5 Lessons from 2025 to Carry You Through 2026

[00:00:00] Camille Arnold: So I hope that it's easier for all of us to prove the impact of our work so that we don't have to feel so much pressure to run ourselves ragged and run ourselves into the ground. And we can actually work smarter, not harder. And then that will help us protect our time and just be more intentional.

[00:00:19] 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.

[00:00:31] Rachel Andrews: I'm Rachel.

[00:00:32] Felicia Asiedu: And I'm Felicia.

[00:00:33] 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.

[00:00:43] Felicia Asiedu: Hello everyone, and Happy New Years. Welcome to the final Great Events episode of 2025. From hot trends to hot takes, it has been a year to remember. This is Great Events, the year-end wrap, and I'm joined by my wonderful co-hosts. I have Alyssa. I have Rachel and drum roll please. Okay, I can't do drum rolls. Camille. Why am I giving you a drum roll, Camille? Why would that be special? Could you let us know?

[00:01:11] Camille Arnold: It's a little special because I am officially joining the Great Events show as another host, which is really exciting. So thank you all for including me and welcoming me into this squad of epic badass-ery. I am so excited to just get to chat with you guys more about events and marketing and all the things that we're all passionate about, and I've had a blast hosting the Checked In show and it is time to just bring all of that greatness into this show that is already so powerful, and you guys have done a phenomenal job of building an engaged audience and I'm excited to join you and engaging with this audience even more and just helping event professionals and marketers find that next edge, whether it's for their next event or the next chapter in their career. So I'm really excited.

[00:02:06] Alyssa Peltier: I'm really excited to bring all of the Checked In listeners onto this podcast too. I think we've been kind of dabbling with the cross-pollination over the year and I think it's finally like, "Okay." Like you said, we're ripping the bandaid off. We're bringing all of these voices together. I think it's going to be a great year.

[00:02:21] Camille Arnold: Yeah, one team, one dream.

[00:02:23] Felicia Asiedu: I've been in exactly your position. I remember when I was just joining the podcast and I was like, "Oh my gosh, it's going to be so cool." So I'm going to ask you in a second, Camille, what are you looking forward to in 2026? But Alyssa first, I want to ask you what you've been cooking up.

[00:02:37] Alyssa Peltier: Yeah, I have exciting news. Yeah, I was going to say we were going to talk a little bit about what happened in 2025 and behind the scenes, what happened in 2025 is that I've been cooking up a little baby and so I will be taking a slight backseat at the beginning of the year and so super excited to have Camille joining just to enrich all of the voices on the Great Events podcast, but I'll be taking some time off to be with my little one, get him off to a great start, and then I will be back in the second half of 2026 just to keep the conversation going.

[00:03:06] Felicia Asiedu: Oh, awesome. I hope you bring this young man to the podcast. We want to hear no doubt from time to time.

[00:03:14] Alyssa Peltier: Hopefully not too many tears. Hopefully it's more of like the giggles at that point, but...

[00:03:18] Camille Arnold: Yeah.

[00:03:19] Felicia Asiedu: Yeah, some of our behind the scenes stuff, right? Giggling crazy women, okay? Camille, before we look back into the hot trends of 2025 and look back at what actually happened, is there anything you're particularly looking forward to in 2026?

[00:03:32] Camille Arnold: I'm just really excited to see, I think I've been so inspired by how marketers and event professionals have taken this concept of a roadshow and just really made it work for their organization, and what I mean by that is I think I also love seeing all these different brands and organizations invest so much into their big brand flagship or tent pole events, and even seeing what Cvent does, right? With CONNECT year after year, just upping the ante and upping the bar, it's so inspiring to see, and I'm also excited to see that same level of thoughtfulness and rigor and strategy applied to different formats. The formats that you can turn into a roadshow and bring from city to city or country to country, where you might have a little bit of a smaller group, but the impact can be just as powerful as your huge big flagship or tentpole event that you might host once or just twice a year.

So I'm really excited to see innovation continue in that space, whether it's finding unique venues that really fit the needs of your event and your audience and your goals, or just getting really strategic with how you're speaking of goals, tying all of your events to business outcomes that you can measure and even predict more accurately what that impact would be. So I'm excited for all of that kind of thought and creativity to continue to explode and expand, and I've been seeing some incredible brands just get so creative, but also I know that they're having a really measurable impact on their business, and I think that is the sweet spot that I really hope more and more event profs and marketers can unlock in 2026.

