Moving Forward with EMC

One Day Ai Will Buy Your Theater Tickets

• Evolution Management Consultants

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Tickets chosen by algorithms. Glasses that guide you to the bar. A digital lobby that follows you home and sparks a late-night debate about the ending. We explore how AI is rewriting the audience journey from first spark to final takeaway and why the art still sits at the center.


SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Moving Forward with Evolution Management Consultants, the podcast where we dive deep into the dynamic world of nonprofit arts management. I'm your host, Leandra Zanetti, and I'm thrilled to have you join us on this journey. In each episode, we'll explore the ever-evolving landscape of the nonprofit arts sector. We'll bring you thought-provoking discussions and innovative strategies to equip you with the knowledge and inspiration to take your organization to new heights. Let's get started. Hello, hello, hello, friends, and welcome back to Moving Forward with Evolution Management Consultants. I'm Leander Zanetti, co-founder of EMC, and your friendly technology enthusiast and arts lover. Over the past few months, you've heard a lot from me about artificial intelligence. We've talked about how to implement it in the admin of theater and what leaders should be thinking about right now. We explored AI within the theatrical art form itself in my conversation with Kevin Labson a few weeks ago. And we've even talked about how it's impacting art forms outside of theater, like our episode on the Velvet Sundown. I really hope you're not tired of it yet, because we're going to keep the train going. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about the consumer side of the picture for theaters and do a little bit of gazing into our crystal ball to see how this AI-powered world might change our audience experience and expectations. Now, first, I want you to think about an audience member's journey with a theater right now. Pretty familiar, right? They hear about a show from an email or a social media poster, maybe even a friend. Then they go to your website, they pick a seat, they buy a ticket. On the day of, they show up to the theater, they hopefully silence their phones and hopefully enjoy the show. I'm here to tell you that every single part of that journey is about to be completely rewritten by AI and the technology that it enables. Because it's not just one change, it's like a whole new landscape, and not just for theaters. This is going to change the way things are sold everywhere. And so, whatever feelings we have about AI and our own use in it, the truth is that a lot of our audience members are going to be using AI in their daily lives, and we have to meet them where they are. So, in this episode, I want to unpack this challenge by looking at the full audience journey and what we might expect in each step from buying a ticket to attending the show to what happens afterward. Let's start with that first big disruption: buying the ticket. What do we do when AI truly becomes our own personal assistant? Now, to kick this off, I want to share a conversation I just recently had with a theater leader and a dear colleague. We were talking about how to use AI to expand box office hours and how it might help the current box office in managing the workflow and the volume of calls they get every day. And he stopped me and he said, Leandro, I really think that humans are gonna get tired of the bots. They're gonna value talking to a real person in the theater. So we should keep the box office human. And look, I am not proposing that we replace all of our staff, not even all of our box office staff with robots. But I did look at him and said, your big assumption here is that humans are gonna continue to be the ones buying the tickets. And that right there is the shift we are not ready for. The whole journey we just imagined, the email, the social posts, the like uh recommendation from a friend, and then going to the website, all of that is built on the premise that a human is driving the process. And now that whole model is collapsing. Now, I can hear some of you saying, Leandro, come on, AI can barely answer my emails correctly. How's it gonna take over the whole economy? Three words, agentic artificial intelligence. Most of the AI we use right now, like ChatGPT or Claude, is generative AI. It's passive, it helps you write a memo or brainstorm ideas, but agenc AI is different. It can take actions on your behalf. And this isn't just science fiction off in the future. Companies are rolling these agent features out right now. We are moving fast toward a world where these agents handle the majority of a user's digital life. So imagine a digital assistant that acts as your personal curator and your travel agent all in one. It knows your history, it knows exactly what price point you're comfortable with, it knows the specific genre of art you actually engage with, and it probably knows your calendar better than you do. In this world, that beautiful press release that you spent hours on, that perfectly crafted email subject