Cvent CONNECT Europe 2026回顾：在伦敦探讨AI自动化与人类连接的平衡

The more you automate events, the more the human side of them matters. That’s the message that ran through Cvent CONNECT Europe 2026.

Event, marketing and hospitality professionals gathered in London from 20 to 22 October to learn how to use technology to reduce manual work without losing what makes events meaningful.

AI featured heavily on the agenda. But so did wellbeing workshops, tech tours, live music energizers, and evening entertainment - a strong reminder that as technology advances, human experience becomes even more valuable. Here are the ideas you’ll want to take back to your teams.

The keynotes

Why human connection matters more than ever

Cvent CEO and Founder Reggie Aggarwal opened the conference with a prediction: AI will reshape how you plan and run events, but it will also increase the value of a handshake, a room full of people learning, debating, and building trust together.

This is the essence of Presence Premium™:  the importance of real human connection in a world where automation is everywhere.

When the world around us is so noisy, choosing to be present…[is] the rarest signal in business today. And the more the world automates, the more valuable that signal becomes.”

Reggie Aggarwal, CEO, Cvent

Read more on The Presence Premium™ and why showing up is worth more than ever.

Event tech is martech. That was another big message from the morning keynote. That takeaway carried through the conference, starting with a mainstage panel featuring Gianni Di Fede, Commercial Officer at Radisson Hotel Group; Cvent’s Senior Director, Meetings & Events, Rachel Andrews; and Yvette Laister, Director of Channel Marketing at Inforcer. They discussed how automation is changing the way they work, while emphasizing the importance of relationships, trustworthy data, and proving event effectiveness.

People don’t buy what you think they’re buying

Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, closed day one in his uniquely witty, observational style. 

Rory challenged the overreliance on conventional measures of success and argued that the events industry has become so preoccupied with proving ROI that it risks overlooking what makes meetings and events valuable. His stories showed how unexpected conversations and simply taking the time to meet someone can lead to lasting positive outcomes.

Where you make money and where you add value aren’t the same place. Don't be so rational about everything that you can no longer get lucky.”

Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman, Ogilvy UK

The takeaway: Events create value in ways that don't always fit neatly into a spreadsheet. Find more innovative ways to prove their value to the people who control the budget.

The secrets to high performance

Day two began with an inspiring conversation with broadcaster and Paralympian Ade Adepitan MBE. 

Reflecting on his journey from discovering wheelchair basketball to representing Great Britain at the Paralympics, Ade explored resilience, the importance of a supportive community and the willingness to keep going after setbacks.

Ade also reminded us of the extraordinary sense of connection created when people come together around sport, music or other shared experiences. He credited London 2012 with creating a feeling of collective pride and helping people experience the possibilities of disability sport.

The power of play in event design

Play can be used in event design to boost creativity, draw people out of their comfort zones, and help audiences understand complex ideas. The closing conference keynote put this into practice, opening with a deliberately playful start: a fashion catwalk. Stylist Sophia Lorimer then talked about how clothing can be a tool for confidence, self-expression and human connection.

Neurologist and Founder of Brain Conversations Maria Sundell, and GPJ London's Executive Director of Creative Innovation, Zara Kerwood, broadened the conversation to explore how the brain is wired for play and how it lets people experiment with uncertainty without feeling threatened.

Zara illustrated how brands including Cisco and IBM have used playful experiences to help audiences understand complex ideas.

It doesn't have to cost a lot of money. It's like storytelling, right? It doesn't cost anything to tell a story.”

Zara Kerwood, Executive Director, Creative Innovation, GPJ London

Attendees learned that effective play at events shouldn’t be so easy that people get bored or so difficult that people feel overwhelmed. The challenge is to find an appropriate level of novelty, complexity and psychological safety for your audience.

Being playful is being free to create our own challenges and find our own solutions. It’s a state of openness to explore in a safe space.”

Maria Sundell, Founder of Brain Conversations

The product roadmaps

When tools change this much, you don't iterate, you reimagine.”

McNeel Keenan, Senior VP Product Management, Cvent

The Event Marketing & Management Product Roadmap revealed how AI-powered tools are coming to more stages of the event lifecycle. The aim? Reduce the repetitive manual tasks nobody will miss, and better understand who showed up, what held their attention, and what you could do differently next time.

