By Kim Rogers, Business Development Manager
Most conferences have a version of honesty. People share what worked, frame it well, and leave out the parts that didn’t. TLCC is different. Last week in Washington D.C., I watched a performing arts organization walk a room full of their peers through two projects that changed course mid-delivery, not as a cautionary tale but as evidence that their process was working. The room respected it. That’s the culture of this conference, and it’s why we keep coming back.
TLCC is the annual gathering of Tessitura users: theaters, concert halls, museums, arts centers, and performing arts organizations from across North America and beyond. Everyone in the room is working with the same core platform, which means the conversations skip past the basics and get straight to what organizations are actually doing with it. The sessions are really good. The hallway conversations are often even better.
What I heard this year
The AI conversation at TLCC was more mature than I expected, and more useful. There were sessions ranging from full strategic frameworks for values-led adoption right through to one presenter who walked through using an AI tool to draft a database query because his team didn’t have the SQL resource to build it manually. Both were valuable, but in completely different ways. What struck me was that nobody in the room was trying to impress anyone with AI. They were just trying to solve problems, and AI happened to be part of how they did it.
The other thing that came through clearly was how much these organizations are carrying at once. The performing arts organization I mentioned at the start ran eight concurrent projects in a single season: a rebrand, a leadership transition, new technology, new programming. They came to TLCC to share what they learned. Two of those projects pivoted from the original plan. They didn’t hide that; they built their whole session around it. One of those pivots turned into a new product that’s brought thousands of first-time visitors into their file. The lesson isn’t that failure is fine. It’s that organizations willing to test, adapt, and keep going are building something more durable than the ones who plan everything in advance and hope for the best.
See you next year
Artifax was at TLCC as a sponsor and integration partner, and the conversations we had at the booth, between sessions, and over coffee were some of the most grounded and genuinely useful of the year. The people at this conference aren’t looking to be impressed. They know their operations inside out, and they’ll tell you quickly whether something is useful or not. I find that refreshing.
If you were there and we didn’t manage to connect, I’d love to hear what you took away. And if TLCC isn’t on your radar yet, it should be.