German Convention Bureau Leader on the Future of AI-Powered Meetings
After the global financial crisis ended in 2011, a few cities and nations around the world began promoting themselves to meeting and convention organizers based on their intellectual capital, versus venues and attractions. Matthias Schultze, managing director of the German Convention Bureau (GCB), led this strategy in Europe at the time.
Around the same year, I was visiting the House of Logistics & Mobility (HOLM) think tank in Frankfurt. The GCB suggested I visit there to better understand this new direction for attracting high-value business events in advanced industries.
"The city of the future is an interdisciplinary knowledge sharing machine," Dr. Stefan Walter told me, who was a professor at HOLM at the time. "So, this [GCB] strategy is about finding the strengths of our strengths, our core competencies, and for Germany, that’s knowledge and infrastructure. It’s also about connecting ideas.”
That has been my due north working in the travel industry ever since. This idea that meeting planners and attendees can tap into a deep knowledge base in a host destination, specific to their interests, for me, is intoxicating. The challenge is it takes a ton of work connecting local leaders in specific advanced industries, like aviation in Frankfurt or e-mobility in Stuttgart, with large global organizations in those same industries and convince them to bring their big annual event to Germany.
It's also pretty high level. From an attendee standpoint, if I'm in Hamburg and want to learn about HafenCity, the largest urban makeover in Europe, it's not like I can easily access a bunch of people and organizations leading the future of urban development. Which, would be cool, right?
AI is helping make that a reality.
Germany's national Open Data/Knowledge Graph project is an ambitious AI-powered initiative to build a massive network of industry suppliers, academic organizations and business leaders across the country. Basically, by indexing the visitor industry and intellectual capital supply chain, Germany can connect the brightest minds in Germany with the rest of the world more seamlessly, effectively and equitably.
An "interdisciplinary knowledge sharing machine," if you will.
I spoke with Mr. Schultze to learn more about how AI is impacting the meetings and convention industry in Germany.
Greg Oates: How is AI evolving across Germany's visitor industry? Specifically, how are your municipal CVBs and other partners thinking about and using AI right now?
Matthias Schultze: Like much of the world, things really accelerated for us around two years ago with the rise of tools like ChatGPT. Suddenly, everyone, from corporates to associations, started thinking seriously about AI. We saw an opportunity and created an innovation platform called ebx.lab. It’s a peer-to-peer learning community for event planners, where we partner with scientists from the Fraunhofer Institute to explore how AI might reshape the business events space.
From those early sessions, we have published a few white papers and identified a few core insights. AI clearly has potential to personalize experiences, optimize event planning processes, improve engagement and networking, and maybe most exciting, support predictive analytics. That last one, especially, being able to anticipate trends or behaviors based on data, is what feels most transformative to me personally.
GO: How is the GCB embracing AI internally?
MS: We developed our own internal AI strategy for the German Convention Bureau. We wanted to give both our team and our stakeholders a shared framework, something that outlined where we are today, where we want to go, and how we get there. It’s called "Driven by People, Powered by Data," and that title really reflects our belief that AI is a tool, not a solution in itself. People need to lead the process.
The strategy helps us clarify not just what we can do with AI, but also what we can’t or shouldn’t do, at least not yet. It outlines our roadmap and aligns everyone across our organization and membership.
GO: Is that strategy available publicly?
MS: Yes, though only in German for now. But with the right AI tools, you can translate it quickly. The strategy touches on everything from marketing and communications to event planning, workflow automation, customer personalization, sustainability, and even ethics and compliance. The ethics component is particularly important. As exciting as AI is, we have to keep guardrails in place.
Within our organization, we’re working hard to ensure that AI isn’t something siloed or limited to leadership. It needs to be embedded across every level. Everyone in the organization is expected to develop basic AI literacy. We’ve also worked on minimum viable products for things like dashboards and customer-facing chatbots. Some are already in use today.
GO: You've always been a strong and vocal proponent for sustainability in business events. How is AI supporting you there?
MS: I’m very proud of a project we developed with 29 other European countries: the Sustainability Hub for Events. It’s an AI-driven platform that brings together all kinds of sustainability related data—certifications, guidelines, best practices—and makes them accessible through an interactive AI agent.
Planners can ask things like, “Can you help me build a sustainable menu?” or input event details to estimate their CO₂ footprint. It’s highly practical, and it’s making a real difference for event planners who need fast, reliable and actionable sustainability information.
GO: We've talked about your Open Data and Knowledge Graph project in Germany numerous times in the past. Is that now live?
MS: It’s technically live but still in progress, and probably always will be, in a sense. We’re continuously expanding it. The Open Data Germany project by the German National Tourist Board is live with its Knowledge Graph. The Open Data MICE project, which is implemented in close cooperation with the GNTB, is not yet live.
One exciting element launching soon is an interactive map of research institutions in Germany. It will show where key research and innovation is taking place, including medical tech, renewable energy and so on, and link that data to infrastructure like hotels and conference venues.
The idea is to visualize Germany as a knowledge landscape. If you’re planning an event and you want to anchor it around a theme like urban mobility, the map will show you which regions are most active in that field and match you with the relevant venues and experts.
GO: One theme I keep obsessing about, and it's felt like a bit of a fantasy for more than a decade, is that the city of the future is an interdisciplinary knowledge sharing machine. That idea is a direct quote from your House of Logistics and Mobility in Frankfurt, and it’s stuck with me ever since I heard it back in 2011. It's this idea of a city as a platform. Do you think we're getting closer to executing on this idea, where innovation at all levels is more accessible and shareable for more people? Ultimately what we're talking about here is the democratization of knowledge and excellence.
MS: I love that idea. I really do. I think there are two layers to it. On one level, we have the smart city movement with systems that integrate transportation, energy, data and infrastructure to make better decisions. That’s already happening in many places across Europe.
But on a deeper level, regarding your fantasy.... Let's say you could land in Munich, be interested in urban tech, and immediately connect with people, events and institutions aligned with that interest—that’s becoming possible too. The data already exists. It’s just scattered. But with open data standards, machine readability, and the right AI tools, we can start connecting those dots. Your fantasy city may not be so far off.