It might be tempting to throw a vibe-coding tool at your friction problem. But there’s a more responsible way to work AI into the mix.
It might feel easy to give in to the vibes of AI to let it build your website or speed up a traditional process. (After all, you’re fighting friction.) But are the shortcuts worth it?
According to Thorben Grosser, EventMobi’s head of AI & automation, it depends on the problem you’re trying to solve—and whether it’s going to make anything worse.
And for most use cases, that leaves “vibe coding”—the spicy AI trend that defined 2025—out in the cold. “Don’t vibe code critical infrastructure. End of story,” he says.
Instead, Grosser suggests taking a more pragmatic approach to managing the vibes, using it for smaller, behind the scenes tasks, like ideation, or a small automation that doesn’t require online access. But even then, you might be overestimating it.
“Vibe coding is still not something you just pick up and do,” he says. “You need to have at least the level of interest of somebody has that still sets up an email client manually.”
So, what’s the alternative? “The answer is so boring and simple, but it’s ‘work with professionals,’” he says.
That, combined with cost, might mean you need to ease your ambitions, but there’s still lots of potential to smooth out the friction through integrations. Software integration tools (like Eventmobi’s integrations hub) utilize the under-the-hood connections that many modern tools have through their application programming interfaces (APIs), but abstract out much of the complexity, making them powerful but approachable.
“It’s possible to build something that we can make available to use on one hand, but that is safe to use on the other hand,” he says.
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The security case against vibe coding
How important is digital security for event planners? Grosser compares it to a real-life wedding crasher—a failure of security, sure, but something that can be more easily managed, even ignored.
By comparison, bots are trying to infiltrate sites just because they’re online—with no care about what might be hiding on the domain. If the wedding had a vibe-coded site, for example, it might leave a security hole that can be difficult to plug.
“There is an absolute certainty that this will happen, and it will happen in a matter of hours of you putting something online,” Grosser says. “And I think people underestimate that.”
That can make for a particularly dangerous situation if you’re dealing with front-facing data—threatening to put that information in the hands of people who don’t actually care about your event, but just want to scrape data.
Can vibe coding actually make sense?
That said, there are some cases where using AI to code can make a lot of sense for a business—especially for internal tools. There is a case for using AI agents to help build the surface-level stuff, such as ideating, building personal automation tools, or putting a surface-level sheen on something you’re already building.
“If you tell a vibe coding tool, ‘make something flashier,’ because it wants to please you, it will try to make it flashy,” Grosser says. “And sometimes you end up with something useful.”
Then there’s the case for data analysis. Grosser says that tools like Excel have their limits for crunching data, but AI can help you make sense of data-centric programming languages like R. “Vibe coding can actually help you use those tools,” he adds.
Not sure whether a given solution is the right one? Consider this four-part triage system:
- Do you own the infrastructure? If you don’t, do you trust the partner who does?
- Is it attendee or customer facing? Is it static, or interactive?
- Does it have access to sensitive data—particularly personal information or payment data?
- Are there better options that already exist that aren’t vibe coded?
Ultimately, if you’re doing market research and need to scrape a website, it can be a useful tool. But ultimately, the point Grosser makes is that whatever you build, you should be able to understand what the tool can do—and can’t.
“I think for these situations, it makes sense,” he says. “But what they all have in common is that their exposure to the internet is relatively contained.”
Stay safe by working within your means
How do you ensure good results from a given initiative? Grosser sees two roads for public-facing tools:
“If you have the money, hire somebody to do whatever you want to do for you,” he says. “If you don’t have the money, then you seek off-the-shelf solutions.”
If you’re budget-constrained, this might mean that you have to compromise on some things. If you’re using a free audience polling tool, you might have to live with advertising or miss out on certain features, for example. “But at the end of the day, it’s going to be much safer,” Grosser says.
Ultimately, the goal is to find a compromise—while not leaning too hard into technical capabilities you don’t have in house.
How integrations can save the day
That may not sound like the most exciting state of affairs. But the good news is that even if you’re sticking with off-the-shelf tools, you still have options for getting in on the AI revolution while veering too far off the edge.
The secret, Grosser says, is integrations, along the lines of EventMobi’s Integrations Hub, which can help to connect the tools you already use though automation techniques. Grosser showed off a variety of use cases during a recent Events Masterclass, including one where he was able to get a notification when a VIP arrived in town.
It can also be useful in a lot of other ways. Lean heavily on Slack for your workflow? You can use it to help build a nerve center for your events—while capturing data that can flow in and out of your AMS.
“It’s possible to build something like that we can make available to use on one hand, but that is safe to use on the other hand,” Grosser says.
Put another way: You can still have your AI without moving too fast and breaking too many things.
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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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