The Event Leaders Exchange (ELX) Annual Congress: The Top Isn’t Lonely Anymore
A small team, a two and a half day gathering, and the new center of gravity for corporate events.
Editor’s Note
I did not attend the ELX Annual Congress. I’ve spent the year getting to know the CEO, and afterward went through the films, the survey, and her account of Las Vegas. So read this as a reported feature, not a dispatch from the room. I am writing it because the gathering is evidence of something larger: the center of gravity in the event world is shifting toward corporate events and the leaders who run them. I built BizBash years ago on the premise that event people can never attend one another’s events and need a way to peek over the fence at the craft. ELX reads to me as that premise grown all the way up. Nicola Kastner leads it. She did not found it, she does not run it alone, and she was the first to insist I say so.
David Adler, Editor, GatheringPoint.news
The room went dark before anyone had settled. In the spoken word and film performance Spoken Cinema®, brought to the stage by The Expo Group, the ELX Annual Congress opened not with a welcome slide but a visual portrait of its own audience: the pressure, the invisible work, the open browser tabs, the last-minute changes, the emotion of building experiences everyone else simply attends. It named the private reality of the corporate event leader out loud, in a room full of them, and landed on a line.
“They told us it was lonely, and perhaps it was before. But the top isn’t lonely anymore.”
At that moment it was a proposition. Two and a half days later, the members would turn it into a fact. That arc, from a promise on the opening stage to a truth spoken from the seats, is the real story of Las Vegas, and it is worth understanding why it matters now.
Why this gathering, and why now
The event world is in a quiet rebalancing. For years the loudest growth stories belonged to the big, splashy trade show, the mega-association event, the consumer festival, and the technology
that promised to replace physical gatherings entirely. That is not where the momentum is anymore. By most credible forecasts, corporate events are now among the fastest-growing parts of the industry. Mordor Intelligence puts the segment on a roughly 13 percent annual climb toward 2031, well ahead of the low-to-mid single digits many forecasters give the broader market. The Amex GBT 2026 Global Meetings and Events Forecast, the survey the profession treats as its weather report, found optimism at a five-year high, in-person settled back in as the default, and internal team meetings and product launches showing the most substantial growth of any format.
The reason is simple. In a business flooded with synthetic everything, the one channel a company cannot fake is a real room full of real people who chose to be there, and that respect flows to the people who design those rooms, a profession long treated as logistics.
There is a second reason, and it is the one that changes the profession’s standing. The business could always feel its value without proving it. That has flipped. A well-built corporate event can now be measured on two axes at once: the hard sales math of pipeline, deals, and revenue that a chief financial officer signs off on, and the projection of soft power a competitor cannot replicate because it was earned in a real room rather than bought in a feed. The leader who can demonstrate both is no longer defending a cost center. Increasingly, they can bring the receipts.
Which is what makes ELX worth writing about as more than a conference. It is an invitation-only community of 324 senior corporate event leaders who collectively steer more than 167,000 events a year and over $12.6 billion in annual spending. When more than a third of them sit in one room for two and a half days, the room stops being a meeting and becomes a center of gravity. The gathering is the evidence. The argument is the shift.
The events business, and the business of events
The intellectual foundation of that shift is a distinction Nicola Kastner, the CEO of ELX, returns to the way other people return to a home key. The events business is the operational discipline: the load-in, the run of show, the moment the doors open, the craft that makes the experience possible and protects it when circumstances change. It is judged, unfairly, only by its failures; nobody praises a registration line that moves. The business of events sits on top of that. It begins with the outcome and works backward to decide what the experience has to accomplish before anyone picks a venue or a date. Congress was built to demonstrate both, and the honest moments of the week were the ones where both were visibly at work at once.