[00:05:31] Felicia Asiedu: Yeah, and you tapped into right there, part of the predictions that we did have for 25 about smaller events becoming more of a thing. So I'm going to take us back now. Let's go back through the time machine of beginning of the year. We made all these predictions and we've just looked at what we're predicting for 26, but Rachel, I'm coming to you. What surprised you? We gave all these predictions on AI and small events and personalization at scale and all that kind of stuff. What surprised you the most this year for you and your team when we were thinking about trends?

[00:06:03] Rachel Andrews: I feel like trends are one of those things that just slow burn over time. So I don't think I was necessarily surprised by anything. For me and I think a lot of my other peers feel the same way is just I'm just so tired, but I really think that the burnout crept up on us because we did so much. I was excited to do so much. I was excited to dig into AI and I feel like I did a lot of that. I'm so tired because I feel like you did so much, but the feeling of doing the work upfront and then feeling ready for '26 is kind of on the tip of my tongue. I feel like while it might look messy, we've put a lot of work in prioritization. Things like, I know year round content wasn't necessarily a new theme, but I felt that theme or that trend go from year round content into short form content being at the forefront next year, right?

So planning that into our events next year, we're doing a lot of work for that now so that next year is a little bit smoother as far as things like that. Prioritization took a big seat this year, and I feel like that is helping us now. We did a lot of prioritization as far as what drives money, what drives the business last year. And now we're doing even more of that with verticalization, prioritization going into next year. So I just feel like this year was a huge building block year for me, and when I look back on '25, it feels really messy, but when you actually write down what you did, it's like organized chaos coming together for '26. I don't know if that makes sense to other people.

But that kind of is like what I started to reflect on this year is I've actually figured out a lot of organizational things this year that in the middle of revamping process, breathing AI into some things, I do think next year, it's going to be still crazy. That's just our lives, but it's going to be a little bit more organized and thought through for 2026. So I'm excited for that.

[00:08:04] Alyssa Peltier: I think that's such a great suggestion for listeners though, not to be so cliche about the reflections time and the switching up the page, but I'm actually coming up on my 10 years at Cvent and there's so many times where I'll come into work and I'll be like, "Oh my God, we're doing the same thing and it's another year." And I feel like we're going through sludge and there's so much you get stuck in the day-to-day, right? But if you really take that 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour of your time just to write down, "What did we actually accomplish this year?" You feel really validated when you go through an exercise like that, and it also is great to say, "Okay, now what am I going to continue? What am I going to discontinue?" All of those types of things. Not to be so woo-woo about things on this call, but I do think that's a great, just the final day of the year to give yourself a little cred for all the things that has been accomplished because oftentimes we think about all the things that we haven't yet got to do.

[00:08:59] Felicia Asiedu: The messiness made sense. We predicted personalization at scale because of the having tech at your fingertips and whatnot. I think it was really messy this year. It's a prediction that we were making would be we're all going to start personalizing and micro eventing because of the personalization and we tried it and it's messy as hell. I'm not going to lie, I feel exactly how Rachel feels, but it set us up so nicely for '27. It means that all the messy working outs and the kinks and everything we were trying to figure out, I had team members saying, "What are we doing?"

[00:09:32] Alyssa Peltier: You mean '26?

[00:09:33] Felicia Asiedu: Oh, sorry. Oh my God. Do you know what the problem is? Because I've been doing so much '26 planning, I'm now like, "Next year is '27."

[00:09:42] Alyssa Peltier: Right.

[00:09:44] Felicia Asiedu: Listen, everybody has this. I don't even know what day it is.

[00:09:47] Alyssa Peltier: We're now adding years.

[00:09:49] Felicia Asiedu: I apologize. See, this is the giggle that you have to bring your son to. All right, no. So yeah, my team has challenged me several times this year saying, "What are we doing? Why are we doing this?" And only as we've come towards the end of this year, they're like, "I see it. I can see how this is going to set us up really nicely for '26." See, I got the year right. So yeah, definitely very relatable.

