI can also forecast how patrons may arrive at the venue, both by arrival over time and through different entrances to help adjust queue processing. This information can also help with procurement planning for stocking categories such as merchandise, food, and beverages.

Combining this with technology like geofencing can provide another layer of direction, future event advertisement, boost fan engagement, and invite patron feedback to understand and address potential pain points.

Facial Recognition

Access control has been rapidly improving through multiple digital methods, evolving from scanning paper tickets to using a patron’s phone to today’s contactless ticketing option. Now we are even seeing the emergence of ticket verification through a face scan.

ASM Global, one of the largest entertainment producers in the world, has announced plans to introduce facial verification payments at some of its major venues in partnership with technology provider PopID. The rollout will utilize advanced facial recognition technology at venues such as stadiums and theaters around the world. 

ASM Global CEO and President Ron Bension said, "PopID's dynamic technology and solutions will allow us to even further revolutionize the event experiences of the future, ensuring that every guest interaction is secure, speedy, and seamless."5

Most likely, VIP ticket holders will be granted a more personalized event experience while the technology is in its early stages. Eventually, modern facial recognition solutions may allow for faster queue processing.

However, there are a few drawbacks of facial recognition, including more steps in the ticket purchase process to capture the customer’s face and its patterns, customers may be unwilling to opt-in to facial recognition, and more hardware and/or software may be required during the check-in process.

Ticketing organizations may want to consider if the value of using this technology for access control outweighs the obstacles involved in making customers feel safe handing using their biometric information.

Illustrative image of a person's face with digital overlay, depicting the use of facial recognition technology.

Chatbots

The conventional chatbot is a dime a dozen, popping up on websites all over the internet. And yet they have fallen short of the lofty expectations we have set for them, sometimes leading to a frustrating experience for customers.

Even so, 82% of customers prefer chatbots while looking for answers to simple questions, and have proven their value to businesses as well, by saving businesses an estimated 2.5 billion working hours per year and $8 billion.

Today’s chatbots must evolve to supply the value expected of them - and with the help of AI, they are. The global chatbot market is expected to reach nearly $28 billion by 2030. We've seen recent chatbots, like ChatGPT, grow immensely better than in years past, and highly intelligent and connective AI chatbots grow in power and potential every day. 

The latest chatbots feature rapid improvements in natural language processing (NLP), chatbots could help with customer support, assist those with disabilities to complete a ticket purchase, or be integrated into physical ticket‑selling kiosks. They also can be combined with voice authentication, which has the potential to provide better security and customer service. 

In the ticketing sector, we’ve seen the emergence of chatbot templates designed specifically around event and ticketing scenarios.

For example, Engati has a ticket booking chatbot template and Makerobos has an Event Management Chatbot. These chatbots are able to manage the flow of information and answer questions from various event stakeholders such as volunteers, speakers, exhibitors, and attendees.

These questions may include details about ticket sales, booth rentals, keynote speakers, parking, event timing, facilities, and WiFi access.  Chatbots help to efficiently address these inquiries as they can affect people's decisions to participate in the event and purchase tickets. Ensuring that these questions are promptly answered is crucial to the success of an event.

An image of various scenarios where chatbots can aid in event management, including event registration, real-time updates, in-person networking, helpdesk, personalized service, multilingual assistance, real-time event navigation, ordering event merchandise, attendee engagement, and post-event feedback.

Maruti Techlabs suggests creating a chatbot (Softjourn can help with this) from scratch or getting one configured from a reliable chatbot platform, to use for customer assistance, bookings, registration, multilingual events, e-commerce, attendee engagement, navigation assistance, and alerts & reminders.7

Chatbots can even help with resolving refunds, make ticket transfers faster and easier, and assist with data collection through reminders for pre and post-fan surveys. 

What Does the Future of AI in Ticketing Look Like?

The next 1–2 years will likely see AI tools in ticketing evolve toward greater personalization and automation. Predictive algorithms may advance to offer not just demand-based pricing but also customized promotions for individual consumers, leveraging data from real-time social media trends and browsing histories.

Additionally, facial recognition technology could expand beyond access control to enhance personalized experiences, such as VIP perks or targeted merchandise offers. With ongoing developments in generative AI, chatbots may also move from simple queries to providing complex, context-aware customer interactions.

Finally, advancements in AI-driven upselling tools, such as plugins for existing platforms, will likely make cross-selling merchandise and memberships even more seamless. As regulatory scrutiny increases, AI applications in ticketing will also prioritize transparency, ensuring customers feel confident about how pricing and personalization decisions are made.

Final Word

With the emergence of so many innovative and industry-disrupting AI advancements, we can expect to see these solutions grow and make ticketing and events more convenient for patrons. 

Our list includes just a few implementations of the advancing AI technologies within the ticketing domain that we’ve seen in 2024, however, we suspect that this is just the beginning.

The IDC forecasts global AI spending to reach $632 billion dollars by 2028, so who knows what exciting new use cases and proofs of concept we will see in the future.

With AI transforming ticketing operations, staying ahead of the curve is essential. Softjourn specializes in custom event ticketing software solutions that leverage AI to optimize pricing, enhance customer engagement, and streamline operations.

Let us help you create innovative solutions that meet your unique needs and keep you ahead of the competition. Contact us today to take your ticketing experience to the next level.

1. Taylor Swift Crashing Ticketmaster and AI in Music Music Business Worldwide’s
2. Making it Personal Report Accenture
3. Upsells with Square SimpleTix
4. What Does the Future Hold for AI and Machine Learning in the Ticketing Industry? Intix
5. Home Innovation AI & Robotics Major stadiums and venues to adopt facial verification payments Zdnet
6. 25+ Top Chatbot Statistics For 2023: Usage, Demographics, Trends StartupBonsai
7. How Can Chatbots Help Make Your Event A Huge Success? MarutiTechlabs
8. AI spending to grow PSFK