The Bit AI Can't Do Yet By Tom Stevens, MD, Oaken Design

I have been delivering exhibition stands for the best part of 25 years. I have built in Las Vegas, Hamburg, Barcelona, London, Dubai and a dozen other cities in between. I have managed stands of 20 m2 and stands of over 1,000m2. I have been on show floors at midnight the night before opening, solving problems that nobody predicted and making sure that when the doors open in the morning, everything is exactly right.

So when the conversation in our industry turned to AI, I paid attention. Not with anxiety. With curiosity.

Because here is what I have noticed over the last 18 months.

The concepts are getting better and

What AI is actually doing in our industry right now

Agencies are using it. Exhibitors' own marketing teams are using it. In-house designers who would previously have spent days developing initial concepts are generating them in hours. The tools are good. Some of the outputs are genuinely impressive.

Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and a handful of more specialised tools are being used to create exhibition stand concepts that look polished, feel on-brand, and give clients something real to react to early in the process. I have seen AI-generated stand visuals that would have taken an experienced designer many days to produce. Generated in twenty minutes.

That is not a threat to our industry. That is a shift in how the industry works. And shifts create opportunities for the people who are paying attention.

Here is the part nobody is talking about

A concept is not a stand.

It is the beginning of a conversation. A vision. A direction. Sometimes a genuinely exciting one.

But between that image on a screen and a physical structure standing on a show floor in Las Vegas or Hamburg, there is an enormous amount of work that AI cannot do. Not yet. Possibly not ever, in the way that matters.

Structural integrity. Load calculations. Compliance with venue regulations, which vary considerably between ExCeL London and the Venetian Expo in Las Vegas, and vary again at Fira de Barcelona. Union rules in the US, which are specific, non-negotiable and will derail your build if you do not know them. Material specifications. Logistics and customs. Supplier relationships built over years. The judgment call at 11pm the night before the show opens when something has not arrived and you need a solution in the next two hours.

None of that is in the prompt.

What this means in practice

I am increasingly talking to clients and prospects who are arriving at conversations with a concept already in hand. Sometimes it has come from their agency. Sometimes from their own team. Sometimes, and this is becoming more common, from an AI tool they have been experimenting with.

They have a vision. They do not always have a pathway to making it real. That is where we come in.

We worked with one client recently who came to us with a creative direction developed by their in-house designers. Bold, technology-driven, ambitious. Our job was not to redesign it. It was to take that vision and engineer it into something that could actually be built, at scale, in a venue with its own rules and constraints, on a timeline that did not allow for second chances.

The concept was theirs. The delivery was ours. That combination worked because each party brought what the other could not.

The question worth asking

If you are an exhibitor or a marketing director thinking about your next show, the question is not whether AI will change how your stand gets designed. It probably already has, or it will soon.

The question is: who is going to make it real?

Because the tools that generate the vision are getting better quickly. The expertise required to execute it, on the floor, in the right country, to the right standard, on the right day, that is not something you can generate with a prompt. It is built over years. It lives in the people who have done it, repeatedly, at the shows that do not allow for mistakes.

What I think happens next

I think the agencies and exhibitors who thrive in the next five years will be the ones who work out how to use AI for what it is genuinely good at, which is generating ideas quickly and giving clients something to react to early, while investing in the human expertise that turns those ideas into something real.

The two are not in competition. They are partners. The concept and the build. The vision and the execution.

I find that rather exciting. After 25 years in this industry, not much surprises me. This genuinely does.

If you are thinking about your next show and want to talk through what that might look like in practice, I am always happy to have a conversation.

Tom Stevens is MD of Oaken Design, a global exhibition design and build company. He has delivered stands at Farnborough International Airshow, Paris Airshow, G2E Las Vegas, ICE Barcelona, AIX Hamburg and dozens of other shows worldwide.

www.oaken.design