Your entrants are using AI. Your entry journey isn't.
For award entrants, AI tools have changed the entry experience.
Entrants are using them to draft award entries, and what used to take a week now takes an afternoon.
As a result, entry volumes are up. But the quality of what's inside those entries is not.
To be clear, entrants aren't doing anything wrong by using AI. They're doing what any time-pressured team would do.
The problem is that ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and all the other platforms don't know your category structure.
They don't know what your judges have rewarded for the last decade.
They produce something that sounds coherent but lands in the wrong place, or reads as generic to a judge who has read hundreds of entries.
Worse, when entrants use those tools, their campaign data, strategy, and results are potentially being used to train the next version of someone else's AI platform.
Most award show organisers haven't responded. At best, there's a chatbot on the FAQ page that can answer "when is the deadline?"
The entry journey itself hasn't changed.
What the industry actually built
What currently exists is more lip service to AI than a revolution of the entry process. "Smart workflows." "Personalised experiences." All very good uses of the technology but they don’t create a step change in the entry experience, which is still the one from five years ago: a homepage, a category list, and a form.
The longest walk in awards is from your homepage to a completed, well-matched entry. Nobody has shortened it until now.
It helps to be precise about what AI can offer an awards show at different levels of depth:
Level 1: Chatbot. Answers FAQ questions about the journey.
Level 2: Entry intelligence at the point of submission. Reads the entrant's actual work, matches it to the right categories, and builds a submission-ready entry from it.
Level 3: Show intelligence from the archive. Uses years of data to inform entrants on trends and best practice for that industry.
Most shows are at Level 1 or below, and very few have reached Level 2. That's expensive, because Level 2 is where entrants get routed to the categories they can win, and pay for.
The answer is not to catch them but to give them a better tool, one that actually knows your show.
What's happening in the judging room
The cost of staying at Level 1 shows up where it hurts most: in front of your judges.
Research from the IASC, reported in February 2026, found that 71% of judges say they can now spot an AI-written entry. When they suspect it, 58% are less confident the entry will be engaging, 21% are less likely to read it thoroughly, and 42% will consciously award fewer marks.
So the generic, mismatched entry that AI produces doesn't just miss the right category. It loses marks.
The instinct across the industry is to police this, and 14% of organisers are already running detection tools on submissions.
That's understandable, but it is the losing side of the trade.
The entrant who submitted a weak, mismatched entry isn't your adversary. They're a customer who used the wrong tool, landed in the wrong category, didn't place, and won't be back next year.
The answer is not to catch them but to give them a better tool, one that actually knows your show.
Changing the award entry journey
That is the gap Award Compass built the AI Entry Navigator to close.
It sits on your award show's platform and does something no generic AI tool can: it reads an entrant's actual work (a document, a case study), analyses it against years of your show's winning entries, and builds it into a submission-ready format.
Then it tells the entrant which categories are best for their work, tailors the entry for the categories they choose, and explains where they're strongest and why.
It's the part of the journey nobody has built yet, where an entrant arrives with their work and leaves with something a judge will actually read.
The entrant's data also stays on your platform. It isn't used to retrain any AI platform, which is vital when entrants are handling sensitive client information and data.
Award Compass is already working with Festival of Media Global across five of its shows. To date, the Entry Navigator has generated more than £60,000 in revenue for the client and captured 75+ new entrant email addresses.
See how it works on your own categories: book a 20-minute walkthrough at awardcompass.com
Sources: IASC research, reported February 2026 via SEC Newgate. Festival of Media Global figures: Award Compass client results.