5 Event Trends You Can't Ignore in 2026

[00:00:00] Rachel Andrews: I think when people view an event as exclusive or driven directly for them, or high value experience for them, you get stronger engagement. People get lost in things like CONNECT. When it's 4,000 people, you're like, "Where is my place?" But if we have these smaller curated formats for things, then people seem to find more value in that and find more connection.

[00:00:23] Alyssa Peltier: Great events create great brands, but pulling off an event that engages, excites, and connects audiences? Well, that takes a village. And we're that village. My name is Alyssa.

[00:00:35] Rachel Andrews: I'm Rachel.

[00:00:36] Camille Arnold: I'm Camille.

[00:00:37] Felicia Asiedu: And I'm Felicia.

[00:00:39] Alyssa Peltier: And you are listening to Great Events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators, and innovators in the world of events and marketing.

[00:00:48] Rachel Andrews: Hello all. Welcome back to season five of Great Events. I'm Rachel, and we're kicking things off with one of our favorite traditions, our annual Hot Trends episode.

[00:00:58] Alyssa Peltier: That's right. Every year we take a look at what's shaping the future of events, marketing, and hospitality. And this year, 2026 is coming in hot with nine trends you absolutely need to know.

[00:01:10] Felicia Asiedu: There is a lot to unpack, so we're breaking it into two parts. In today's episode, part one, we're talking about how events are getting smarter; how AI, personalization, and attendee expectations are reshaping the way we plan and deliver experiences.

[00:01:25] Camille Arnold: And then next episode, we will dive into part two where we'll shift gears to talk about how events are getting a little bit more intentional, driving and diving into topics like trust, ROI, cost, and purpose-driven design.

[00:01:40] Rachel Andrews: All right, let's get into it. So here are the first five trends that are defining events in 2026. I got to start with our favorite buzzword, AI,

but AI is getting operational. So what that means is organizations are moving beyond experimentation and demonstrating more of the measurable outcomes with AI. We're doing that here at Cvent. We're trying to tie time savings and things like that into what we're using AI for. So I can already see that being a huge thing next year. What are you all seeing?

[00:02:11] Alyssa Peltier: Yeah, I was going to say, I feel like we're moving beyond the Nike years, which is "AI Just Do It", which is probably the 2025 approach, into more structure. I think some of the buzzwords that we've been seeing around that is incorporating AI into policies, incorporating AI into governance, and then obviously getting a little bit more structure around that as well, just like Rachel just alluded to. But yeah, 2025 AI Just Do It, and now it's AI Get Organized.

[00:02:40] Camille Arnold: Yeah. And thank God, because I think people are so hungry for this. There's just such an appetite. I mean, we've been talking about, "How do we use AI to work smarter, not harder?" for years now, and I think we're at this point where people are like, "All right, but for real, how do we do this? How do we operationalize this at scale?"

I mean, we're seeing it on the hiring front, right? When people are out interviewing for roles now, I feel like the question of, "How do you use AI in your function to be more successful, to tap into hidden resources that you never thought you could utilize?"

But I am excited to see this and learn from other people, honestly.

[00:03:29] Rachel Andrews: I know. I just want to share like one hot tip for people that maybe are struggling with this.

My team, my meetings and events team, meets once a week and we share a case study of something that someone is doing on the team and we document it. And eventually, ideally at the end of this six month period of us documenting things, we're going to have more of a playbook of, "This is working, this is not working."

And yeah, of course it goes beyond that, it goes into MOPS and a ton of other teams, but I just want one meetings and events policy for AI, and that's like, we're taking just baby steps to make that happen. But it's actually kind of awesome what we have already documented, and I hope to be able to share something externally so people can just take it and maybe copy it.

[00:04:16] Alyssa Peltier: Rach, do you kind of align those operationally, not to overuse this word, but to stages in your planning cycle at all? Have you got to that place?

[00:04:25] Rachel Andrews: We're looking at like pre-event, during, post-event stuff that we're using and flagging it to that. So yeah.

[00:04:31] Alyssa Peltier: And this will probably tail into Felicia's commentary, but we hosted an AI workshop with a lot of senior leaders that was in Cvent CONNECT London just this past month, and a lot of what we were working through was starting to map those opportunities across the event planning lifecycle as it pertains to AI. Right?

I think a lot of what we've been talking about in the previous year in 2025 has been just kind of like, "Everyone use it everywhere, wherever it makes sense," but really starting to maximize the opportunity to say,

"This is a must-have at this stage in the planning lifecycle because this is where we see the most productivity, the most optimization happening."

