Part of Bob’s continued ramblings.
Earlier this year a paper came out – AI 2027 – forecasting all of the rapid progress that AI would make toward Super Intelligence and beyond. In terms of timing, I think I am more in agreement with Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind saying it is 5-10 years out.
In any case, one of my responsibilities is to figure out the general direction of our technology roadmap based on all of the input we get from customers and how our team sees our needs. I try to articulate that annually in a development plan for the coming year. This year I did two plans – our normal set of features events need (2026 Product Plan) and how we will continue our rapid deployment of AI for events (2026 AI Product Plan). These were driven by some underlying thoughts I hope to lay out in the blog (it helps me to write to crystalize my thoughts as well as make sure I get input from others).
AI 2027 For Events
Here is my core thesis:
By the end of 2027, most capabilities currently available in GiveSignup will be accessible from Chat interfaces within our products AND from all major Chat interfaces like ChatGPT and Gemini.
AI will bring a new wave of CONVERSATIONAL and INTERACTIVE user experiences to our transactional GiveSignup system.
There will continue to be typical web and mobile access, and Conversational access will gradually increase to become dominant over the next 5 years (2032).
Here are some of the underlying thoughts.
GiveSignup Core Transactional Platform Is the Cornerstone
While AI will be transformational in terms of how people use platforms like GiveSignup, the underlying transactional system will still be needed. AI does not have a couple of things:
- Transactional Capability – AI can not assure that a monetary transaction takes money from one place and puts it someplace else in a highly reliable manner.
- Robust Database and Memory – AI can not save accurate accounts of who signed up, or when an event is, or what the exact timeslots are for a venue.
- Real Human Interactions – AI can not experience the human interactions necessary to operate an event experience and learn the needs of the people. GiveSignup employees know more about events and have the emotional connection. And our platform has encoded all of that learning into our databases and transactional code.
What is interesting is that there is now a first generation to allow AI to talk with transactional database systems like GiveSignup. MCP is that protocol, and was introduced only 1 year ago by Anthropic. The fact that we now have an MCP server and can do things like Results lookups and buy a ticket via the MCP-GiveSignup interface is remarkable. Imagine what will be available in 2 more years as we build on that base.
GiveSignup Will Need Core Infrastructure to Interact with AI
We have upgraded our API infrastructure, we have our own MCP server with a bunch of tools built, we have upgraded our OAuth2 infrastructure and added DCR, we have a Chatbot for customer service running in production and we have demonstrated a prototype of our infrastructure to buy a ticket. We will build on these initial steps with our own RAG and Vector databases, improving our ability to host many of our own AI Agents as we open up more and more of the GiveSignup platform to our own Chat and Agents.
Customers Will See Chat Interfaces in Websites and Dashboard Pages Grow the Next 2 Years
With this advanced infrastructure that provides security, reliability, scalability and productivity to our entire development team, customers will start to see more and more chat interfaces with more and more advanced capabilities.
By the end of 2027, most interfaces that GiveSignup currently has with text boxes, drop down menus, radio buttons, checkboxes and so forth will also have the same capability available via Chat.
It is important to make three notes here.
- We will not slow down on improving our core functionality. Customers can expect us to continue to have the best event technology even without AI. Se our 2026 Product Plan as proof.
- As we build more, we will learn more. We will get better and faster.
- We expect slow adoption of the AI interfaces. Humans are creatures of habit. We know that at the end of 2027, most interactions (probably greater than 90%) with our system will be from traditional web and mobile interfaces.
GiveSignup Open to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc. Directly
In addition to the chat interfaces inside GiveSignup, the same features will be securely available within the various Conversational interfaces from the LLM’s. This technology is still maturing, but given how fast MCP adoption has accelerated in just the first year, we expect common issues of registries and security will be coming in 2026 with widespread adoption and standardization (probably a few competing standards) in 2027.
GiveSignup 2026 AI Plan is Built for This Future
Our 2026 AI Product Plan is built for this vision of the future. The first half of the year will focus on building out our infrastructure to make sure we have a strong foundation. We will do various small pilots and experiments that will increase in size and importance as the year carries forward. We expect that by 2027, when we build features or create V2 and V3 of a capability that it will involve doing a web interface, a mobile interface and an AI interface.
We think this plan ensures we are helping our event customers be in a position to take advantage of AI. Making your event accessible to people using AI to find and signup for events. Giving you tools to analyze your event. Making it simpler to setup your event and add features and capabilities.
AI is changing the world, and fast. GiveSignup will keep up the pace both short term and most importantly for the long term.