OpenAI Is Betting on In-Person, Which Tells You Something About AI

OpenAI is hiring a Global Head of Events. The base salary runs from $361,000 to $401,000, with equity on top. Whoever gets the job will lead a large existing team and oversee flagship conferences, developer gatherings, executive programs, regional events and product launches, along with the studio that films OpenAI's town halls and webinars.

According to the listing, the Events team exists to connect the people building AI with the people using it. The ideal candidate, it says, has "a love of bringing people together."

That's a slightly funny line to read from OpenAI. Few companies have done more to take people out of business communication. Its models draft the sales emails, write the follow-ups, summarize the calls, and now make support calls for customers who don't want to wait on hold. Plenty of B2B inboxes are now mostly one company's AI writing to another company's AI.

And yet OpenAI is offering one of the biggest salaries in the events business to get people into the same physical space.

Why the room got more valuable

For most of the last fifteen years, in-person was the expensive exception in B2B marketing. Digital was cheap, trackable and easy to scale. Events were what you did when there was budget left over, and they were usually the first thing cut in a bad quarter.

AI changed the math on the digital side. When a rep spent fifteen minutes personalizing an email, getting one meant somebody had actually thought about you. That email now costs a fraction of a cent to produce, everyone knows it, and so it carries almost no weight. Buyers trust less of what lands in their inbox, and marketers have noticed. We've written about LinkedIn cracking down on AI posts, companies publishing AI writing policies and typos becoming proof that a human was involved.

A dinner hasn't gotten any cheaper. Neither has a flight, or two hours of a senior executive's time. That cost used to be the main argument against events. It's now closer to the argument for them, because buyers can tell the difference between something a company generated and something a company showed up for.

Budgets are starting to move in that direction. In the US, event spending grew about 10.9% for 2025/26 while total B2B marketing spend fell 3.1%. In Bizzabo's 2026 research, 78% of organizers said in-person conferences and summits were their most effective marketing channel. The enthusiasm has limits, though. Forrester found that two-thirds of event teams still have flat or shrinking budgets, and only 38% of CMOs think their company's events are performing well.

What OpenAI is asking for

The listing is more interesting for its tone than its title. OpenAI wants someone with "creative judgment" who is comfortable making decisions without complete information and who keeps the attendee experience at the center. It will measure the role on product understanding, adoption, community, customer relationships, brand and business results. Community and product understanding sit right next to revenue on that list, which isn't how most companies write an events job these days.

The listing also wants someone "excited to use AI" in their own work, and that makes sense. The future this points to isn't a choice between AI and human contact. Software can take over the planning, research, logistics and follow-up that used to fill most of an events team's week. That leaves the people free to do what software can't, which is to be present and make a room full of strangers feel like the trip was worth it.

Rooms that feel like funnels

One thing could spoil all of this. People go to in-person events because they don't feel like marketing. The best part of most conferences happens in a hallway or over dinner, when someone tells you what they really think of a vendor, or you meet a person you'll be calling for advice for the next five years.

If every company rediscovers events at the same time and runs them like any other demand-gen channel, with every badge scanned and every attendee dropped into an SDR sequence by Monday, the room will start to feel like the inbox. Marketers have done this before. Email, display ads and LinkedIn were all useful once, until they were optimized to the point where people stopped paying attention.

Some brands seem to get it. Ramp just staged a one-night Broadway musical for finance leaders, starring Billy Porter and built around its accounts payable software. Nobody in that audience was going to mistake it for a webinar.

What OpenAI can see

Few companies have a clearer view than OpenAI of how much everyday business communication is being handed to machines. When a company in that position decides to spend more on putting people in a room together, it's worth asking what it knows.

As software takes over more of go-to-market, a company's reputation will depend more on the things software can't do. Showing up in person is one of the few left, and OpenAI appears to be paying accordingly.