[00:10:12] Camille Arnold: Well, I think that is par for the course. That is generally the experience that one has when you're in a foundational building mode, and I think that was 2025 for a lot of people, I think especially when we think about how do we operationalize AI, which is one of our trends for 2026, and yeah, I think there was a lot of learning in 2025. The learning is going to feel non-linear sometimes. It's going to feel messy. It's going to feel chaotic when we're figuring out how to implement AI into our processes, which has its own learning curve and still keep the pedal to the metal so to speak, and just keep trucking along towards our basic day-to-day strategic goals and priorities, right? Now we have everyone has this added layer of now you need to figure out how to use AI in your role, and that is its own kind of extra homework assignment every day.

[00:11:16] Felicia Asiedu: Who figured it out? Did someone figure it out?

[00:11:19] Camille Arnold: I mean I've made progress. I still feel like there's a lot more to do.

[00:11:22] Alyssa Peltier: Because this is the thing, right? I just want us to be really honest. Our audience is there, their bosses are telling them, "Use AI." Okay, what does that mean?

[00:11:31] Rachel Andrews: I'll be the first one to say I have no idea what I'm doing.

[00:11:37] Felicia Asiedu: Yes!

[00:11:38] Rachel Andrews: And I say that from a really authentic place, and we talked about this on the Trends podcast, which is coming out next, but we're all figuring out together, which is a very unique thing. It's not like all these people went to college for it and they're all... I mean maybe some people did, but it's not like everybody is an AI expert. So we have just weekly team learning meetings to see what other people are doing so that we can learn from them and then put it in a playbook so that we can continue to use it. So I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm learning and it's really cool. It's not just ChatGPT.

It's like all these agents that we're building to help us with not just outside of chatbots, but helping our attendees connect with us, helping our internal stakeholders understand what's going on from a reporting standpoint, from a FAQ standpoint, from a I don't know, hotel support standpoint, there's just so many things you can use it for, and I'm overwhelmed with how many things you can use it for, but it is going to save time, and so I'm learning as we go.

[00:12:37] Alyssa Peltier: I think one of the big 'aha' moments that has been interesting to witness, and it's been like this shift towards collect all the data, to now collect all the good data and standardize the data because AI is this kind of great enabler and unlocker of the data, and it's drawn emphasis on event technology and the digitization of events. Something that we talked a lot about going through the pandemic, the hybrid event years, the virtual event years, all of that stuff, we were talking about this digitization movement, but we didn't necessarily have the foresight of AI coming that would say, "And you're really going to need all that digital insight, and you're going to need it standardized, and you're going to need it organized." And it's basically the foundations of everything, the engine of how your company runs now, and I think that was a light bulb that went off for a lot of people is just the sheer power that data across any channel, let alone events, right? Events just being but one of those, but it is the great data movement right now and the activator of that I think is AI.

And so there's such an investment in the technologies that we'll capture and standardize, and streamline, and simplify, and centralize. All of the words that we use all of the time on this podcast. I think that was like the big reckoning that we got everybody on the same page is data is everywhere and data is usable, and data is tappable, and now it's about leveraging the technologies that unlock that data, right? What Rachel was just talking about is getting to the 'how to' getting the most out of the data, and data comes in many forms, right? That's the great thing about AI is it could be written form. It doesn't have to be numerical anymore. It doesn't have to all be quantifiable. AI allows you to figure all of that stuff out in real time. That to me was a very interesting turning point, seeing our customers have that lightning bolt go off to say, "We need more digitization of our events. We need more of this data because it has so much value and we now can unlock it."

[00:14:46] Camille Arnold: And as you said, the importance of standardization because that is, I mean what company would honestly say that they don't have a data hygiene issue that is dirty, it's messy. Everybody wants clean data, everybody wants it. Show me an organization that can truly say, and maybe put them on a lie detector test because I don't even know that I would believe them if they did tell me. You know...

[00:15:15] Rachel Andrews: What are you talking about? We are perfect. We have everything figured out. LOL.

[00:15:20] Camille Arnold: So I think there's like the data, there's the need to capture data if you're not already capturing it, hence what you're talking about digitizing events, and then there's the okay, but how are we capturing it? Do we have standardization in place so that we can then use these AI tools and you're not running into the tools being like, "You're trying to have me compare apples to oranges here. The data is not making sense."

