The Next Draft of the Events Industry

What the live-experience world can learn from television’s evolution—and why the future of events depends on moving from passive viewing to participatory creation.

We are rewriting the future of events—whether we realize it or not.

Every decision about design, data, and how we gather is shaping what live experience will mean for the next era of events. The only question is who will write that draft: creative practitioners who still believe in the power of human connection, or algorithms and efficiencies that mistake optimization for meaning.

Before we rush into that future, we should decide what kind of future we want. The event industry is changing faster than any of us can program a keynote or design a set, and it’s tempting to treat that change as inevitable. The lesson from traditionaltelevision’s evolution is that automation without intention can drain the very magic that made the medium matter. This story isn’t about predicting what’s next; it’s about questioning it—asking whether the tools, venues, and data layers we’re building will serve creativity or simply optimize it to death.

Those of us who came of age in the Boomer decades grew up under the glow of three television networks. Culture moved in unison; the schedule decided what we saw. In hindsight, it was a kind of simulation—stable, centralized, comfortably passive. Every generation since has lived in flux, flipping through infinite channels, curating meaning instead of merely receiving it. That volatility now defines the event industry too. The field that once built predictable programs for captive audiences is learning to design participatory ecosystems for restless ones. What television lost through automation, gatherings might regain through interaction—if we build the infrastructure for it.

That thought stayed with me during the last formal evening of the 2025 IMEX America in Las Vegas, as I left the Mandalay Bay show floor for a reception at F1 Arcade, hosted by Soundings. The company promises to reinvent how freelance talent moves through the event world—a curated network that treats producers and planners like global creatives instead of temps. The party doubled as a preview of the new arcade opening at Caesars Palace that weekend, and as I crossed the Strip, I realized I was walking into a metaphor for the entire industry: one half built on legacy hardware, the other racing toward something faster, smarter, and infinitely more human.

Outside, the Strip shimmered in the early evening sunset glow. Inside, amid champagne and the hum of racing simulators, someone mentioned a haunting essay by television producer Ed Sayer—The End of Television as We Know It. Sayer argued that television wouldn’t die dramatically; it would quietly re-engineer itself into irrelevance. Cameras would become sensors, directors data editors, studios sterile labs producing metrics instead of magic. “Television,” he wrote, “will not vanish; it will simply age out of its old body.”

Standing beneath Caesars’ chandeliers, I realized Sayer’s diagnosis wasn’t about television at all. It was about us. The same algorithms that had sterilized broadcast were creeping into live experience. If television was chasing control, our salvation would have to be the opposite—contagion. What we sell isn’t spectacle; it’s pulse.

You can already feel that pulse in places like Convene—now rebranded under the new Convene Hospitality Group umbrella. Walk into one of their Midtown venues on a weekday morning—polished concrete, espresso scent, screens tuned to optimism—and you sense a new architecture of feeling. It isn’t a ballroom and it isn’t coworking; it’s a studio disguised as hospitality. Every inch is calibrated for capture: light balanced for film, acoustics tuned for conversation, Wi-Fi that never blinks. Each room doubles as a broadcast stage, a hybrid hub, a temporary community center.

Under Convene Hospitality Group, that philosophy is expanding: the merger with etc.venues and new signature properties like The Mallory at Manhattan’s Terminal Warehouse are turning this idea into a true global network of “studios of belonging.” They aren’t just spaces—they’re infrastructure for participation.

They’re doing what Sayer predicted for television, but in reverse. Every Convene property behaves like a living set: half venue, half content engine. They own the hospitality, the tech, the streaming, even the data. They’ve become the A24 of corporate culture, where the coffee break is choreography and the catering feels like character development. Events aren’t about square footage anymore; they’re about story.

Science confirms it. When people share awe, their hearts sync. Mirror neurons fire, oxytocin blooms, cortisol drops. That synchrony—emotional contagion—is the real product we trade in. Tomorrow’s producer will read a room the way a conductor reads a score, cueing dopamine with light, modulating trust with silence. Biology is the new tech stack.

Tahira Endean, who leads education for IMEX Group, calls joy a KPI, and she’s right. As one of the most respected educators in our field—and the author of Our KPI: Joy — Because Happiness Delivers Productivity—Endean argues that emotional outcomes are as measurable as financial ones. Her book reframes joy not as decoration but as a driver of attention, learning, and trust. In an age obsessed with metrics, she reminds us that the most valuable data point is still how people feel when they’re together.

Freeman’s research found that participants feel “failed” when they leave unchanged. Translation: if they don’t feel something, nothing happened. Fun is chemistry; chemistry is ROI.

