As artificial intelligence floods the internet with content, one of Australia’s leading business event experts says it’s having an unexpected side effect: pushing people back into the room together.
Anne Jamieson, CEO at Saxton Speakers Bureau, says the shift is a direct response to the erosion of trust in digital content.
“I think that there’s a couple of things attached to that. The first one is, and I hate to say it, but COVID really completely changed the landscape – everybody is hungry for that connection and to actually meet and to actually be in the room together,” Jamieson said.
“One of the things in the research was that nobody ever made a friend on Zoom.”
Jamieson said the proliferation of AI-generated content online was compounding that hunger for real connection.
“With all these digital channels and everything filling the sort of the AI generated content, the whole credibility starts to decline, because people don’t know what they can and cannot trust. Whereas if you’re actually meeting somebody face to face, then you’re actually looking at somebody in the eyes while they’re delivering a keynote – and that is where you actually build trust.”
The comments come as Saxton closes out a strong financial year, placing speakers into around 2,500 events over the past 12 months. Despite pressure on corporate budgets, Jamieson said volumes had held firm.
“There’s definite pressures on budgets and things like that at the moment with everything that’s going on in the economy. But our volume and everything hasn’t changed, which is touch wood.”
Live events still dominate
Even with the rise of virtual and hybrid formats through the pandemic, Jamieson said in-person delivery remained the overwhelming preference.
“95 per cent of what we’re putting speakers into is still an actual live event. The other 5 per cent, we do a tiny, tiny bit now of virtual.”
Hybrid formats, she said, tend to be used pragmatically rather than as a genuine substitute for gathering in person – for example, when an organisation running a conference in Sydney can’t justify flying in delegates from Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane, and opts to livestream to those markets instead.
Redesign, not reduce
With budgets flat but appetite for events undiminished, Jamieson said organisers were being forced to rethink programs rather than simply cut costs.
“The core to this is very much about redesigning. When you’re actually looking at your event, redesigning sessions for connection or asking a better registration question – those things don’t cost a lot of money. They’re actually relatively simple to do.”
Her bigger message to event organisers: less is more
“Events really need to subtract over add. That’s actually a really, really big challenge for the association market. If somebody’s running an event and they’re bringing in 700 people, the people that are actually organising a conference often think that they’ve just got to pack it – because people are paying all this money to be here, we’ve just got to jam it. Whereas if you look at it from a research perspective, less is actually going to be more.”
Content, she said, remains important, but it isn’t the primary reason people show up.
“Content is still important, but content is not the key driver.”
Designing for connection, not just content
According to Jamieson, the real value delegates are chasing is intentional connection – something she said most conference programs still fail to build in.
“If you go to a conference now, there’s morning tea and then there’s afternoon tea. There’s nothing intentional about that. It’s actually finding time and allowing for people to have an intentional connection”.
That, she said, means organisers doing the legwork to identify who in the room should be talking to whom, and why.
Left unaddressed, she warned, the format risks favouring only one type of delegate.
“Events are organised by extroverts for extroverts. When you have a really large group of people, and you’re not forming an intentional connection, then the introverts often get left out. They’re just kind of sitting there going, I’m not going to sit in a room of 500 people and put my hand up because that’s just not something that’s comfortable to me.”
The ROI problem
Jamieson acknowledged that proving the value of events to budget holders remains one of the industry’s toughest challenges – precisely because the biggest wins often show up long after the event itself.
“It’s really hard to actually measure all of the benefits of going to an event. One of the hardest things is when you go to an event, it’s really hard to explain that somebody you met two years ago is now picking up the phone to do business with you because you had a connection with them at a conference. It’s all those little things that are really, really hard to actually explain as an ROI.”
Relevance over profile
Jamieson said the bar for content had risen sharply now that information is freely available online and that speaker selection was shifting away from star power toward relevance.
“If you can get it on a podcast, you can get it on YouTube, you can get it on Instagram, then the program that you’ve put together is not relevant to your audience and you’re not delivering something new to them. So, relevance to the audience is really now the top factor.”
That extends to who gets booked to speak, she said. Credentials from a traditional speaker’s bureau matter less than whether the speaker is genuinely relevant to that audience, whether that’s a doctor at a medical conference or otherwise.
“There was a time when it was all about ‘we need a name to get everybody to come to the conference’. But these days there’s just information everywhere, so relevance is actually really important.”
Jamieson said 87 per cent of participants in Saxton’s research named relevance as one of the most important factors going forward.
One category, however, has proven immune to changing tastes. Saxton, now in its 61st year, tracks its most requested topics every month and inspirational stories have held a top-five spot for six decades straight.
“For 60 years, inspirational stories has always been in the top five. It’s never changed. Everything else around that changes. At the moment everybody wants an AI speaker, or mental health is really topical as well. But inspirational stories is always there at the top.”
What sticks by 2030
Looking ahead, Jamieson pointed to two forces she expects to reshape events permanently: personalisation and intentional connection.
She said the next generation of delegates, raised on algorithmically tailored content, would have little patience for rigid, one-size-fits-all programming.
“If you look at how they actually process information now – Instagram, everything – it’s 100 per cent tailored to them. If events stay in the current format, a really rigid program, the younger generation coming through are just going to find it so foreign that they’re not going to be able to attend.”
That points to a fundamental reordering of how events get built, she said – consulting delegates on what matters to them before designing the program, rather than after.
“It’s almost like you’ve got to reverse everything now. You’ve got to work out, in terms of the delegates that are coming, what is going to be relevant and ask them the questions before you actually even develop the program. There’s no point in developing a programme without engagement with the people that you actually want to come.”
Associations that fail to adapt, she cautioned, risk fading into irrelevance altogether while personalisation, including delegates picking and paying for only the sessions relevant to them, is likely to force a rethink of event pricing models entirely.
Jamieson said the trends were far from limited to Australia and New Zealand. Saxton’s research, cross-referenced against global data from the Professional Conference Management Association’s 2026 corporate sector outlook, pointed to the same shifts playing out worldwide.
“As much as we focused on Australia, New Zealand and a little bit of Asia, the trends that we’re seeing are definitely global.”