And so we're shifting away from the, again, "Do it all everywhere," into, "It has to be done in these very strategic places across the planning cycle."

[00:05:18] Felicia Asiedu: So when I went to IBTM a couple of months back now, I sat on stage with Julius Solaris, and he was talking about, he recognizes that we are a driver of AI, you know, Cvent is doing our thing out here, but he wanted some key tips. And actually, Rachel, you're hitting right on the key tip I gave, which is documentation.

To get operational, if you don't write stuff down, there's no way...

Like you're behind because you don't know what's going on. So to write down, yes, the things you're doing with AI and how it can be used at each step, but also the things you want to do, the things where you could see there'd be time savings;

how much time is that taking your team today, and how much time do you anticipate it taking if AI was to step in? And then recognizing as a business,

"We could save hours, money, bodies." You know?

I think it's so important to write it down.

[00:06:06] Rachel Andrews: I should have mentioned that. So the purpose of those meetings is to talk about currently what we're doing, but future wishlists. And a lot of what we've done is document some of the gaps or pain points on the team of,

"It takes 20 hours to pull a list," or,

"It takes 40 hours to research X."

And then our team all just kind of brainstorms, "Okay, have we thought about this? Oh, let's talk to this team."

And we're solutioning that stuff to bring in AI or put it on a wishlist of something that we want AI to do.

[00:06:36] Camille Arnold: Yeah. I'm so glad. Rachel, first of all, thank you for sharing that. I think that's such a helpful tip.

And Felicia, thank you for double-underlining the importance of documentation, because I think that really is the key, as you said, to operationalizing when you think about any other processes that you have internally. Right? Like I think once they're formalized and documented is really where they become real.

And that's where you could even think about scaling things. I'm sure there are lots of teams in many different organizations, hopefully like Rachel, that are doing that kind of testing, and, "What could we do?", thinking through that and then putting that as a test like, "Okay, how many hours did we save?", for example. But if it's not documented, then how does your same team benefit from that moving forward, or how does anyone else in your organization also learn from that too?

[00:07:32] Felicia Asiedu: The only thing I wanted to point out is we don't want to be blind with our trends. And the one thing that has been...

We've been doing a lot of vertical work, so looking at life sciences versus finance and things like that. And actually we've realized that in the financial services, it isn't as operational as it is for everyone else.

[00:07:49] Rachel Andrews: Hmm.

[00:07:49] Felicia Asiedu: So the general trend, you know, that's why it's a trend and not a given, the general trend is that it's getting more operational, but we recognize that for FinServe and financial institutions, they're just waiting. They're in a bit of a holding pattern of like, "Huh, how is this going to impact security and all these other kinds of things?"

So I just want to say we're not blind to that. So sorry, Rach. Segue away.

[00:08:10] Rachel Andrews: No, you actually added to my segue because one of the big, big topics that comes up around AI is trust and people being mistrustful of it, which kind of segues our next trend into trust as a brand differentiator for all audiences.

So I think trust is critical. Digital is becoming more and more untrustworthy, so let's discuss that. Because human connection has always been what we're about, but I think it's going to be even more important in that next year of differentiating like you've got to be in person for a lot of these things to trust where the information's coming from or the relationship, or whatever it is.

[00:08:46] Felicia Asiedu: I'm not going to name any names because I don't want to get in trouble, but we've had some really high profile cases recently, especially in the UK where maybe certain organizations have clipped some videos to make people look like they didn't quite say what they said. And you know, it's a big deal. It's a really big deal. And unless you're there at the time listening to the person speak at an event, it is becoming so hard to trust what is coming out of your screen.

So we know that when people get together, we always say events power human connection, but now more so than ever, given that is the place where you can shake someone's hand and do business. Or if they tell you A is A, it's A, and it didn't get doctored to becoming an apple.

[00:09:27] Rachel Andrews: Yeah. Events are the best channel to build that trust of like, the kind of headline here for me. I mean, people like Camille and I,

we've known that for years. That's how you build a lot of trust just in general. But it's going to be, I think, put up even more on a pedestal. It was put on a pedestal after COVID. Now it's going up there again. I'm like, "I'm great with this job security. That's fine by me." Because I've always known I'm biased that events are the best channel, but now it's even more so.