[00:15:48] Alyssa Peltier: Yeah, AI's not going to necessarily clean up your data strategy for you. If you go in with a great plan, then AI can make more out of the data that you're collecting and gathering and have already made standard.

[00:15:59] Rachel Andrews: But maybe that's like a simple goal to set for your team. Let's get all of our '25 data solid, but keep it small. We're just going to upload the number of events we did this year or the budget that we spent or whatever, and we're going to upload that and then we'll build on that template every year uploading it to AI so that it has this model that it learns from. Just start small. I mean I think that's why it's so daunting for people because they're like, "AI is a massive monster that I'm scared of." It's like, "It is, but start small, start somewhere."

[00:16:31] Felicia Asiedu: I'm going to shift us to some of the things that did catch us by surprise. I think I asked you, Rachel, what surprised you, but I know Alyssa, you were talking about just the kind of economic climate, the macroeconomic environment.

[00:16:43] Alyssa Peltier: Yeah, I feel like I'm always the one, this is going to be such a US reference, but Steve Cornacchia, who's the guy on CNN and NBC who does all the data analysis on what's going on and the economic climate, but I'm always constantly bringing that up because we have been in a very reactive state I feel like all things considered, the boat is still moving in a positive direction, but a lot of organizations have been bracing for impact and that's been come in many forms, whether that's been cost-cutting or cost holds or freeze, and a lot of that is in reaction to a geopolitical climate that is slightly unstable and a lot of macroeconomics that then react to a lot of that, and meetings and events are in the crosshairs of a lot of these things. We have travelers that come from many different regions.

We have programs, especially in the space that I talk to customers on that are operating in many different regions, and so all of those program dependencies are very much, they react to these big picture market trends. And so that was a big one that I don't know if everyone was prepared for. January, February timeframe, there was new US administration that came in and there were some big changes that came down very quickly that had a massive ripple effect, and I think programs for the most part have stabilized or normalized or figured out the operating rhythm, but those first couple of quarters this year, there was a lot of kind of like 'hurry up and wait' type of thing.

[00:18:16] Felicia Asiedu: If I'm going to be really honest, the impact for us of what's happened across the world, I can't even just say it's America, but it's across the world, has made a major shift in terms of the programs haven't stabilized, unfortunately. They've changed. So events that would've gone to the US are just not. They're going to the Middle East. The Middle East has become quite an interesting place to do business. People have moved. I've seen people actually move to the Middle East, set up teams, offices in the Middle East. So there's been a real big shift. I'm not entirely sure how that would swing back. I don't know if it will or when it would.

One good thing that I guess is a good thing is that some people have set up small micro offices in the States that have their major hubs in the UK because they are finding it difficult to have people travel to America and get the short-term visas that they need. Apparently, I think I've said this before, but apparently if you're plugging something in, you need a work permit, but if you're going to have a meeting, you don't. So they were like, if I have to go and send someone to physically go and work on an event, that means I need to spend time applying for things that I just don't have. So we'll just set up a little office in New York or something and then that person will go and plug the stuff in. It's so different. I don't know if that would change. They're not going to close the New York office suddenly in two years when things maybe are different. So I don't know, is that a good thing? Maybe. Maybe that's worth.

[00:19:37] Alyssa Peltier: Or change, nonetheless.

[00:19:38] Felicia Asiedu: Or change, yeah.

[00:19:39] Alyssa Peltier: Yeah.

[00:19:40] Felicia Asiedu: Yeah, so speaking of change, let's speed forward. Let's think about not just what we're hoping to see in 2026. What do we love? What has changed that we're like "Yes, I'm picking this up and I'm running with this." So it's not necessarily a trend, but it's something that you're looking to implement and to carry forward that change as we go into next year. It's New Year's, right? So we have to have those resolutions.

[00:20:01] Rachel Andrews: I'm seeing the change of planners. This is years and years, planners becoming marketers, data scientists, all of the above. All of the planners that I know are so sick of being called planners. I'll give you an example. Someone comes up to you in an event and you get introduced to somebody else as, "Oh, this is the planner that organizes the event." And it's like, "We're more than that now." And we're event strategists, we're data analysts, we're more than just concierge agents is the best thing. We are doing so much more.