line, they all become irrelevant. Why? Because agents don't read your marketing copy. They analyze behavior, they analyze patterns in big data. So the new word of mouth isn't necessarily gonna be person-to-person. It's gonna be agent-to-agent intelligence. These agents are gonna be looking for where is the heat in a digital realm for the cultural experience that their user users want. And this is what brings us to the massive infrastructure problem. Most of our ticketing systems were built for human eyeballs. They have human readable websites and require a human-driven purchase path. And let's just be honest with ourselves for a second. It's 2025 and some of our ticketing platforms still can't figure out how to accept Apple Pay. So the idea that they're ready to negotiate a complex API transaction with an autonomous AI agent, come on, that's a stretch. If our platforms can't speak agent, though, those agents are just gonna go bypass us entirely. They're gonna go to aggregators like today ticks or StubHubs who do speak their language. And the moment that happens, we lose the direct relationship with our patrons and we lose the valuable data that it comes with. And so that's why this is critical for our organizations. Are we building websites that enable agent interaction? Are we demanding that our vendors plan for an agent first world? Because if we wait, the cost will be losing control over our inventory and our ability to build new audiences, right? So I'll get off my soapbox for a second. Let's move on to the next part of the phase. The AI agent successfully bought the ticket. Well, good news for concessions. It will still be a biological human who is has to actually put on a coat, travel to the venue, and walk through your doors. But that coat won't be the only layer they're wearing because increasingly your audience is going to walk in plugged into a permanent digital layer through things like AI wearables. For years, we've talked about things like smart glasses as this far-off sci-fi concept, but it's not a concept anymore. It is a consumer reality today. The meta ray bands are already out on the market. Uh, Apple Vision Pro is changing its whole strategy to be making more of these smart glasses, and that ecosystem is growing. These devices are gonna get smaller, cheaper, and harder to spot, and more and more people are gonna own them. So very soon, a significant percentage of your audience is gonna be walking in with discrete AI lenses sitting right on the bridge of their nose. And this is gonna leave us with a choice, a fork in the road, if you will. Path one is to ban it all. We can try to treat these glasses like cell phones and turn our ushers into the device police, scanning faces for cameras and risking uh asking somebody with prescription lenses to take off their glasses because we're afraid AI uh is integrated into them. And to be totally blunt, that is gonna be a nightmare. And it's gonna be really alienating for folks who get used to this in their everyday lives. But there's a second path where we recognize that this tech is coming and we decide today that we're gonna use it. And if we choose to integrate, we unlock capabilities we've never had before. First, think about it. We can solve the friction of the lobby. Um, think about something like wayfinding. We know that the scramble, we know we all know the scramble to find the restroom or the bar during a crowded intermission. With smart glasses, you don't need to hunt for signs. You just look up and a glowing arrow appears on the floor, like a GPS indoors, guiding you straight to where you want to go. Second, we get unprecedented insight into the art itself. Other types of wearables like smartwatches, rings, and even glasses, could allow us to track, with user consent, the the audience's actual physical reaction. So then we're not just counting tickets anymore. We're measuring heart rates and pupil dilation anonymously, of course. And imagine what that unlocks. Imagine the value of that during a preview period. A playwright or a director could know with data-backed precision exactly what moment in the second act made the whole audience hold their breath. Or um exactly when the heart rates in the audience dropped because they got a little bored. Think about how we might be able to shape plays with that kind of data. Fascinating. And third, maybe we create a new tier of engagement. What am I talking about? Um imagine that we could offer something like an enhanced track for your most dedicated fans. Maybe it could be something like a director's commentary mode, giving patrons poetically layered context on the history of the play and the director's thoughts on a particular moment. Movies have been doing it for decades and people love it. So why not offer people a new way to engage using new technology? This is fundamentally a way to curate and monetize the distraction that's being put into our theaters. We aren't asking people to look away from the stage, we're giving them a curated digital layer that deepens their experience. But the most important reason to take the integration path isn't money, it's actually mission. This technology