[00:09:54] Alyssa Peltier: Felicia just said events power human connection. And I'm like, "Well, events power authenticity."

So of course they power human connection, right? There's causality there. And I think that's really important in this time where there is a lot of mistrust, distrust and disingenuous content, disingenuous voices, all of those things. Power of face-to-face has never been more true.

It's so funny because I feel like every couple of years we come up here and we're just like, "Events matter. Events are the best thing. And look, this is what's going on."

And so this is yet but another wave that this industry is able to, I don't want to say capitalize on,

but we're able to capitalize on because this business of events is so important in these times.

[00:10:35] Camille Arnold: Absolutely. I think, you know, you said we can capitalize on it. I think what came to mind for me was events as a channel, they're going to stand the test of time. And I think that is, even and maybe especially in the pandemic, right? When in-person events were taken away from us, there was a certain point where, at least in this country, in-person events were illegal, which was crazy for us. And yet that did not take away the need for us to gather intentionally with our people. And we just did it digitally. We got creative. We said, "Okay, we're going to figure out a way how we can do this still."

So yeah, I think I'd be hard-pressed to find a scenario or a situation, I think now we're in the future where events are not going to hold the power that they do for all the reasons that we just said. They power authenticity, they power trust, they power ultimately human connection, and that's what really moves people to make decisions.

[00:11:36] Rachel Andrews: Speaking of moving people, that brings us to trend number three, loving these segues, emotion and storytelling coming into the B2B event space.

I don't think that's new either, but I think that because of this, events are the best channel to build that trust, then the authenticity piece, plus bringing that storytelling in.

This also goes back to Felicia's brainchild of moments that matter, right? Creating moments that make people feel something is so important. Felicia's talked about all these different ways to make people feel that emotion, like music or just real stories, make that attendees experience. So I like this trend.

[00:12:15] Felicia Asiedu: I like it a lot.

It's definitely not new, but we are seeing more and more typically boring B2B services and B2B companies. Like we could be seen as boring. We're technology at the end of the day. But a lot of these companies are like actually they've figured out that these things are emotive. And when you can tap into someone's emotion, they're more willing to work with you. That humanity comes out, they can relate to you.

I went to a whole session recently where it was run by a DJ, and she said, "Every time you hear this song, you're going to think about this particular thing." And then she would do something else and do another activity, "Every time you hear this song in the club, you're going to think about this." And it was just all these little emotional connection points that you don't typically get from B2B, I don't think.

Even endorsements, celebrity endorsements. You're just seeing them a lot more with like monday.com, and all of a sudden you've got someone that's a celeb that you can relate to, and you're like,

"When did this change?" But it's a great change. It's a really good one.

[00:13:12] Rachel Andrews: I think people are going to be super protective of their time. And if you don't infuse your B2B events with this, like I know we're not B2C and can't do insane things like B2C can, but B2B, you almost need to tell that story before they're even on site of what they're going to feel going into next year so that they make an effort to take that time out. You know what I mean?

I feel like we had this like, everybody went to everything last year. I think I went to an insane amount of events the last two years. And now I'm like, "I'm going to protect my time next year and really select the ones that are going to bring me value in my personal life, but also my professional development." I think this is going to be a huge one.

[00:13:56] Alyssa Peltier: Yeah. Just going back to the notion of AI and the influence of AI on these times, right? So much of voice and brand can kind of be manufactured right now. Right? Like we're starting to see people change the way that they talk. We've seen some of these studies. Like in some ways, so much of society and business is losing its voice. And I think that our buyers and our customers and our members and our constituents are starting to catch onto those things. There is that discerning eye.

So I think, again, tapping into the humanity of things, emotion, voice, storytelling, all of those things that are kind of communal connectors, becomes so much more impactful in a sea of blah, in a sea of just rice, right? Like everything's just the same. It's all just blah. So it's just interesting that all these things kind of stack onto one another.

And it's funny, Rachel, as you're going and were segueing, it's, "Oh, perfect. That's because of this, that's because of that, that all of this is even more important than all the times we may have said it before.

[00:15:02] Rachel Andrews: Yeah. I think you're referring to trend number four, which is personalization becomes attendee-led.

So trend number four, personalization becomes attendee-led, I think, I mean, we are already doing some of this too, but just choose your own adventure type stuff and telling us what you want to see at these events. Because event organizers, we are not mind readers. We need to listen to what people want to see at these things, or lead the horse to water a little bit with personalization based on vertical or topic or persona. It's going to be huge.

