Saxton发布与ThinkerTank合作的《The Future of Business Events: 2030 and Beyond》研究报告

In more than 60 years since Saxton speaker bureau was founded, event formats have come and gone, technologies have arrived and receded, and plenty of predictions about the death of live events turned out to be wrong.

But what we’re seeing now is different. Not because the industry is in decline – it isn’t – but because the rules that governed what made an event worth attending have fundamentally changed.

Saxton recently commissioned “The Future of Business Events: 2030 and Beyond” with foresight agency ThinkerTank.

It is the most comprehensive study of its kind ever conducted in Australia and New Zealand. In the research, more than 360 industry professionals were surveyed; 15 in-depth interviews with senior leaders across the ecosystem were conducted; and more than 20 published sources were analysed.

The study wasn’t carried out to produce a trend report that sits on a shelf. It was done because Saxton is at the intersection of organisers, speakers and audiences every day, and can see a gap forming between what events are delivering and what people actually need from them.

The central finding of the study is that business events are not facing a crisis of demand, they are facing a crisis of relevance.

People want to be in the room; the data is unambiguous on that. Nearly eight in 10 companies consider in-person events their most impactful marketing channel.

Investment is flowing, and pipelines are strong, but overall confidence in the industry is not the same as confidence in a single event actually earning someone’s time.

“When someone says they can’t justify three days out of the office, they’re not telling you about their calendar,” revealed Sherrif Karamat, CEO, Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA), during the research.

“They’re telling you about your value proposition.”

Rising costs were cited as the single biggest change in the past 12 months, with more than one-third of respondents naming it as number one.

At the same time, 54 per cent reported flat budgets. Higher costs meeting flat budgets forces hard choices, and the people making those choices – your attendees, their managers and their procurement teams – are asking sharper questions than they used to.

Six themes emerged clearly from the research: experience, connection, relevance, personalisation, quality and proof. None of them are abstract, and each represents a shift already underway.

Audiences now benchmark events against every experience in their lives, not just other conferences.

Connection and networking is the number-one behaviour shift event professionals are reporting. Content that isn’t relevant or practical is the primary attendee complaint.

Personalisation is expected to be among the most important factors in events by 2030.

Smaller, more targeted events are predicted to be the dominant growth format, and measurable return on investment is now rated as essential or very important by nearly three-quarters of the industry.

“People aren’t just asking whether events are worth attending anymore,” says ThinkerTank founder and chief futurist Dr Ben Hamer, who led the research. “They are asking whether events are worth their time.

“That’s a harder question and it’s changing everything.”

The study’s findings reinforce what we’ve observed firsthand at Saxton. The speakers and facilitators that clients are asking for have shifted. Relevance to the audience outranks name recognition by more than three to one as a selection criterion.

Organisers want someone who can walk into a room and make the content matter to the people in it.

They want practical takeaways over polished performances, and want speakers who can facilitate genuine conversation, not just deliver a keynote and leave.

This research has implications for how clients are advised, how speaker talent is developed, and how organisations design the right combination of voices, formats and moments to create real impact.

The most effective events during the next five years won’t be built on more complexity, more content or bigger production budgets; they’ll be built on clearer intent, stronger design choices and a sharper focus on what people actually take away.

Not what they sat through, but what changed because they were in the room.

The opportunity now isn’t to reinvent everything in events – it’s to make more deliberate choices about what stays, what shifts and what no longer earns its place moving forward.

“The Future of Business Events: 2030 and Beyond” is available to download here.

Photo at top: iStock/akinbostanci.

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