has the potential to make our performances massively more accessible. Think about it. Real-time closed captioning for the deaf, personalized audio descriptions for the blind, and instant translation for non-native speakers. Think about the audiences that opens up for us. Strategically using AI and additional technology in the theater, it's not just an innovation play to be fancy, it's a mission-driven imperative that can really widen our access. So technology is walking through our doors, whether we like it or not. And the question is, do we fight it or do we design for it? And this brings us to the final piece of the puzzle. What happens when they leave? The curtain falls, the applause dies down, and the house lights come up. In our current model, unless there's a scheduled talkback, that's the end of your experience. You shuffle out of the row, maybe you talk to the person you came with for five minutes, and then it's over. The connection is totally severed. And we spend so much money getting people into the building, but we have very little strategy for keeping them engaged the second they walk out of the building. And this is where AI offers us a massive opportunity. We can use AI to extend the lifespan of the performance long after the actors have gone home. So think about this. Imagine that you walk out of the theater, your phone buzzes, but it's not a generic, thank you for attending. Please rate us one to five. Nobody wants that, and most people don't fill them out. Instead, your AI agent delivers a personalized digital souvenir. Maybe it's something like a deep dive reading list that connect the themes of the play to books that you've loved, and then offers suggestions for what your next read might be. Suddenly, the theater isn't just a two-hour event, it's a launch pad for your own intellectual curiosity. And we can even go further. We could use AI to facilitate connection. Like, what if 20 minutes after the show your AI offered you an invitation? Let's say it tells you three other people in the audience tonight also had a pretty strong reaction to the ending. Would you like to join a temporary anonymous chat to discuss it? An AI moderator could facilitate the discussion, keeping it civil and on topic, and suddenly your ride home becomes a vibrant book club. And you can even do it while you're driving because you're still wearing your glasses that can transcribe your words into your chat. And we can keep building community without needing folks to stay in the physical lobby. How amazing would that be? So here's why this matters for us, the leaders. All of this post-show interaction gives us something we've never had before. Real data on what our audience actually thought. Right now, we guess what audiences want. But in this new model, we know exactly what themes resonated. We know if they were engaged with the historical context or the romantic subplot. So when we go to market our next show, we aren't shooting in the dark. The AI agent says, Leandro, remember how much you loved the political intrigue in Julius Caesar last month? The theater just announced a new play about 1960s Washington, and I've already put a hold on seats. That brings us right back to where we started. The AI agent buying the ticket. We close the loop. The post-show experience becomes the fuel for the pre-show marketing. So now we've looked at the whole journey. The AI agent that buys the ticket, the smart glasses that enhance the show, and the digital lobby that follows the patron home, and then sends them right back to the agent to buy another ticket. This all can feel really overwhelming. It's a lot of change, and it can feel like a threat to all of us. But I want to be really, really, really clear about something. This is not a threat to the art, right? The quality of the work on our stages will always be the most important thing to our audiences. And I believe that 100%. This is going to be a challenge to our model. It's a challenge to the clunky websites and the marketing strategies that we've been using for 20 plus years. The real danger isn't that AI is going to make bad art as we've read about in so many different places now. The danger is that we as leaders will let our organizations become invisible because people can't find us, or irrelevant because they can't experience our work in a way that respects their new technological reality. The time for be for dreaming or for being scared, honestly, is over. The time for action is now. So here's your homework. I'm not asking you to become a coder. I'm not even asking you to use AI, but I am asking you to do one thing. I want you to call your ticketing vendor, get your get your rep on the phone, and ask them one very specific question. What is your roadmap for an agent first world? Because just asking that question starts the revolution we need because they know you're also paying attention to it, and they need to come up with those answers. So let's be the leaders who design for this next era of technological advancement, not the ones who get run over by it. Thank you so much for listening today. Again, I'm Leandro Zanetti, and this has been moving forward.