Concert Fans Put AI in Charge of the Tickets Search
Fans hunting for concert seats are starting to skip the filters altogether. Instead of scrolling through hundreds of listings sorted by price and section, some are simply describing what they want and letting artificial intelligence narrow the choices.
Seatpin, a European ticket marketplace, built its Pin AI assistant after watching customers do exactly that. Users were already browsing event pages with listings and filters in front of them, yet they still turned to live chat and WhatsApp with requests such as tickets for a specific match or two seats for a concert.
“Some customers prefer a conversation to navigating websites, filters and options,” Galin Ananiev, founder and CEO of Seatpin, said in an interview with PYMNTS. He said the behavior cuts across age groups rather than concentrating among younger consumers.
Conversational Search Replaces the Listings Page
Seatpin is not alone in betting that the ticket search box and results grid can be compressed into a conversation. SeatGeek launched Ask SeatGeek in August, letting fans type queries such as popular outdoor concerts under $100 and get a direct answer instead of working through multiple filters.
“We’ve spent 17 years organizing the details that matter when someone chooses a ticket,” Jack Groetzinger, SeatGeek’s co-founder and CEO, said in the announcement, framing the tool as a way to surface information the marketplace already had, PYMNTS reported.
Ticketmaster has taken a similar path. The company connected its listings to Google’s Gemini in August and to ChatGPT’s app marketplace earlier this year, letting fans compare seating and prices inside a chat window before finishing checkout on Ticketmaster’s own site.
Seatpin has taken the same step. It already operates an app inside the ChatGPT marketplace, Ananiev said, though referral traffic remains limited because the company has not yet promoted the listing or built awareness around it.
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For Ananiev, the harder question isn’t discovery. It’s how much of the purchase itself an assistant should be allowed to make.
Checkout Keeps the Customer in Control
Ananiev drew a firm line between an assistant that prepares a purchase and one that completes it. His preferred flow has the agent search listings and assemble an order, then send the customer an email with the ticket details, total price and an approval button. Clicking that button triggers an SMS code for a second confirmation before the transaction goes through.
“A comfortable approach would be for the agent to prepare everything and leave the final approval to the customer,” Ananiev said. He would not want an assistant independently authorized to spend a consumer’s money without that final review.
Handing a shopping assistant a stored card number and letting it check out on its own remains the harder problem, Ananiev said, since ticket prices and inventory can change between search and purchase. Splitting the flow into preparation and approval keeps the customer as the last decision-maker on a purchase that, unlike a reordered household staple, can be expensive and difficult to reverse.
Visa and Mastercard have both rolled out tokenized credentials scoped to a specific agent, merchant and spending limit, an approach PYMNTS reported is meant to give banks and merchants a way to recognize an AI agent as authorized before a transaction clears.
PYMNTS Intelligence research found 45% of consumers are comfortable letting an AI agent complete a purchase on their behalf, while 95% still hold at least one concern about agentic buying. Roughly half said clearer fraud protections would raise their confidence.
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