Vibe Organising: Madness, or Not?
“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is” - Yogi Berra
I was speaking on the panel “Actually Innovative: AI in Events” at Confex last week, and I came up with a new term:
“Vibe Organising”
If you don’t get the reference immediately, keep calm and enjoy your retirement, sorry to disturb you…
This is not the first time I’ve coined a phrase that sticks. A bit more than ten years ago, I called our industry “the handshakes business” because, underneath all the brands, booths, badges and buzzwords, we’re fundamentally selling: the ability to meet (and yes, literally shake hands) with the right buyers.
And now, I’m watching a very specific behaviour pattern spread across events teams, especially marketing, and it needed a name.
A tiny bit of vibe coding applied to our world
Over in software land, there’s this concept called “vibe coding”. Andrej Karpathy’s (founding team at OpenAI) now-famous tweet is basically: you “…fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.”
The most useful part of that isn’t the hype. It’s the working pattern:
Outcome-first work → Rapid iteration → Letting AI generate a usable first draft → Then vibing…
That’s it. That’s the transferable idea.
Is anyone vibe organising already?
Let’s be honest: you can be sure your young guns marketing team are already doing it. They’re not calling it vibe organising (yet). They’re just moving faster than your governance model was designed to allow: drafting copy on the fly, adapting messaging to personas in minutes, generating strategies while waiting for the meeting to start, endlessly iterating on creative, and retrofitting the rationale afterwards, all before you know it.
The question isn’t whether it’s happening. It’s whether you’re doing it deliberately, with commercial and operational guardrails, with oversight, or letting it happen accidentally, with a growing pile of invisible assumptions. If you don’t have close oversight of how AI is deployed in your business, chances are, some hallucinations are being baked into your plans as you read these lines. And in the extreme case of Vibe Organising, it could work brilliantly until a forklift reverses into your assumptions.
The real use-case isn’t launching new events. It’s refactoring existing ones.
If you try to vibe-organise a brand-new show from a blank page, you’ll most probably end up with something that reads beautifully, but is invisibly wrong in all the expensive places. Where Vibe organising gets genuinely useful is vibe re-organising an existing event.
Because you already have:
a date slot, a venue, and a past performance record
an established customer base
visitor segments, content and intent signals (even if they’re messy)
a known “shape” of demand and delivery
In other words, you have a live codebase. This is very fertile ground for AI to do what it does best:
Analyse → Synthesise → Draft and Adapt, acting as a strategy-and-packaging accelerator.
In reality, most established events don’t need “more ideas”. They need a refactor:
From “a bit of everything” to a defined strategic position
From gut-feel to clear-cut sector and competitor mapping
From 10% more of everything, to strategic growth levers
So, how do you vibe organise properly?
Let’s make this practical. Vibe organising is not “open ChatGPT and ask for ideas”. It’s structured acceleration. Here’s my sequence:
Step 1: Start with structure (not prompts)
Run your event through the Event Strategy Bot first. Because vibe organising without a scaffold only produces (very) elegant nonsense. The Bot helps you clarify the below at speed:
Your one-page Event Thesis
Your ICP (who it’s for / who it’s not for)
Buyer–Seller mapping
Sector and competitor landscape
Retention vs expansion logic
Commercial architecture
Core growth levers
Risks and constraints
In short, it gives you a structured baseline. Minimum hallucinations. No fluff. No brainstorming theatre. Just clarity. Make sure you use the latest (5.2) Model with the extended thinking option.
Step 2: Download the output
Once you’ve run the Bot and are happy with the results, download the output. (I’d suggest getting an HTML export) Now you have something powerful. A structured, reality-grounded representation of your show. This is your “clean codebase”. Keep it safe.
Step 3: Re-upload to your favourite LLM
This is where the fun begins. Upload that structured output into your favourite LLM, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whatever your team swears by this week. Put on some music, then Vibe away.
Step 4: Vibe inside the guardrails
Now you can responsibly vibe organise. You can ask things like:
Stress-test this positioning.
Where are the weak assumptions?
Rewrite our sponsor packages as outcome-driven products.
Identify three commercial levers we’re under-exploiting.
Simulate how a competitor would attack this show.
Rewrite our visitor proposition with ruthless specificity.
Identify contradictions between our ICP and our messaging.
Now, AI isn’t inventing your strategy. It’s iterating on a structured one. That’s the difference between chaos and leverage.
You get:
Faster strategy loops
Tighter drafts
Accelerated packaging
Clarity through rapid iteration
The Bottom Line
Vibe organising is happening already.
Your marketing team is experimenting. Your sales team is drafting smarter emails. Your content team is iterating sessions faster than ever. The only strategic question is this:
Are you in control of it? Or are hallucinations quietly becoming part of your value proposition?
If you want to do it properly:
Start with structure.
Run the Event Strategy Bot.
Download the output.
Re-upload to your favourite LLM.
And vibe away.
Just remember: It works brilliantly…Until the forklift arrives.