And so I want that shift to continue to happen because people in my position, people in leadership positions in the events world are so sick of being not taken for granted, but just fighting to bring that to the table and saying that this matters, but I see a change in planners the way they're speaking, the way that they're bringing themselves forward, the way that they're correcting the people that are like, "Oh, this is the person that makes the dinner reservation." I'm like, "No, actually I'm the one doing multimillion dollar deals, signing huge contracts, establishing protection against risk, duty and care for the entire company, big, huge deals that we're working on. We're looking at MQL volume. It's not just that."

So it's a theme that's throughout my whole career, but I'm excited for more of that in 26 and more planners to step into their own and say, "I'm not a planner. I'm a strategist. I'm not a planner. I'm a project manager. I'm not a planner." I'm a events leader or whatever we want to call ourselves events professionals or marketer. We are that too. So I'm excited for people to take more of a stand there and start correcting people because we're not just order takers.

[00:21:48] Alyssa Peltier: Rachel, do you think that's trickling down to the early career professionals on your team and others as well, or do you feel like that's like a reflection of where you're at in your career? No wrong answer on that.

[00:22:00] Rachel Andrews: I think it starts at the top and the leaders need to train that into people. I do think that some people starting in their careers are in more of that hospitality focused role that they are providing a service, but we are asking them to also be speaking the same language. So a lot of junior planners are working with the executives, so they do need to do that, and so I would just say some of our associates that are two, three years out of college are working with our SVPs plus. That's not a unique to Cvent thing, that's across the board thing, especially at smaller companies. Bigger companies, maybe not so much, but yeah.

[00:22:42] Camille Arnold: I agree, Rachel and this is something that we've talked about a lot internally is where do we draw the line between planners and marketers? Are planners marketers? And I agree with you, Rachel. At Cvent, right? You run the meetings and events team, Rachel, and it's part of the marketing department, right? You're not rolling up into another department, and so to me, I'm like, "What's the highest level department category? It's marketing." So by default in my mind, everyone on your team is a marketer and whether they think of themselves as a marketer or not is maybe another question.

[00:23:25] Rachel Andrews: It's definitely nuanced. It depends on the region. It depends on the organization. It depends on how the organization's set up because some event professionals sit in different departments in marketing. So it could be different.

[00:23:35] Alyssa Peltier: I would say the big word, Felicia when you asked that question, and Rachel, we were on the same exact page, the word that came to mind was integrated. Meetings and events is becoming integrated and a critical function across the organization, and so just to kind of come back to what you guys were both saying, Camille and Rachel, even if you aren't in the meetings and events function, I can use a perfect, very large telecoms provider is going through a Cvent implementation right now, and it is more in a procurement, we'll call it SMM, Strategic Meetings Management type motion, but the project is seen as a critical strategic driver for the business moving into 2026, and it is coordinating cross-functionally across all of those different departments. So the implementation of this enterprise-wide technology, the event, is impacting the marketing department, demand generation, field marketing. There is a travel component to this.

That idea that the meetings and events is so business critical, it has to be integrated across all of these disparate teams. Previously, they were completely disconnected functions, had disconnected technologies, and so I think that word that keeps coming to mind is integrated, and that is how you really start to show business value, whether that's on cost objectives, whether that's on productivity objectives, whether that's on growth objectives. I think that is the big growth that we've seen within the industry at large is not just being what we used to say, "The copy and colors over here or at the kids' table." Right? You don't sit over there. You're seated at the center of it all.

[00:25:20] Felicia Asiedu: I love that so much. I've seen it myself. We've had some very serious grownup conversations recently. When I think about what am I looking forward to, I am loving the champions that are coming out. So similar to what you were saying, Rachel, there are people that have taken the seat at the table. They literally snatched it and said, "This is what's so important." They're the heads of global events. They've gone and forged their way into the C-suite and been like, "Let me tell you what's going to happen," which I just think is phenomenal. I was talking to some of these women funnily enough the other day, and they worked for some very big grownup companies similar to what you were just saying, Alyssa, and they have spoken about those things, integration, technology, implementation, strategic alignment across the business, all centered around what are we doing together, and how are we meeting together, and how we meet in our audiences together.