The outcome architects
The word attendee is inadequate for the people in this room. They are the ones a company hands its most consequential rooms and millions of dollars: the product launch a quarter is staked on, the sales kickoff that sets the year’s tempo, the investor day, the all-hands where a CEO tries to move ten thousand people in an afternoon. When one of them is in the room, it is because they own the result. Outcome architect is the closer word, and it is the one the profession is beginning to claim.
Something happens to a company’s wiring when its CEO stakes a message on one of these Super Bowl moments. Command and control, which prefers clean vertical lines, has to loosen around the event, and for the weeks it takes to build, communication rearranges itself by proximity rather than title. The person producing the CEO’s biggest room is suddenly in that room constantly, shaping what gets said and how the leader shows up, and proximity, in any organization, is a form of power. Anyone who has spent real time inside a large enterprise has seen a version of it: the head of communications who is with the chief executive so often that the org chart stops describing who has the ear. It is a virtual shift in leadership, visible in perception long before it appears in a title, and the event leader is increasingly on the near side of it.
That is the deeper reason the center of gravity is moving, and the deeper reason a community like this one is filling so fast. ELX is still young, founded in 2021 and led by Kastner only since 2024, and already selective enough that its own criteria work as a filter rather than a formality. As the role becomes more strategic and complex, the people carrying it are looking for peers who understand the same operating reality. ELX’s criteria are designed to protect the relevance of those conversations.
Not a one-person operation
Kastner did not start ELX. David Kliman and Mark Brewster founded it in 2021, in the middle of the pandemic; she joined as CEO in 2024. Her own way in is the proof of how seriously the community guards its bar. After she left SAP, where she had been vice president and global head of event strategy, she applied to become a member and was turned down, because she no longer led events inside a qualifying enterprise. She jokes that she had to become the CEO to get in. She tells it for a reason: the criteria protect the relevance and candor of the room, and she was not exempt from them.
See our story on. Nicola Kastner
What she leads is a team of five, roughly four full-time, delivering work that would normally require an organization several times its size. Chloe Richardson, the head of content, is the strategic mind and engine behind everything on the schedule, and carries that strategy into the room as the emcee of every ELX event. Hannah Elston runs marketing, communications, and partnerships, and tends to be the connective tissue holding the experience together. Abby Faulkner, six months in, has already helped deliver two major events. Alice Lindridge kept the wider organization running from home while everyone else was on the floor, which is its own argument that ELX is a 365-day community and not a once-a-year show. Leadership gets the visibility. The work is built collectively.
The program is the argument, staged
If one person’s stamp is on the intellectual experience, it is Richardson’s. She finds the problems members are actually wrestling with and turns them into agendas, research, and workshops, coaching contributors and pushing each session until it earns its place. The scores ELX posts are inseparable from her work; she is, accurately, both the brains and the workhorse behind the content. Each year she builds the program with a member or two as content co-chairs. The 1.5-day Summits get one; the 2.5-day Annual Congress gets two, this year the heads of events at Amazon and Veeam.
The content refuses the parts of the job most conferences skip: professional development for leaders no one develops anymore, a measurement session Kastner leads herself on the argument that measurement belongs at the front of a design rather than stapled to the back, a research reveal that turns the audience into co-authors of the next study, and a session where members show one another how they are actually using AI. None of it is pay-to-play. The connective philosophy is a line from Kastner’s opening keynote: “Random where random works. Deliberate where it does not.” ELX does not assume the right people in one building will find each other; it is experimenting with new ways to help members identify the peers who understand their operating reality, and the most visible expression of the deliberate half is a gala seating chart Kastner still builds herself, on the theory that people default to the colleagues they already know.
A place to peek over the fence
Nearly every craft lets its practitioners watch one another work. Surgeons observe from the gallery, architects walk each other’s buildings, chefs stage in rival kitchens. Event leaders are the exception, and it is structural: when everyone else is running their event, these leaders are running theirs, and the most consequential corporate events are private, internal, often built to outdo a competitor. The best work in the field has spent decades invisible from one practitioner to the next. You could read about it. You could rarely see it, and almost never test your own version against a peer’s.
