LAST FOUR 2036 PREDICTIONS FOR EVENTS INDUSTRY - BELONGING, GLP1, AND THE POWER OF FACE TO FACE REMAINS

Four predictions about belonging, connection, and what people actually need from the gathering.

A note before the predictions. Welcome to the final installment of my summer predictions for 2036- This is my take — a point of view, not a forecast I’m betting the house on. Some of it will be wrong; I’ve misjudged this industry’s timing in every decade I’ve worked in it, and I’ll misjudge some of this too. The point isn’t to be right. It’s to pull the camera back far enough to see the whole board, and to think it through together. So read what follows as an invitation, not a verdict — and tell me where I’m off. That’s the whole idea.

For Paid subscribers, the Evidence for each prediction can be found here.

The events industry has spent 40 years designing for the professional and ignoring the person. The professional needs content, connections, and ROI. The person needs to be seen, to feel something, to encounter another human being who shares her specific obsession about the world. These are not competing needs. They are the same need at different registers, and the event that serves only the professional register while ignoring the human one is the event that produces satisfied surveys and hollow afternoons.

Events Become Gathering Spaces for Remote Workers.

The convention center dark between events and the dispersed workforce desperate for a third place are sitting next to each other in the same cities, and the connection generates new revenue from existing infrastructure without significant capital investment. The global coworking market reached $20.96 billion in 2025. There are 42,000 coworking spaces worldwide. 78 percent of companies now have a formal hybrid policy. 65 percent of new coworking memberships purchased in 2025 and 2026 were for locations within a 15-minute commute of the worker’s home, which puts the convention center within that radius for large populations of hybrid workers in every major convention city. The Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre has developed a between-events workspace program. The Javits Center in New York has experimented with non-event day programming. Neither has yet scaled to a defined business model, which means the first convention center operator that does will have built something the rest of the market is watching for.

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GLP-1 Drugs Restructure the Banquet Business.

12.4 percent of US adults were taking semaglutide or tirzepatide by 2025, up from 5.8 percent in early 2024. GLP-1 users consume 21 percent fewer calories on average and spend nearly a third less on food. J.P. Morgan’s February 2026 global research report projects a $30 to $55 billion annual revenue reduction for the food and beverage industry by 2030 to 2034, attributable directly to GLP-1 adoption. A study measuring food waste at six business events found that at one plated dinner, the banquet event order called for 1,200 entrées but the kitchen produced 1,440 plates. The organizer paid for 1,440 plates. The attendees ate fewer than 1,200 plates worth of food. The F&B minimum calculated on pre-GLP-1 consumption models is the wrong number for a 2030 attendee population, and the hotel defending those minimums against a population whose appetite has structurally shifted is extracting margin on the basis of a calculation no longer connected to reality.

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Belonging Becomes the Gathering Economy’s Most Important Product.

The US Surgeon General declared loneliness a national epidemic in May 2023. Nearly three in five Americans report that no one truly knows them. The American Journal of Psychiatry has documented the health impacts of loneliness as equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes per day. Remote work adoption has increased reported loneliness among professional workers. Dating apps are losing users: Tinder lost 600,000, Bumble lost 368,000, Hinge lost 131,000. Searches for the term matchmaker nearly doubled between January 2025 and January 2026. The professional conference is structurally the most sophisticated interest-driven social environment that exists: it has already solved the shared-interest problem, since everyone in the room cares about the same professional domain, the vetting problem, since everyone has a publicly verifiable professional identity, and the extended-contact problem, since three days in the same building produces more opportunity for genuine connection than a four-minute speed dating rotation. The organizer who acknowledges that the people in her room are whole human beings whose need for genuine connection does not stop at the professional register, and who designs the evening program and the social architecture accordingly, is not marketing against loneliness. She is doing her job more completely than she has been.

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The Gathering Itself Becomes a Philosophical Argument.

In 2036, the decision to bring 600 people into the same room for two days, at significant cost in time, money, and carbon, with no streaming option and no asynchronous alternative, is not a logistics decision. It is a statement about what the organizer believes human beings need from each other that they cannot get from a screen. The event that can answer, specifically and honestly, what this room makes possible that nothing else can, is the event with the best attendee outcomes, the best ROI, and the best renewal rates. The philosophical clarity is the commercial argument. The organizer who cannot say what her event makes possible that nothing else can is not missing a marketing line. She is missing the reason the event exists.

Full evidence brief, named sources, and confidence rating for subscribers.

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Leonardo da Vinci said wisdom is the daughter of experience. Not the daughter of content consumed. Not the daughter of sessions attended. Not the daughter of keynotes watched from a dark room with excellent production values.

The experience that produces wisdom is the experience that changes the state of the person in the room. That requires a room designed to make it possible. A room with low enough cognitive load that the attendee has attention available for the unexpected. A room with an arrival architecture that puts her next to the right stranger before the first session begins. A room where the tribes have been identified and the collisions have been designed and the follow-through is already scheduled for 90 days after the closing keynote. A room where the facilitation is skilled enough to take the conversation somewhere nobody planned. A room where, at some moment that was prepared for but not scripted, the air changes and something happens that required witnesses to exist.

That is not a spectacle. That is an experience.

And it is the only thing this industry makes that nothing else can make.

The room remains.

David Adler is the founder of GatheringPoint.news. He has been asking the same question since 1975.

The Entire Series below

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