So I just think, yes and more yes to it. I saw something, I don't know what I was reading. This is a reference to Rachel. Someone said people are changing what they're calling attendees. They're no longer attendees, they're something...

[00:26:21] Rachel Andrews: We're humans.

[00:26:23] Felicia Asiedu: We're humans.

Yeah, and then you were like, "No, we're just badasses."

[00:26:26] Rachel Andrews: We call our attendees badasses now. Let's call our attendees something funny, call them 'amazing assets'. I don't know, we can call them whatever we want. I think it was Julius Solaris was like, "People are calling them humans." I forget what he said. I need to look at it, but it's funny. I was like, "We can call them all sorts of things."

[00:26:46] Felicia Asiedu: So there we go. Drive and shape the business, call them badasses, just make sure it says that across Salesforce and Marketo and it integrates, but yeah.

[00:26:54] Rachel Andrews: I think the underlying theme of what he meant by that is that people are looking for not to be cattle and a herd. They want to be in an authentic event. They want to have an experience that's going to bring them something that is not just the status quo is kind of his point, and so treating them not just like cattle or attendees that you would normally treat them like, treat them like individuals, and so I mean that goes back to authenticity and personalization and creating moments that matter. All those things that we talked about, it goes back to all that stuff.

[00:27:28] Felicia Asiedu: At the end of the day, authenticity is what it's all about. We have a lot of that actually coming up in '26 in our campaigns, so you have to look out for that. We're talking a lot about trust and about human connection, so that's going to be really exciting. So thinking about us humans, if we were to give each other a little bit of good cheer and some wishes for the next year, does anyone have any good wishes that we're putting out there for our listeners?

[00:27:53] Rachel Andrews: I have one. I'll start. I just hope that people protect their time next year and I think that's going to be a big trend of people really putting a lot of thought into what they do and pre-planning. I mean that's part of what we do as planners where we plan things out, but I wanted to show you guys, so I bought myself one of those calendars that goes on your wall. I don't know if you can see this on the podcast. If you're just listening, it's a knockoff of Big Ass Calendar, which is Jesse Itzler's company. I got a smaller one because my wall isn't big enough for his Big Ass Calendar, but I am planning and I hope this for other people is plan out the year to be really intentional with where I spend my time. I feel so burnt out right now, and it's because I didn't intentionally plan my 2025, and there was so much agility that went into this year of just felt like there was so much coming at us that I'd like to plan.

And I'm going to plan some moments where I can be spontaneous because I do think it's important to have those moments in your life, but I really think that protecting my peace, spending time with people I care about, and spending time on the events that matter for a company ahead of time is going to be something big on mine, and so I hope that for all of you, that you get that time to plan yourselves and be intentional with your life next year.

[00:29:12] Felicia Asiedu: Oh, that is such a nice wish, and it kind of wraps up all of our moments that matter. Your personal moments that matter are going on your wall so you can be like, "Yes, this matters. I'm going to do that." Anyone else have any goodwill wishes for everybody?

[00:29:27] Camille Arnold: I have one. I can connect a dot to Rachel's, which is about being intentional with your time, protecting your time. I think similarly, people have for years been talking about how can we work smarter, not harder, and I think someone, actually a good friend of mine who is an incredibly hard worker and incredibly accomplished in her career said to me, she's like, "I feel like I'm working too hard right now." And it's not, this is like... stay with me for a second because I'm not knocking rolling up your sleeves and diving in to do hard work and just approaching it with brute force. I think there's a season for all of that in each of our lives probably, but what I'm hoping for us event professionals, marketers going into 2026 is that we actually find a little bit more ease in proving the impact and value of our work because I think that helps you... you can work so hard and you can burn yourself out, and you can do all of that without successfully proving the impact of your work.

And that to me just leads to a vicious cycle because if you are that kind of person and you're a high achiever, then you're just going to keep running yourself into the ground to try and prove that you've worked so hard, but let's flip that script and let's prove the impact of our work, which if it takes you 20 minutes to come up with a concept of your next event or it takes you two weeks, it doesn't really matter if the impact is the same, right? So I hope that it's easier for all of us to prove the impact of our work so that we don't have to feel so much pressure to run ourselves ragged and run ourselves into the ground and we can actually work smarter, not harder, and then that will help us protect our time and just be more intentional. So that's the dot that I'm connecting and that's what I'm hoping for all of you listening out there.