That blindness is what ELX is built to solve, which is why the community behaves less like a conference than a forge. The research is co-designed by members. The AI session is members showing what they actually deploy, not a vendor demo. Formats are tried in the room, kept when they work and refined when they do not, in front of the only audience qualified to judge them, and whatever survives is carried back into organizations many times ELX’s size. A profession that never had a research-and-development function is building one out of its own most senior people, in the open.
Low cognitive load as a courtesy
The clearest place the business of events shows up is in the friction ELX removes. It merged the two lines everyone treats as unavoidable, hotel check-in and badge collection, so a member gets a name badge with a room key. Arrival notes say where to be and when, with time built in to get there, and answer the small anxious questions in advance, down to whether to bring a notebook. First-timers are prepared before they arrive so no one walks in feeling like they wandered into the wrong room. None of it is expensive. All of it is thought spent ahead of time so the member does not have to spend it, to protect their energy for the people and ideas in front of them.
The room, and why it is protected
The influence in that room is easy to state boastfully and better to state plainly. These were not 120 attendees. They were outcome architects, each the person their company trusts with its most important rooms. “The magic is who is in the room,” Kastner told them from the stage. “When a community like this exists, the work changes. The role gets stronger. More strategic. More respected. The whole profession moves up, because the people at the top of it are in one place.”
Because the value depends entirely on trust and candor, the room is protected with unusual discipline. ELX events are not open to the broader industry; the only people present are members and representatives of the community’s annual strategic partners, capped so members always make up at least three quarters of the room. The word partner is deliberate. These are not sponsors buying stage time; every strategic partner contractually agrees to protect the non-sales environment, attending to listen and build relationships rather than prospect. The model is scarce by design, with only four partnership positions open for 2027 and a multi-year waiting list already forming. That scarcity is a consequence, not the mechanism. What lets a senior leader say what is not working without becoming someone’s lead is the relevance, trust, and conduct the criteria protect. The city noticed: the CEOs of both the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority and The Venetian Resort Las Vegas spoke to the room about what the industry means to Las Vegas.
Value for time
Kastner’s most important metric is not attendance or even net promoter score. It is value for time, because time is the one thing she cannot give a member back. She said so in her opening keynote and closed by asking directly: has this been a good use of your time? With the survey roughly half returned, and ELX usually reaching 85 percent or more, the results are preliminary, but Congress is posting a value-for-time score of 4.65 out of 5 and a net promoter score comfortably above 90, close to unheard of for an event judged by professionals who design and critique events for a living. The first number is the one that matters, because it measures the promise the community actually made.
Becoming the guest
The quietly radical thing Congress did was let the people who spend their lives taking care of others be taken care of themselves. ELX hosted its first gala this year, with a glam suite for hair, makeup, and shined shoes beforehand. In the closing film, one member said she felt like a Disney princess, which sounds small and is not; these are leaders who spend their careers anticipating everyone else’s needs, and for one night someone anticipated theirs. Guests arrived at Allegiant Stadium to an experience designed, by Ashley Hinsen of the stadium’s private events team, so it did not feel like a stadium at all, with a Michelin-starred chef and a progressive dining concept, and it ended with a drone show over the skyline, orchestrated by Rebecca DeLucca and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, a surprise to everyone including the ELX team. The care extended to the rooms, where The Venetian, under Karin Davis and Tony Yousfi, delivered hospitality from monogrammed silk pillowcases to individualized snacks that made members feel the week had been built for them. It had.
It is also an audience many destinations and hotel properties would value access to: senior corporate leaders responsible for significant portfolios, budgets, and business decisions. ELX does not take that audience everywhere. Kastner brings its North American events only to destinations that participate as annual strategic partners, creating a relationship that begins long before a venue is selected or attendees arrive.
