One file format is eating up event discussions

Christopher Dela Cruz spent five years on the agency side before moving in-house at a tech cybersecurity company. When I asked him what still breaks, he went straight to CAD files.

His estimate: about a third of the conversations in any planner group chat he's in are about CAD, and not the floor plan itself. It's about how to convert a PDF into one.

Here's how it goes. A vendor needs the diagram in CAD, and what you have is a PDF, which you can't convert yourself because you don't have AutoCAD and nobody ever trained you on it. So you ask, and then you wait.

"We're kind of held captive in a way. The vendor still will take a week, and we don't have access to anything, or we can't convert it ourselves."

Meanwhile, the floor plan is frozen, and the client wants an update you can't give.

The awkward part

I was ready to write that nobody has built the tool for this, but the tools exist.

CADZoom turns CAD imports into event-ready floor plans. Cvent Event Diagramming, which most of you knew as Social Tables, has done collaborative to-scale diagramming for years. Prismm built 3D and VR digital twins. And straight PDF-to-DWG conversion runs about $100 a sheet with a 48-hour turnaround, or free through AI converters that detect walls and doors and then hand you a file needing manual cleanup on wall thickness, alignment, and scale.

That’s the catch. The free option requires you to know CAD well enough to fix what the converter got wrong. If you knew that, you wouldn't have the problem.

So it isn't that nothing exists, it's that everything that exists was built for the person who already owns AutoCAD, or it costs a hundred dollars and two days every time a vendor asks.

The bigger trend in this category

While planners wait a week for files, the software that would fix it is consolidating fast.

Cvent acquired Prismm in April 2025, picking up 5,500 venues, hotels, planners and vendors. Cvent already owned Social Tables.

Prismm is now being shut down, and Cvent has published the timeline. It runs like this:

• Now through 30 September: the ability to create new Prismm events ends, account by account, with at least 30 days' notice each

• 1 October: Prismm goes view-and-export only

• 31 December: prismm.com access and support end

Customers move to Cvent Event Diagramming. Templates, favorites and object groups do not come with them, which means whatever you built in there, you rebuild.

That was Cvent's seventh acquisition since January 2024, the most aggressive expansion in its 26-year history, and Event Tech Live called the December run the start of event tech's consolidation era.

Read that as a planner rather than an investor. If you diagram in Prismm, your create-new window is closing within weeks, and your templates don't survive the move. If your company already pays for Cvent, this is an inconvenience. If it doesn't, the category just got further away rather than closer.

It isn't only CAD

CAD was the headline, but it wasn't the only thing on Christopher's list. Four more, in his words.

Fire marshal approval. "When we're trying to get fire marshal approval for like a keynote or something like that, it takes weeks hoping that hey, is it approved? Is it not?" His frustration is that the input is public: "Why is there not a solution for this, especially if the fire code is made public to everybody? That's for me my most mind-blowing thing."

Safety planning by search engine. "Every time I ask anyone, even past colleagues, they're like, oh yeah, we just google it. Almost 90% of the time." Where a previous version of the event exists, teams copy last year's plan across, which he doesn't think holds up either. Venues open, venues close, and the nearest emergency room changes.

The site visit. "There's always the, well I need to pull up my laptop and open up like the 10,000 tabs that I have. Or, oh shoot, we're walking around the venue and I didn't capture that one note."

Hunting approvals. "Where's that one Slack message where Susie approved it? I feel like that wastes a lot of time, everyone trying to hunt things down."

What he did about it

Christopher isn't waiting. He's building it himself. A CAD converter, a room planner that flags fire code issues on upload, a safety and evacuation generator, a site visit view that pulls every document for that visit, and an on-site change log so approvals stop living in Slack.

Solo. In his words, on the team page of his own product: "obviously, it's just me."

He isn't a neutral observer, and you should read his list knowing that. He described these problems while walking me through the tool he's building to solve them. It's also why the list is good. He spent five years agency side, he's now in-house, and he's annoyed enough about the same five things to build them himself.

Two things are moving in opposite directions here. The category is consolidating upward into fewer, larger, more expensive platforms. The barrier to building the specific thing you need has dropped far enough that the person with the problem can build it themselves.

If you take one thing from this

Write down the thing you do at every event that makes you sigh before you start.

Not the hard part of your job, but the tedious part. The file you convert, the document you rebuild, the message you go hunting for, the export you paste into three places.

That's your list. Most of it is now buildable by somebody with no technical background, which is the part that's new this year.

Till next time,

Noah

Do More With Less Using AI

PS: What's your record wait time for a CAD file?