[00:15:38] Camille Arnold: I think that is a general theme that can just be applied to marketing in general, not just the events channel. Because I think, especially for events, when I think about the power of personalization, events is one of your only channels where your target audience, they are opting in every single time they register or attend one of your events, right? They're opting into an experience with your brand.

And more and more, I think people want to have a say. They want to be invited into shaping what their journey with your organization or your brand looks like. And so that starts with their expectations in terms of what experiences or what content you're serving up to them along their journey. Right?

That also can look like...

even like I said, just in general in marketing, we have a lot of investment into voice of customer or voice of market, right? Like understanding who is your target audience.

I think personalization was really as important as it is today. Marketers could sometimes be,

not lazy, but you could just decide, you could just make assumptions, right?

[00:16:58] Rachel Andrews: Hmm.

[00:16:58] Camille Arnold: Like even building out your ICP, right? You're just going to like...

You would kind of are inferring or assuming what their interests are, what topics they're going to be interested in, what kinds of experiences they're going to want at an event. And I think now, to your point, Rachel, you're asking, "What do you guys want? What do you need?"

And I think smart marketers, smart brands and companies understand that they need to invite their target audience in to co-create the kinds of hyper-personalized, hyper-targeted experiences that our attendees or our target audience, whether they're buyers or members, constituents, whatever they want, they have to have a seat at the table a little bit, and we have to be smart about how we're inviting them in to take that seat with still making sure we're driving our strategy for our organizations and hitting our corporate priorities.

But yeah, in a way, we have to acknowledge that these people, they are probably going to have an opinion. And if we're not asking them to share their ideas or their wants or their desires or feedback with us, we're missing out on being able to really meet or exceed their wants, their needs, their expectations, and therefore impacting the trust that we can build with them and all the other things, you know?

[00:18:20] Rachel Andrews: Yeah. Last year was all about personalization at skill, right? And now it's, "Let's flip that back onto people."

But I don't think it's like attendees doing all the work either. I think it's like AI helping them see what their journey is, or putting their preferences in and then saying, "Oh, this is the right journey for you," or, "Based on your attendee behavior, it looks like you're really into budgets," or whatever it is. Like, "You should do this," or, "Here's a snapshot from this breakout that you missed. Maybe you should watch this"; and be like, "Oh, okay, I do like that because that's my behavior and that's what I'm telling you."

[00:18:54] Felicia Asiedu: Yeah. I mean, you basically took the words right out of my mouth. I was going to say that idea of asking the attendees, still needed, I would say right now, but I'm hoping we get to a point where actually it's just this symbiotic relationship of like they just did and we just saw and they just saw, and therefore you can make some differences.

And I know with things like CventIQ and our event app, getting those things like daily summaries, "This is what you did, this is how you engaged," "Oh, did I?", you know, it's almost like giving that window to both sides without there being too much. It's more frictionless, you know? So I think that's quite important.

We've never been so close to true personalization as we are right now, but hopefully people adopt. You know, because that's the other thing. People have to adopt that technology, otherwise we stay where we are.

[00:19:40] Rachel Andrews: All right. I think all of this kind of leads us to trend number five, which is the exclusivity piece.

I think when people view an event as exclusive or driven directly for them, or a high value experience for them, you get stronger engagement. That's also not a secret, but I think that that's what we've seen on the rise with some of these smaller curated formats. People get lost in things like Connect. When it's 4,000 people, you're like, "Where is my place?" But if we have these smaller curated formats for things, then people seem to find more value in that and find more connection.

But I think we're seeing that at scale fringe events, wraparound events, whatever you want to call it. But I do think that exclusivity piece is driving deeper demand and engagement.

[00:20:29] Felicia Asiedu: Even at CONNECT, I love the fact that you started running the forum groups, and it's very exclusive. It's for a particular group of people running a particular kind of organization, having particular budgets and whatnot, and they can relate to each other. And so rather than getting lost in the sea of 5,000 people, actually there's something specifically for them. So I think that's pretty cool.

[00:20:52] Alyssa Peltier: Yeah. And this has come in response to how they have required us to more personalize their experience at the conference, right? Like in many conference environments, it can be a sea of sessions, a sea of even plenary sessions, like a lot of information in all the ways. And so the behavior that we were starting to notice, and now I've been able to capitalize, was one where I'll say micro communities or smaller communities were starting to huddle together and we were trying to figure out, what is "the track", I'll put that in air quotes. Whether it's a package track or something that we would want to monitor them through their journey in the conference itself, we noticed that they kind of flocked together. Right?

