The very best events function a lot like Disney World.

If you’ve never been to Disney World, it’s a case study in people engineering, in behavioral engineering. Disney invests crazy amounts of time, effort, and money to steer hordes of people around a relatively small area and ensure they have a satisfactory (and profitable) experience.

The very best events borrow from this playbook. This past week, I had the pleasure of speaking at my 6th MAICON, the Marketing AI Conference put on by SmarterX (formerly the Marketing AI Institute). Cathy McPhilips, Ashlee Moehring, Claire Prudhomme, and the entire team execute Disney‑level operational excellence for an event that has grown 10× in 6 years.

Look at the photo of the lunch line. What do you see?

First, the lunches are laid out logically and well, with tables for very fast pickup. Attendees don’t have to waste time waiting in line, or worse, leave the event to go get lunch elsewhere. Sponsors benefit from tremendous foot traffic as a result.

Look at the signage. It’s HUGE. It’s clear. Labels like Vegan/Vegetarian make it clear which line to get into. This reduces cognitive load on attendees who are already overloaded from learning and networking. It’s frictionless.

Another simple, easy thing: pretty much around the clock, coffee, tea, and hot water are available. While that may seem obvious, there are plenty of events that don’t provide such a simple basic thing – and that inconveniences attendees who have to wander to the nearest coffee shop (which can be 10‑15 minutes away).

Here’s another simple touch: the breakfast had protein options. If you know anything about nutrition science, you know that different foods digest at different rates and provide different levels of energy. By making sure attendees had protein options, MAICON prevented that mid‑morning crash that impairs learning and makes people “hangry” by 10:30 AM.

A third simple touch: the amount of time between sessions was significant, with networking breaks, sponsor demos, and more. This obviously benefits sponsors, but it also benefits attendees in two ways, one obvious and one not.

• The obvious one is that at a learning‑heavy event, sizable breaks give people time to digest, take notes, and decompress, not to mention network.

• The hidden benefit – and as a speaker, I love this – is that it gives speakers ample time to get set up, get tech checks done, and avoid chaos. Before one of my sessions, a video cable from the venue fried itself. It took the team 25 minutes to isolate and fix the problem. If the break had been 15 minutes? I would have basically needed to do literally half of a 45‑minute talk with no AV – and since the talk was video generation with AI, that would not have gone well.

Think like Disney: reduce friction. Give people space and time. Take care of their needs so they never need to leave. Create buffers to sweep imperfections behind the scenes. Do these things, and your events will go from good to great.

#AI #GenerativeAI #GenAI #ChatGPT #ArtificialIntelligence #LargeLanguageModels #MachineLearning #IntelligenceRevolution