Speakers including Cvent’s Director of Product Management Shiloh Frauen and VP Product Management Jonathan Bartlett, plus Goldcast’s Head of Product Lauren Creedon, explored how AI-powered assistants and agent-driven workflows can help teams manage tasks across connected systems.

Hospitality professionals also had their own Product Roadmap session. It focused on AI-powered sourcing, corporate travel, and business intelligence, showing how hotels, venues, and destinations can respond faster to opportunities, make better commercial decisions, and grow revenue.

Sessions that struck a chord

Practical advice and insight were everywhere at Cvent CONNECT Europe 2026. Two breakout sessions show the kind of next steps attendees could take back to their teams.

In Agentic AI: What It Means for Marketing and Events, Lucy Postlethwaite of Practical AI and Cvent Consulting Director Mary Kluck cut through AI jargon and outlined the difference between AI that answers questions (generative AI) and AI agents that can work toward defined goals.

Their advice? Start with specific problems, understand where automation can help, and make sure humans are in the loop for important decisions.

AI takes away a lot of the burden of having to learn a lot of new tools. AI makes the jobs easier so that your teams can focus on more strategic work.”

Mary Kluck, Director, Cvent Consulting

The UK’s Protection of Premises Act is expected to come into force no earlier than April 2027, so a panel of event professionals and venues urged organizations to prepare now.

Martyn’s Law: What UK Event and Venue Teams Should Know explored how the Act may affect qualifying venues and events, emphasizing that responsibilities depend on the nature of the premises or event and the applicable legal criteria.

The key takeaway was that preparedness goes beyond legislative compliance. Tips included assessing risks early in planning, agreeing on who is responsible for each safety concern, ensuring frontline staff are trained to respond to incidents, and running regular simulations.

“I would say simulations are one of the most valuable learning experiences because it really uncovers the gaps. It's not about blaming anybody. [...] It's about going, where are the gaps in our defence? How do we make that better?”

Dr Claire Drakeley, Course Leader for BA(Hons) Hospitality Management at the University of Northampton

What marketers can put to work after Cvent CONNECT Europe

Marketers came to Cvent CONNECT Europe looking for ways to prove events work. The sessions delivered practical answers.

Events can fuel your GEO strategy

AI search is reshaping how buyers find answers, and content strategy has to keep pace. In The GEO Playbook: How to Get Your Content Found in AI Search, Cvent Content Strategist Victoria Akinsowon showed how events can fuel your GEO strategy by creating trustworthy content you can repurpose across channels.

The first step is an audit. Prompt ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini the way your buyers would, noting which sources are cited and where the gaps lie. Create content to fill those gaps and review it regularly to keep it fresh.

Performance and brand go hand-in-hand

During Performance vs Brand: Can Events Achieve Both? Deutsche Bank CMO, Corporate Bank Christoph Woermann and Cvent VP Demand Generation Myllisa Patterson debated the merits and differences between performance and brand. 

Their conclusion? It’s never an either-or. Brand drives long-term outcomes. Performance matters for the bottom line. The friction between them happens when events and demand generation optimize for different things. The fix isn’t better collaboration. It’s shared KPIs.

In Whose ROI Is It Anyway?, Marie Diane Tyler, Director of Strategic Engagement at OrangeDoor, challenged marketers to consider what success means to different stakeholders. Her example: a multimillion-dollar sales conversation at a trade show that never made it into the lead-capture system

If your team isn’t recording the effectiveness of every on-stand conversation, you won’t be able to demonstrate its contribution, making it harder to justify a show presence.

Turn engagement signals into follow-up

The theme of capturing and connecting meaningful engagement to business outcomes continued in the session, What Are Your Buyers Telling You?

Lisa Davis and Chris Scott, Managing Directors and Heads of Europe at Marketbridge, plus Ferran Puig, Head of EMEA Partnerships at Clay, explored how to combine engagement signals with human-driven account information to identify opportunities for sales follow-up.

“Signals are hints, essentially, that you need to collectively put together to form a picture. With all these signals, it's really important to look at two things: one, traceability- where does this come from- and then two, is it actually reliable?”