That’s why the heroes of this new era aren’t stage managers; they’re Event Entrepreneurs—half sociologist, half showrunner. Inside corporations, the Corporate Entrepreneur plays the same role, turning annual meetings into neural boot camps for culture, replacing “cost per attendee” with “impact per connection.” And somewhere between them spins the Eventfluencer, the creator who owns both audience and atmosphere, the bridge between digital followings and physical gatherings. Together they’re the auteur trio of the modern event age. Sandi Safi saw it first. Dîner en Blanc began as a picnic and became a planetary ritual—eighty markets, encrypted waiting lists, a self-replicating ecosystem where participants are both stars and producers. Each dinner regenerates through local hosts and shared data, measuring passion as precisely as attendance. It’s a decentralized studio of white linen and human behavior: belonging franchised through joy. Daybreaker, the sunrise dance movement, does the same with music—temporary cities of joy that appear and dissolve like applause. Both models prove that participation isn’t a moment; it’s an organism that renews itself through rhythm.

The hardware is catching up to that philosophy. Television’s cameras have become sensors; our venues will too. At Rock Lititz, Freeman’s Dallas labs, and the MSG Sphere, technicians rehearse experiences the way film studios rehearse scenes. Lighting grids double as biometric scanners; spatial audio follows the heartbeat of the crowd. But hardware is just skeleton—empathy is the soul. Data without trust is surveillance. The visionary’s job is to make measurement feel like care.

That same thinking is surfacing across the Atlantic. At ExCeL London, the leadership seems to view the campus less as a venue and more as an event forge—a flexible studio environment where producers can experiment with light, sound, and storytelling infrastructure rather than just rent square footage. You can feel a quiet shift in philosophy: a move from selling space to enabling imagination. The data and feedback loops that flow through those halls aren’t simply tools for venue optimization—they’re instruments of meaning. It’s the same logic driving Convene, Rock Lititz, and the Sphere: when you give creators the right tools, culture follows.

The forge model isn’t only about space or tech; it’s about physiology. At IMEX this year, Circadian Cove re-imagined wellness as data. Designed by Olympian Meeting with Dr. Jess Garza and David Stevens, the lounge used light, breathwork, and sensory downshifts to mirror the body’s rhythm through the day. It wasn’t a spa in the middle of a trade show—it was a live laboratory of calm. Every meditation, stretch, and conversation became a soft data point on focus and recovery. With interviews and opt-in sensors, Circadian Cove hinted at a future where wellness modules feed into the studio’s feedback loop: how long it takes a crowd to reset, when stress drops, when connection spikes.

Social health, after all, is the single biggest determinant of physical health, and events are the architecture of social health. These new wellness studios make that measurable. Imagine each one as a data lens on vitality—an empathy interface inside the infrastructure of belonging.

Explori gives us the baseline: feedback scores, satisfaction charts, benchmarks. Useful, but not the whole picture. The next evolution is what I’ve started calling passion telemetry—the effort to understand why some moments give us goosebumps while others pass unnoticed. That’s what we explored during a morning session at IMEX America 2025, a conversation sparked by my essay “Passion, Charisma, and the Goosebumps Moment.” The idea has already begun to evolve into a collaborative project rather than a panel—a working group exploring how passion might someday be captured, coded, and understood without losing its mystery. Explori and others are building the scaffolding; the next step is figuring out how to make the data sing.

Convene has already mastered that feedback loop. They treat emotion as a deliverable: every coffee break a micro-ritual, every scent a cue for calm, every camera angle an invitation to memory. They’re building what I call Experience Forges—spaces where corporate culture, content creation, and human gathering melt into one act of production. The difference between their model and Hollywood’s? Ours still breathes.

Of course, no rehearsal survives the crowd. Disruption has become the co-star of every event. Protest, weather, tech failure, scandal—volatility is the new luxury. The best producers don’t resist it; they compose with it. The modern show caller now shares a headset with a behavioral scientist. Recovery arcs are written into the script. When chaos arrives—and it always does—it’s not a crisis; it’s choreography. That’s defensive design: the grace to let reality in.

Which brings us to the outcome test. Every gathering, from a wedding to a world summit, now answers one question: what changed because we came together? Did trust deepen? Did joy spread? Did an idea, a product, or a movement take flight? Television sells illusion. We sell verification. We are the reality premium.

It’s already happening. The most forward-thinking producers and planners are quietly building their own studios inside the old frameworks—experimenting with passion metrics, wellness data, participatory design, and behavioral science. The creativity is there; what’s missing is the infrastructure to sustain it. We need the tools, policies, and spaces that make this kind of work not heroic but normal.

We are not simply watching the evolution of events—we are writing it. The next draft of this industry will not be dictated by algorithms or efficiency metrics, but by those who still believe that bringing people together is one of the most transformative technologies we have.

Because belonging, at scale, is both the hardest and the most human infrastructure we’ll ever build.