Cvent CONNECT Europe made a triumphant return to the InterContinental London - The O2 earlier this month, with marketers, event professionals, and hospitality specialists registered for two days of knowledge sharing, insights, and networking.
Those who couldn’t attend in person could tune in to CONNECT TV and the virtual CONNECT Europe experience. But those who had travelled from across Europe to the UK capital were treated to insightful sessions, a glitzy Cvent Excellence Awards ceremony, tech tours led by Cvent experts, lunchtime roundtable discussions, deep dives on event tech in the Innovation Pavilion, and some unforgettable mainstage moments.
Hosted by broadcaster and TV presenter Dermot O’Leary, Cvent CONNECT Europe 2025 provided an essential overview of the key issues, trends, and technology shaping the events and hospitality sectors. Read on for the highlights and main talking points.
The keynotes
Cvent CEO and founder, Reggie Aggarwal, opened CONNECT Europe 2025 with an inspiring speech that emphasised three key priorities shaping the future of the meetings and events industry: managing uncertainty amid global economic pressures, the transformative potential of AI, and unlocking the full value of event-led growth to drive tangible business outcomes.
Reggie described the evolution of AI as “a monumental shift on a scale unlike anything we’ve seen before.” He concluded by highlighting the rise of Event-Led Growth (ELG), a go-to-market strategy that places events at the centre of customer engagement, acquisition, retention, and revenue.
“AI is about redefining productivity, not replacing creativity. It is a force multiplier, helping deliver exponential outcomes while enabling industry professionals to focus on the critical strategic and human-led aspects of their work.”
- Reggie Aggarwal, Cvent CEO
Day two of Cvent CONNECT Europe 2025 began with a candid and often hilarious interview between conference MC Dermot O’Leary and his fellow This Morning daytime TV presenter, Alison Hammond.
Alison talked about her childhood in Birmingham, the major influence of her mother, and how she dealt with her death in 2020. She also covered her early career and how she built her career in television.
The interview featured amusing anecdotes and offered the audience inspiration on topics such as the role of luck, hard work, and improvisation, as well as imposter syndrome and authenticity.
“I’m improvising my way through life. Things that don’t work out aren’t failures; they’re redirections. If your heart says go for it, then go for it.”
“Yes, I’ve had imposter syndrome. But you’ve got to push yourself a bit - have a go and be your authentic self.”
- Alison Hammond, TV presenter
The product roadmaps
Two of the most eagerly anticipated presentations at Cvent CONNECT Europe each year are the Cvent Product Roadmap sessions, where Cvent experts discuss updates and outline new platform developments.
This year, these sessions introduced CventIQ, a collection of intelligent capabilities embedded across the Cvent platform. CventIQ brings together industry expertise, proprietary insights, a connected smart platform, and intelligent infrastructure with AI.
Example features included:
- Session Snapshots: delivering real-time transcripts, audio snippets, and slide captures directly to attendees.
- Session Insights: providing automated summaries of session feedback for actionable takeaways.
- Attendee Chatbot and Personalisation: providing tailored session and networking recommendations, concise daily summaries, and answers to common questions throughout the event journey.
- Response Assistant: enabling hotels to draft proposal responses to RFPs faster and help drive conversion on group business.
- 3D Event Designer: allowing planners to generate interactive, to-scale venue layouts in photorealistic 3D.
To support the rise of Event-Led Growth, Cvent’s product experts also showcased Cvent Essentials. This simplified solution allows field teams to manage small, repeatable events, such as VIP dinners, roadshows, and regional seminars, at scale.
“Essentials gives you a fast lane for smaller, repeatable events - a way to empower more people without losing control. Scaling stops being about heroics and starts being about smarter systems.”
- Jackie McDonough, Cvent senior director, product management
The Event Marketing & Management Product Roadmap concluded with the unveiling of new tools for managing large-scale conferences and trade shows.
These included the ability to add train travel bookings to registration workflows, ‘On-Arrival’ magic links, which simplify event access for on-site staff, executives, and volunteers, and AI Booth Mapping, which automatically detects and assigns booth layouts from uploaded floor plans.
Cvent’s new sustainability-focused badge partnership with Enviricard was also announced. Each badge is made from paperboard sourced from responsibly-managed Nordic forests and printed using minimal energy, resulting in less waste and a 57% reduction in overall carbon emissions compared to traditional PVC cards.
“Our goal is simple: control when stakes are high, resilience when plans change, and results you can stand behind.”
- Jason Misener, Cvent senior director, product management
Sessions that struck a chord
This year’s Cvent CONNECT Europe offered plenty of insight and advice on everything from planning events with a ‘Saturday night primetime TV entertainment mindset’ to integrating tech stacks and maximising AI.
There was something for everyone. Here were some of the key takeaways for event planners, marketers and venues.
Event professionals
In the panel discussion, How Event Leaders Build (and Run) Smarter Tech Stacks, Vanessa Lovatt, founder of Event Tech World, argued that planners who fully understand the purpose and outcomes of their event programmes make the best event technologists, as this enables them to translate technical ideas into business value.
“Technology only exists to help us make events better. The best technologists are outcome-driven, not tool-obsessed.”
- Vanessa Lovatt, founder of Event Tech World
Fellow panellist Matt Ackroyd, director of event technology at Techoraco, suggested that planners allocate dedicated experimentation time for their teams to test new tools and approaches.
Vanessa echoed this, stating that her work supporting The Financial Times’ dual tech stack depended on her team using the tools internally to identify both flaws and opportunities for improvement.