Ferran Puig, Head of EMEA Partnerships, Clay

Turn trade shows into pipeline

In The Trade Show Playbook High-Performing Teams Already Use, ON24’s Hannah Kemshell urged marketers to treat every trade show as a connected campaign. Her advice: set clear objectives, align with sales, and plan follow-up before the event begins.

The creator opportunity for events

Partnerships with creators and influencers are well-established in B2C, but not so much in B2B. That’s about to change, according to a panel moderated by The Drum’s Senior Reporter Mel Henson and featuring LinkedIn’s Terry Rand, The Goat Agency’s Cameron McIntyre, and Good Culture’s Holly-Beth Dazely.

From Promotion to Partnership: The Creator Opportunity for Events explored what creators can do for event marketing. Their advice: involve relevant creators earlier in the planning process and decide upfront what success looks like.

“Creators used to be one-off adverts and treated as a one-off media buy. Now they are viewed as fully-fledged partnerships that help to shape an event campaign.”

Holly-Beth Dazely

What did hospitality professionals take away from Cvent CONNECT EUROPE?

AI is changing how planners discover, evaluate and choose hotels and venues. Many of the sessions for hospitality professionals looked at how to navigate this shift.

On the main stage after Reggie’s keynote, Radisson Hotel Group's Global Chief Commercial Officer Gianni Di Fede spoke about the importance of keeping hotel information accurate and trustworthy as more planners use AI-supported sourcing tools.

“We need to make sure that AI can understand, trust, and then eventually recommend our own properties.”

Radisson Hotel Group, Global Chief Commercial Officer, Gianni Di Fede

Then, Sourcing In The AI Era: Inside Cvent’s Vision demonstrated how AI-powered workflows are being used to define venue needs, find the right options faster, and help make more informed decisions.

Associations and Life Sciences: Shared challenges

Cvent CONNECT Europe gave membership organizations and life sciences marketers a half-day dedicated content stream.

Association planners shared tips and techniques for evaluating their established event formats and re-examining how their programs serve their communities.

Karen Usmani of the Institute of Leadership described consolidating three flagship events into one experience to better serve members.

Ioannis Pallas of the European Society of Association Executives argued that associations should measure events against their wider organisational mission rather than treat attendance and revenue as the ultimate measures of success.

“We are community organizers first and foremost, and events are a way for us to bring that community together. It is about how that particular event helped the association move forward with its mission and vision.”

Ioannis Pallas, Managing Director of the European Society of Association Executives

A dedicated Life Sciences Working Group explored connecting what people show they are interested in during events and webinars to broader marketing and commercial activity.

Led by ON24’s Ankit Sagar, the workshop focused on identifying signals, improving cross-team collaboration, and following up.

Time to recharge and grow

Big ideas need time to sink in. Cvent CONNECT Europe built in space to recharge, with interactive sessions on breathwork, yoga, and live music that gave attendees a chance to reflect on their own wellbeing and take a break.

For a more personalized experience, Sarah Hunt, a corporate wellness expert at Conference Wellness, also offered one-to-one consultations.

Live music added energy. Sam McNeill of SongDivision led energizers across both days, and in a joint session, McNeill and Hunt explored how music and movement can strengthen social bonds and help people manage stress.

Leadership Coach Abi Osho also inspired professional development in The Human Advantage: How To Claim the Power Of Your Story by urging us to use the experiences that have shaped us as fuel for career development. The core message: AI can do many things, but it can’t replace the value of your lived experience.

Awards, entertainment and connection

This year’s Cvent Excellence Awards Europe, hosted by comedian and TV presenter Joel Dommett, celebrated individual achievements across the events and hospitality industry.

New this year, Drag Bingo, in all its flamboyance, ran alongside the awards, giving attendees a fun way to switch off after the first conference day and compete for prizes.

Automate while protecting human connection

The meetings and events industry is being reshaped by AI, but it can’t define a successful event alone. This year’s Cvent CONNECT Europe showed us the value of the human experience and how embracing AI can make room for designing more personalized and memorable experiences.

As you plan for 2027, use technology to remove friction and understand your audiences more deeply, and protect the creativity, trust, and connection that make your events worth showing up for.

Save your place for 2027 

Cvent CONNECT Europe returns next year. Pre-register today to secure your place.

Missed a session? Watch this year’s sessions on demand.