Collect your badge and enjoy a light welcome lunch at the event. Use this time to network with other in-house event managers, exchange ideas, and get to know the community.

Anita, along with Michael, our MC for the day, welcomes you and sets the tone for the conversations ahead. Michael will introduce the themes shaping the programme and what you can expect as we bring the community together for a day of shared insight, open discussion, and practical learning.

In this interactive one-hour workshop, participants will work in groups of ten through a collaborative exercise exploring one of the biggest challenges facing corporate event teams: how to prove that events are not a nice to have, but a business-critical tool.

Participants will identify the barriers that stop events being valued at board level, examine why traditional event language often fails to land with senior stakeholders, and work together on how to translate event activity into business outcomes such as trust, influence, behaviour change, revenue and reputation.

This session forms part of ICENetwork’s Big Experiment, running across the UK, US and Germany. The insights gathered will contribute to a global white paper highlighting the barriers facing event teams and the practical solutions needed to make events essential.

A chance to pause, grab a coffee and catch up with others. Continue the conversations, share perspectives and connect with people in the room.

Join our interactive campfire sessions, designed for small-group, peer-to-peer discussion. With six campfires running, you’ll have the opportunity to attend up to three within the hour, moving between conversations that are most relevant to you.

Most meetings look successful but fail to drive decisions.
This session breaks down how to design executive-ready meetings that align stakeholders, reduce noise, and create clear business outcomes. A practical look at what to prioritize, what to cut, and how to measure real impact beyond attendance and feedback scores.

What has delighted you lately?

In an increasingly artificial world, well-designed events have the potential to earn true human feelings.

Giles will dive into how principles of behavioural psychology can help craft experiences designed to delight, driven by audience insights and curated design. Featuring insights from acclaimed behavioural science consultancy Mindscope

As budgets tighten and audiences crave deeper connection, many programs are rethinking the default of large-scale conferences in favor of smaller, curated roundtables. But a successful pivot isn't just about shrinking the guest list - it requires a fundamental shift in how you design content, cultivate relationships, and measure value.

In this campfire session, we'll walk through the strategic and operational steps of transitioning a large-event model to an intimate roundtable format. You'll learn how to right-size your programming without sacrificing reach, how to reframe sponsor and stakeholder conversations around a new model, and how to build the facilitation skills and session structures that make roundtables genuinely productive, not just smaller versions of panels that didn't work. We'll also cover the metrics that matter most when you're optimizing for depth over scale, and how to tell that story compellingly to leadership.

The expectations of event leaders have fundamentally changed. Success is no longer measured solely by attendee counts, production quality, or satisfaction scores. Today’s organizations expect events to influence opportunities, accelerate relationships, support revenue growth, and contribute to broader business objectives.
Join this conversation as we discuss how event professionals can evolve their role, demonstrate value beyond attendance metrics, and position themselves as strategic business partners within their organizations.

AI is beginning to influence how destinations are researched, compared and shortlisted. It can assess access, cost, capacity, risk, sustainability claims and venue options at speed. But if AI starts shaping the first list of possible destinations, what happens to human judgement, creativity, brand fit and local knowledge?

This campfire asks whether AI-led destination sourcing will make decision-making smarter, faster and more evidence-based, or whether it could create new risks: biased data, safe choices, over-standardised recommendations, poor visibility for less obvious destinations and decisions based on information that may be outdated, incomplete or wrong.
Together, corporate planners will explore what they would trust AI to do, what they would never hand over, and what rules event leaders need before allowing technology to influence one of the most strategic choices in the event process.

If you had one minute with a CEO, what would you say?

This session equips event leaders with clear, credible ways to demonstrate why events are business‑critical.

Expect honest discussion on trust, leadership communication, and organizational alignment - plus practical insight you can use to elevate events at the strategic table.

By 2030, 75% of the workforce will be comprised of the two youngest adult generations: Millennials and Gen Z.
At this session, we'll go beyond the stereotypes and share what the data actually says about their wants, hidden barriers and why they're sleeping on your event. (Or AT your event! 61% reported they're likely to skip sessions to decompress, versus only 31% of Baby Boomers.). Expect to hear data insights plus real-life examples.

This closing session brings the day together by capturing the key themes, standout ideas and practical takeaways from across the programme. It is a final opportunity for delegates to reflect on what they have heard, what has challenged them and what they want to take back into their own event teams.

The day continues with drinks and canapés, followed by dinner and the Awards ceremony. A chance to relax, connect and celebrate the achievements of in-house event teams.