Jennifer Bray, the event tech team lead at First, also participated in this panel. Each panellist agreed that, at present, tech integrations represent both the greatest opportunity and the biggest challenge for event teams.
“Start simple, benchmark progress, and continuously improve. Build teams that strike a balance between technical depth and effective communication skills. Sometimes the best integrations aren’t about speed - they’re about reducing the time spent on repetitive work.”
- Jennifer Bray, event tech team lead at First
Marketers
In the session, Launching an Event-Led Growth Strategy, Cvent’s Senior Manager, Industry Solutions, Camille Arnold, revealed four essential prerequisites for implementing Event-Led Growth:
- Measurement (tracking pipeline velocity and retention)
- Attribution (aligning to revenue outcomes)
- Technology (CRM, marketing automation, and event tech)
- Internal Alignment (cross-functional collaboration across marketing, sales, operations, and finance)
“The key is repeatability - creating templates and processes so great events can scale without chaos. Don’t aim to be best-in-class tomorrow. Aim to move one stage forward today.”
- Camille Arnold, Senior Manager, Industry Solutions, Cvent
Joel Harrison, founder and editor-in-chief at B2B Marketing, then revealed research from over 1,000 marketers showing that organisations embracing Event-Led Growth outperform their peers.
Over 30% of marketers reported a 20-30 day reduction in their sales cycle, and 80% consistently met or exceeded quarterly revenue targets when using events as the main channel for customer acquisition, retention, and expansion.
“ELG positions events, not just as marketing tactics but as a strategic motion that drives revenue - connecting brand, sales and customer success through shared goals. You can’t build ELG in isolation. It thrives on collaboration - sales, marketing and finance pulling in the same direction.”
- Joel Harrison, founder and editor-in-chief at B2B Marketing
During a panel discussion on How Integrations and Automation Drive Smarter B2B Marketing, Shweta Bajaj, head of marketing enablement at Invesco, recounted how Invesco had historically faced ‘data chaos’ across multiple marketing and event platforms.
By integrating Cvent’s platform into Salesforce and enabling automated data ingestion and scoring, Shweta could trigger relevant email follow-ups and Salesforce tasks, providing sales with real-time visibility into client engagement.
It eliminated spreadsheet imports, delayed follow-ups, and uncertainty about post-event actions, transforming feedback into actionable insights that support account-based marketing (ABM) programmes.
“Integration is the thread running through everything we do. We’ve transitioned from manual uploads to real-time activation, connecting data to deliver client value. Our salespeople now see who attended our events, what they asked, and how they engaged, before they pick up the phone.
- Shweta Bajaj, head of marketing enablement at Invesco
Hospitality professionals
The topic of AI and how to maximise the use of both agentic and generative AI tools dominated many of the sessions aimed at hospitality professionals.
In a panel titled AI in Action: Powering Smarter Meetings and Events, Mandy Stam, senior director of business solutions at Radisson Hotel Group, outlined the organisation’s five-year AI journey. It began with analysing workflows, which revealed that 80% of staff time was spent on administrative tasks.
Radisson now aims to shift that ratio using AI so that only 20% of staff time is dedicated to admin, with 80% on sales and customer engagement.
To achieve this, Radisson employs workflow automation to reduce manual data entry, agentic AI to interpret guest and meeting data, and generative AI to provide staff with instant access to Standard Operating Procedures.
“We want meetings and events teams to spend their time with customers, not spreadsheets. AI is not here to replace people; it’s here to empower them. Take your teams by the hand and show them what’s possible.”
- Mandy Stam, senior director of business solutions at Radisson Hotel Group
Hospitality professionals also gathered to play The Venue Game on day two of Cvent CONNECT Europe 2025.
The large-scale board game enabled sales and marketing teams to experience the booking customer journey from both the venue's and the planner’s perspectives. It offered a fun and collaborative environment to share strategies and test negotiating skills. The first team to reach a 70% chance of closing a deal won the game.
Learning from failure and finding balance
In a candid on-stage moment during day two, Cvent CEO and founder, Reggie Aggarwal, and broadcaster and conference MC Dermot O’Leary shared stories of their early missteps.
Reggie spoke about raising US$17m to compete with 500 other event registration companies based along the West Coast of America in 2000. It allowed Cvent to scale from six people to 125 staff in a single year, but when the ‘perfect storm’ of 09/11 and the dotcom meltdown hit, Reggie found himself on the point of bankruptcy.
“We made the only choice available, which was to cut 80% of our staff. It was a major low point in my life. You learn more on the way down than you do on the way up. And the things you learn will always help you in the next crisis or the next difficult time.”
Dermot spoke about failing his drama GCSE and washing dishes as a kitchen porter, and how each setback became a lesson in resilience, humility, and purpose.
“So many regrets you have. It’s all about learning from them and not making the same mistake twice. I failed my GCSEs, worked in hospitality, and learned the joy of hard work and human connection long before I found TV.”
Dermot also spoke about the importance of perseverance, recalling the 300 handwritten letters he sent to production companies before landing his first role. “I got 190 no replies and two offers of unpaid work,” he laughs. “But that’s how you learn the graft.”
Drawing parallels with the events industry, he urged the audience to ‘adopt kindness as a business strategy’ and to see failure as a learning opportunity —a lesson he also imparts to young people through his Tuskar Trust mentorship programme.
See you next year!
Cvent CONNECT Europe will return to the InterContinental London - The O2 from 21-22 October, and you can pre-register to secure your place today.
Content from this year’s Cvent CONNECT Europe, including main-stage keynotes, panel discussions, presentations and industry expert advice, is still available to watch on-demand via the Cvent Attendee Hub until 14 November.
