Find yourself moving data around via spreadsheets and long-forgotten emails? It might be time to get an integration platform in your life.
Once upon a time, the technology world was overtaken by this concept called plug and play, where you connected things together, and they just worked.
It was the ultimate friction-killer, but it wasn’t easy to pull off. Nowadays, the idea has moved from hardware to software, in the form of integration—apps that communicate with other apps seamlessly. Any professional can benefit from it, especially event planners. But too often, event pros, stuck in old systems and vintage workflows, might find themselves doing a lot of unnecessary copy-pasting instead.
The good news is that, if you can find a way to make integrations work, they could be your ticket out of spreadsheet hell. The bad news? You have to figure out how to make integrations work. But on the plus side, tech companies have been working to make these integrations user-approachable, even when the apps are increasingly obscure.
“Basically, the opportunity for anyone, regardless of technical knowledge and technical experience, is to build complex workflows and to integrate whatever they want,” says Leo Goldfarb, the head of Albato Embedded, an EventMobi partner.
Integration tools, like Eventmobi’s Integrations Hub, represent what plug-and-play can look like for event planners, whether they just want to keep it simple, or aim for something more ambitious.
And for those leaning on AI agents and similar tools, Goldfarb says that integration software plays extremely nicely with AI: “All that can be fed to an AI agent that sits in the middle.”
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What’s An API & Why It Matters
What enables integrations between platforms? Simply put, many tools have what’s known as an application programming interface (API), a way for apps to communicate with one another under the hood, often using a standard interface. If you’re code-savvy, you can make these programs talk to one another. But for people that can’t, where does that leave you?
In some cases, the tool might integrate directly with a desired app, but if you need something specific, this can ultimately prove limiting, according to Thorben Grosser, EventMobi’s Head of AI.
“Let’s say I want an event platform that has an integration with Cvent,” Grosser says. “Well, there’s probably 50 out there. Okay, but I need an integration with Cvent and MailChimp. There’s probably still five, but now I need an event platform that has an integration with Cvent and MailChimp, and that supports sending Slack messages. And now I’m down to zero.”
One solution to this problem is the integration platform as a service (iPaaS), which essentially facilitates connections between tools. Services like Zapier or Make have helped take this concept mainstream in recent years. But even there, those create challenges as you niche down. For example, event planners may need their tools to talk to an association management system (AMS), a type of application essential to associations but unknown outside of it. These kinds of monolithic enterprise apps are everywhere, and most automation tools don’t talk to them.
In the past, these might have been handled through custom-developed integrations, but the challenge is that their tools evolve just like yours, requiring periodic fixes. “You know, a good friend of mine once said that integrations are born to be broken,” Goldfarb says.
For EventMobi’s integration hub, Goldfarb notes that Albato worked closely with the company to help identify and develop integrations that are especially valuable to event planners. “Basically, we custom-built some integrations to make EventMobi’s offering more valuable to their customers,” he says.
What Can You Actually Do With An Integration?
Integrations can be an excellent way to lean into what’s called a best-in-class approach to software, in which you take the tools you need from different software packages and make them work together as a single piece. Vertically integrated tools may be your preference, but sometimes, you just want Slack notifications over whatever tool you’re buying in an integrated package, because that’s what your team already relies on.
That’s an area where integrations can shine, by connecting your niche tools to platforms that your employees are already likely to know. (Plus, there’s something to be said about connecting your applications to your database. If you’re moving attendee data by hand, that could create some serious data privacy risks.)
According to Goldfarb, putting together an integration does come with some limitations. After all, you’re working with user-friendly automation scripts, rather than a more out-there approach along the lines of what you might see with a vibe-coded tool.
But if you want to do that, there’s still plenty of room to experiment. Goldfarb says Albato had developed numerous experimental tools such as AI marketing agents that leverage both Albato integrations and up-to-the-minute AI tools like Claude Code or OpenClaw. It’s a concept he says that, in the right hands, could be used quite creatively.
“Maybe you share some information about you or your company when you register to an event,” he says, offering an example of an AI-first targeting strategy for events. “All that can be fed to an AI agent that sits in the middle, for example. It can analyze the audience even before the event.”
Integrations: Lazy, But Brilliant
At the end of the day, though, an iPaaS tool like Eventmobi’s Integrations Hub solves a problem of manual labor in more ways than one, including by replacing the complex work that often comes with a platform transition. Goldfarb says that moving data around can lead to poorly optimized shortcuts or fragile custom integrations.
The reason? People are lazy—but it’s completely understandable.
“Any sane person wouldn’t want to do it by hand, and that’s when they start looking for a specific integration to basically enable automated data sync between EventMobi and another app,” he says.
A little upfront work now, a lot fewer headaches later on.
“I guess it all comes from laziness,” he says.
Struggling with disconnected event tools and manual data imports?
Book your EventMobi demo today to see how the Integrations Hub connects your CRM, marketing, and event data, so everything stays accurate and up to date.
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