AI hallucination

Hallucination is the single biggest operational risk of putting generative AI in front of your attendees. An event chatbot that sends a visitor to a stand that doesn't exist, or announces a session at the wrong time, damages trust faster than having no chatbot at all — and the errors read as polished and authoritative, which makes them worse. The risk concentrates wherever the AI answers from general knowledge instead of your actual data: names, numbers, times, locations, and anything about this year's edition specifically. In practice, organizers reduce it by insisting on retrieval-grounded systems (the AI answers only from your event data), constraining scope (the assistant refuses questions outside the event), and testing adversarially before launch — ask it about exhibitors who cancelled, sessions that moved, halls that don't exist. The common mistake is testing only happy paths during the vendor demo and discovering the failure modes live, from an annoyed exhibitor screenshot. One honest nuance: hallucination can be reduced dramatically but not eliminated, whatever the sales deck claims. The practical question isn't "does it hallucinate?" but "how often, how badly, and does it fail visibly or invisibly?" Ask vendors for their measured error rate, not their assurances.