And so some of the things that we've been able to trial have been more curated, not to overuse all of these words today, but more curated, more personalized, and ultimately smaller, but equally impactful experiences; which I think is what we're really talking about in trend number five here, where the exclusivity component of being with a smaller subset is leading to more impact with our business message and ultimately on the receiving end with the attendee as well.

[00:22:03] Camille Arnold: Yeah. And I'll just add to that. There's another added benefit here, which is, selfishly speaking, what does this also allow for our organization?

Well, it allows us to drive really deep engagement throughout the year. Right? It's not happening just leading up to or at CONNECT. We are able to carry that momentum throughout the year through these smaller curated event programs that then, like we said, allow us to tell the right story to the right audience at the right time.

And so that's the other side of that same coin where we're like, "Oh, this is actually also another great benefit for our business."

[00:22:45] Alyssa Peltier: I also think it's really important to note, where do you need to be exclusive? What is the most important thing to be exclusive? Because I'm thinking, I have my Rachel hat on right now and I'm like, "Not every single thing can be small and intimate and exclusive," right? Like one, that's not something that you can execute on, but then it loses its exclusivity factor by definition, right?

Yeah.

So I think it is important to look at past data, past behaviors, all of that kind of information that you have. AI can be a big enabler of this. Right?

Who is the most important? Where do we have the most value? And that can be determined in a number of ways through your organization. But then start curating the most elite, exclusive experience for those folks. And I think data will kind of rise to the top in that.

Rachel, did you want to say something on that too?

[00:23:32] Rachel Andrews: No, I was just going to take it kind of outside the Cvent context here and say I've seen some other organizations do it really well where they carry the thread through the year, like Camille was saying, in a community aspect with follow-up meetups, follow-up Zoom meetings to continue that topic or conversation. Or maybe like, I was just at a leadership summit and I was literally given homework to take home, and then they made us all do a group text together to keep ourselves accountable for what we said we would do.

And so it's kind of nice because it does feel like I created this new community and it doesn't just die there on the vine. It keeps going. And then there's a follow-up and then there's just like, "You're part of this exclusive community and we are doing these things for you."

And some organizations don't do that. They're just like, they host it and then they're done, and then they forget to follow up or they forget to engage them, thinking that the attendees will do it on their own. And some of them do, but some of them really don't because they're busy. Everybody's busy.

[00:24:29] Camille Arnold: Yeah. Or the follow-up is like, "Thanks for coming, fill out our survey," and then that's it, you know? Which is like...

[00:24:36] Alyssa Peltier: And I just want to reiterate you don't need to do that for every single person that attends the event, right? Like the format where you were at, Rach, was, I'm assuming, something that was intentionally smaller, curated and already very defined group of individuals that have the need to continue that connection.

Not every single event needs to have this, but be really discerning about where you should do this, where you should invest more time in that kind of continued communal experience. And I think that's where you'll find that impact.

[00:25:07] Rachel Andrews: Yeah.

Well, this is amazing. Loving our hot trends for 2026. Just to recap, the top five trends that we started with are AI gets operational; second trend, trust as a brand differentiator; third, emotion and storytelling come to B2B events; fourth, personalization becomes attendee-led; and fifth, exclusivity drives deeper demand and engagement.

We are going to do way more trends in our part two, so please jump over to check that out when it comes out next time.

Thanks so much for joining Great Events by Cvent. We are excited to have you on the podcast as always, and very excited to kick off another amazing season five and another amazing 2026.

Thank you all.

[00:25:54] Alyssa Peltier: Thanks for hanging out with us on Great Events, a podcast by Cvent. If you've been enjoying our podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

[00:26:04] Rachel Andrews: And you can help fellow event professionals and marketers just like you discover Great Events by leaving us a rating on

Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

[00:26:14] Felicia Asiedu: Stay connected with us on social media for behind the scenes content, updates, and some extra doses of inspiration.

[00:26:21] Rachel Andrews: Got a great story or an event to share? We want to hear from you. Find us on LinkedIn, send us a DM, or drop us a note at greatevents@cvent.com.

[00:26:31] Felicia Asiedu: Big thanks to our amazing listeners, our guest speakers, and the incredible team behind the scenes.

Remember, every great event begins with great people.

[00:26:41] Alyssa Peltier: And that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.