[00:31:47] Felicia Asiedu: I'm going to connect to your dot and I wish for everyone out there that someone starts releasing agent building micro courses and when someone's like, "Oh my gosh, all these hotels are writing to me and I just can't respond and whatnot." Don't worry, there's an agent for that and here's the micro course of how you put all of your responses into the agent. The agent says, "Here's how you negotiate or here's the email written for you or here's the whatever." Or maybe that's a little bit of Cvent, who knows? I'm not trying to pitch us, but maybe I hope that it comes easier for people to do what you just said, Camille because look, I can show you how much this agent has spat out that has made me more productive or I can show you the wrap up of all this data because the agent just did the work or something.

I just want people to be more empowered and therefore not burnout and therefore be more intentional with their time and enjoy the moments that really matter because as an agent, taking care of the stuff that come on doesn't really matter. So agent micro courses, whoever wants to make them, send them to Cvent or put them out. You can help us help you. Alyssa, do you have any-

[00:33:02] Alyssa Peltier: Do I need to connect a dot because I feel like I'm dotless in Seattle over here with baby-making. All I've got is baby on the brain and I just want a happy healthy baby, but I'll keep the event hat on for a second. I think one theme that's really interesting with artificial intelligence is that there's this concern that everything becomes artificial, right? And so we're trying to preserve human things and the creative moments, and so I will connect to Felicia's dot.

[00:33:33] Rachel Andrews: Yes, the dots are connected.

[00:33:35] Alyssa Peltier: The square is complete. All of that time affords you more focus on creativity, creating the moments that matter, right? All of the creative stuff, get rid of all of the crappy things that we don't want to do, like pulling reports and playing with Excel blah blah blah. We get to make cool stuff and make moments matter and make human connection very real and that AI, it adds to that. It doesn't take away from it because my biggest fear is that everyone starts using one of these tools, we'll call it ChatGPT on this one and it says, "I'm trying to plan a seminar for 30 people and blah blah blah" Give it a great prompt and then every single planner across the universe is getting the same exact output and all of our events become exactly the same.

That is the exact opposite of what we want to happen in events. We want you to be able to have this creative energy infused. Everybody gets to do something completely different because the possibilities are endless. So I think with all of that freed up time, we get to reinvest it in the creation of our event programs. That's my hope.

[00:34:45] Felicia Asiedu: Creativity, moments. I love this. Taking your seat at the table. We're leaving you with some good stuff. We are leaving 2025 with some really good stuff for I hope all these wishes come true for our audience. I hope they get to do all these things. They buy their Big Ass Calendar that goes on the wall.

[00:35:07] Rachel Andrews: I hope they all win the lottery. I hope they get to go on 18 vacations. I hope that they, yeah, all those things.

[00:35:13] Felicia Asiedu: It's all going out there into the ether. Phenomenal. Well thank you so much for joining us. Our next podcast is Trends. So we've spoken about our wrap up. Please do join us to hear all about our amazing trends, and thank you, Camille, for joining. It's going to be amazing.

[00:35:31] Camille Arnold: So excited.

[00:35:32] Felicia Asiedu: Happy babying Alyssa.

[00:35:34] Alyssa Peltier: Thank you. See you later in 2026, although I am making a brief appearance on our first episode of the new year. So Happy New Year.

[00:35:43] Everybody: Happy New Year.

[00:35:45] Alyssa Peltier: If you've loved tuning in this year, make sure to rate us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

[00:35:50] Rachel Andrews: And hit that subscribe button on YouTube for new episodes every other week in 2026.

[00:35:56] Felicia Asiedu: Cheers to a new year and more Great Events ahead.

[00:36:01] 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.

[00:36:11] 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.

[00:36:21] Felicia Asiedu: Stay connected with us on social media for behind the scenes content, updates, and some extra doses of inspiration.

[00:36:28] 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.

[00:36:38] 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.

[00:36:48] Alyssa Peltier: And that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.