Five Events Worlds

About the Five Events Worlds

Where the Five Events Worlds came from, what each one means for the people in the room, and why we count news stories to track them.

By Mark Jones · The Story Code Co.

The Five Events Worlds is a research project I began in 2026 to study the impact of dominant industry narratives on decision-makers. It’s an attempt to make invisible stories visible – offering leaders more context and clarity.

A few years ago I was struck by a short essay by two computer scientists, Scott Aaronson and Boaz Barak, called “Five Worlds of AI”.1 Instead of arguing about whether AI would save us or sink us, they did something quite smart. They laid out five possible futures side by side to help people map out these different arguments.

I couldn’t let it go – in fact, it captured my imagination. I’ve spent 30 years as a journalist, agency co-founder and professional speaker. I’ve watched industries argue endlessly about their future and what dominant narrative will ultimately win.

When I found Aaronson and Barak’s Five Worlds of AI, it imprinted a map in my head and I started seeing it everywhere.

Every industry must have its own five worlds.

The names of each narrative within that industry are different, but the core arguments are the same. There’s always a “nothing really changes” story, a “the benefits spread to everyone” story, a “winner takes all” story, a “the technology takes over” story and an “it all falls apart” story.

So began a research project. I used Claude Code to build a scanning method that reads the news at scale, once a week. Press, research reports, industry commentary. And it categorises each story into one of the five worlds that exist in that industry.

We’re now running this weekly news scan in the AI, marketing, HR and events industries – each one an area of interest to me and my clients.

And because the universal, cross-industry names – Fizzle, Spread, Domination, Autonomy and Chaos, our own labels for the five worlds Aaronson and Barak first mapped – mean nothing to an event producer with 400 delegates arriving on Tuesday, we gave each world a new name that’s more intuitively meaningful.

So let’s get into it. Here are the Five Events Worlds and what they mean.

The five events worlds.

Five competing beliefs about where corporate events are heading – and what each one costs you if it wins.

Same Rooms

Maps to AI's Fizzle world

The Same Rooms narrative is a belief that disruption never comes. Events carry on as they always have. This is the events version of AI’s Fizzle world – where the big transformational change everyone predicted quietly fails. It’s the least glamorous story and the most underrated, because it’s the default setting for a lot of corporate event budgets.

So what? If this story wins, events won’t actually die straight away. But they will drift. And a regular event that’s drifting and directionless is easy to cut if you’re a sharp CFO or CEO.

Open Rooms

Maps to AI's Spread world

Anyone can convene. This narrative is the belief that the room is open to anyone – communities run their own rooms, and business follows. This is the events version of AI’s Spread world, where technology makes a good thing available to everyone. Interestingly, most vendors selling technology for events believe this narrative. And it’s not wrong: the barriers to running a decent event have collapsed.

So what? If anyone can host a room, the question stops being “can we run an event?” and becomes “why would anyone come to ours?”

Mega Rooms

Maps to AI's Domination world

Mega Rooms is at first glance a narrative that does what it says on the tin. That is, large-scale events concentrate value in one time and space. The nuance is that believers in this narrative adhere to the idea that the money, attention and data ultimately flows to a handful of mega-conferences and big-budget brands. Bigger is best, and the big brands with the biggest events will win.

In AI world, this narrative is called Domination – the belief that the benefits of a new transformational technology are ultimately captured by the people at the top (think AI billionaires and the dominant LLM providers). In the events world, examples include giant global user conferences and the sponsors who follow them.

So what? If this story wins, smaller competitors get squeezed. Mid-sized events fight for scraps of attention and the smart money asks whether it should be hosting an event at all, or just buying a bigger stand at someone else’s show.

Small Rooms

Maps to AI's Autonomy world

In this narrative, the room itself becomes more highly valued. Smaller, curated, high-value gatherings are where in-person human connection can’t be faked. This one maps to AI’s Autonomy world. The mapping is a little tricky, so stay with me. In the original AI world, Autonomy is the world where the technology runs so much of life that humans are free from the grind. In the events world, the flip side is the whole point: when everything else can be automated, a room full of actual humans becomes the scarce asset.

So what? Curating a compelling event becomes the craft. Hosting becomes a leadership skill. And presence – actually being there in person – is worth more.

Ghost Rooms

Maps to AI's Chaos world

This narrative is where things get tough. AI is transforming our experience of events in tangible ways as the room hollows out. AI agents attend in place of real people, virtual attendance and budget cuts replace travel, and of course attention from real people collapses. This is the events version of AI’s Chaos world – the loss-of-control story.

So what? Nobody in the events industry wants this reality, which is exactly why it matters: the stories we’d rather not tell are the ones that sneak up on us. So our advice is to watch this one closely. That’s also why the scan counts a warning as much as a prediction: a piece that frets about empty seats is still a Ghost Rooms story.

A quick note about counting news stories

The thing about human beliefs is that they’re tough to survey directly. People often respond to surveys by reporting what convention dictates they should say – not what they truly believe. But you can track what gets written.

Every credible article and report is in effect a vote for one of the five worlds. That’s because journalists and editors write articles they know will appeal to readers. When I first began writing back in the late 1990s, we got reader survey insights once every six months. Today, the world could not be more different. Editors and reporters are tracking real-time insights – web traffic, social engagement, live forums, and of course inbound comments from readers. Popular topics and ideas get more attention over time, and less popular ideas fade away as readers tune out.

From our perspective, the Five Worlds project builds on this idea by committing to a long-term study. When you use the exact same methodology to count enough articles, week after week, all that industry noise starts to resolve into signals that make sense.

And here’s the method. A fixed register of more than 100 B2B events publications, associations, podcasts and YouTube channels across Australia and New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong, Europe and North America, read every week. Every story gets the same eight questions, and one ‘world’, classified on what the story assumes rather than how it sounds. For example, a worried piece about mega-conferences is still a Mega Rooms story. A story picked up by five outlets counts once.

That’s because we’re tracking a headline metric we call the Gathering Gap. There are two primary battles of interest. Mega Rooms versus Small Rooms. Scale or intimacy – which narrative is winning?

The weekly scans carry the running score, and the monthly reports read the trend. But that’s not a prediction. That’s where the industry’s attention sits today, and readings change.

So what?

Each one of the Five Events Worlds represents a dominant narrative already alive in our industry. You and your leaders believe one of them. Your sponsors believe another. Delegates are voting with their feet in yet another – attending large or small events based on what they believe delivers most value.

Now, to be clear, the Five Events Worlds won’t tell you which story is ultimately true. But it will show you which stories are gaining ground, which are fading and how fast. Your job is to decide what stories deserve your attention and what’s just noise.

That’s because we believe pattern recognition is one of the most powerful skills leaders need in the age of AI. The question isn’t which future will arrive but which core narrative is the basis on which you’re building your events – and whether you chose that narrative or passively inherited it from someone else.

1. Scott Aaronson and Boaz Barak, “Five Worlds of AI”, April 2023.

Methodology: Each scan reads a fixed, published register of B2B events sources across four regions, screens out consumer events and filler, and classifies every story into one world based on its underlying assumption about where events are heading, not its tone. Stories reporting the same announcement count once. Each region is scored on its own, and the global figure weights them for Australian and New Zealand readers (Australia & NZ 40%, North America 35%, Europe 20%, APAC 5%). Vendor-written stories are counted but flagged. Full method notes at thestorycode.co/five-events-worlds.

Which world are you building for?

The Five Events Worlds scan runs every week – the trend graph, what moved, and the stories bending the narrative.

Get the scan free