That continuity mattered in Las Vegas. The LVCVA and The Venetian Resort Las Vegas already understood the community, its expectations, and the standards ELX protects. They were not encountering the audience or the model for the first time. As annual partners, they had the context to help shape an experience around the members rather than simply host an event.
That familiarity is one reason they were able to deliver so strongly. They understood that these were experienced event leaders who would notice every detail, but also that the goal was not spectacle for its own sake. It was to make people who spend their careers caring for other audiences feel that the experience had been created with equal care for them.
That investment also produced measurable value for the hosts. Among post-event survey respondents to date, 57 percent said Congress left them with a more positive perception of Las Vegas, while 88 percent said their perception of The Venetian Resort, Las Vegas was more positive.
For destinations and venues, that is the return on understanding the audience well enough to create something genuinely relevant. Members received an experience designed around them, while Las Vegas and The Venetian strengthened their standing with an influential group of senior corporate event leaders.
Encore, also an ELX annual strategic partner, translated the event’s ambition into the in-room production experience. Because the team already understood ELX, its audience and the standards of the community, they were able to do more than execute a production brief. They were able to turn the ELX team’s ideas into an experience that felt distinctly ELX.
That is what true partnership should produce: meaningful value for everyone involved.
When the plan changed
One of the most revealing stories of Congress came when the closing event plan had to change.
The event was designed as a block party across AREA15‘s newly opened Zone 2. A converted aircraft was intended to serve as the central headquarters, an apt setting for an audience that spends so much of its professional life on planes. The Museum of Ice Cream was already planned as one of the experiences within the wider event.
When the aircraft could not host the group as intended, the challenge was not to replace the closing event. It was to reconfigure it without compromising the experience.
Under Kelly Campbell Smolen’s leadership, the AREA15 team worked with ELX and its logistics partner to reposition the Museum of Ice Cream from an additive experience to the primary headquarters for the block party. Members could still explore Zone 2, see what was coming with the aircraft and experience a closing event that felt intentional and complete. The business of events had defined the intended outcome. The events business protected it when reality changed the plan.
The pivot worked because the organizations involved approached the challenge collectively and focused on the experience members should have, rather than the individual elements each had originally planned to deliver.
The point is not that the plan changed. In live events, plans change. The point is what strong partnerships make possible when they do.
The proof
The ELX Annual Congress closed the way it opened, with a film, and this time the voices were the members’ own. They talked about having no true peer inside their own organizations, about feeling alone in the role until they found this community, about finding people who understood the world they were running. One described how event leaders spend their careers caring for everyone else’s needs, and how at ELX someone finally cared for theirs. Another said it is simply easier to climb a mountain with other people on the rope. Then the film returned to the line the week had opened on.
“The top isn’t lonely anymore.”
On the opening stage it was a promise. By the closing film the members had supplied the proof. You can hear it in the survey they left behind, in lines like the member who wrote that in a role where you are expected to have every answer, ELX gives her a trusted circle of peers who understand the complexity of leading enterprise events and share what is actually working.
The event is not ELX. Its four annual gatherings are the community’s most visible expression, but the work continues throughout the year.
ELX hosts multiple member-focused virtual gatherings each month, creating regular opportunities for senior leaders to compare experiences, work through challenges and learn from one another without waiting for the next in-person event. Its research turns what members are experiencing individually into collective insight they can use inside their organizations. Its tools help translate that insight into practical action. Its digital community allows the relationships and conversations to continue between scheduled moments.
That is what makes ELX a 365-day community. The value is not confined to a single event agenda or a ballroom. It lives in the research members shape together, the conversations they return to throughout the year, the tools they can take back into their businesses, and the trusted peers they call when they need someone who understands the world they are running.
The Annual Congress simply took a network normally spread across organizations and geographies and made it visible in one place for two and a half days. That is what a center of gravity looks like when you can see it. The gathering ended. The community does not.
The room was not the work. It was the proof.
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