What every event organiser in Australia and New Zealand needs to know about the next five years. Scroll to the end of this article to download a copy of the report.
The business events industry has recovered from the disruption of COVID-19. Attendance is up. Pipelines are strong. Investment is flowing. By most traditional measures, the industry is back. But recovery is not the same as readiness. The playbook that worked reliably before 2020 is no longer sufficient. Costs have risen sharply while budgets have stayed flat. Audiences are choosing more carefully which events are worth their time. And the bar for what a good event looks like has moved considerably.
This research exists because Saxton wanted to understand what is genuinely shifting, not what the industry hopes is true, but what the data, the practitioners, and the audiences are actually saying.
About the Research
The Future of Business Events 2030 and Beyond is independent research commissioned by Saxton and conducted by ThinkerTank, Australia's leading trend intelligence and strategic foresight agency. The research was led by Dr Ben Hamer, Founder and Chief Futurist at ThinkerTank, and conducted between January and February 2026.
The findings draw on three sources: an industry survey of 363 event professionals across the Australian and New Zealand business events ecosystem, of whom 197 completed the full questionnaire; 14 in-depth stakeholder interviews with senior leaders and practitioners from organisations including PCMA, REA Group, AHRI, and the New Zealand International Convention Centre; and desk research across more than 20 published industry reports and data sets including the Australian Business Events Association, PCMA Convene, and Business Events Industry Aotearoa.
Respondents included corporate and association event managers, venue and destination partners, Speakers, event agencies, HR professionals, and professional conference organisers. The age distribution skews experienced, with 60.6% of respondents aged between 35 and 54.
The State of Play
The economic case for business events is not in question. Australia's business events sector contributed $19.6 billion to the visitor economy in 2024. Across the Tasman, multi-day business events contributed NZ$925 million to the New Zealand economy in 2025. The global market is forecast to reach US$2.3 trillion by 2032, on a 15% annual growth trajectory. Nearly eight in ten companies believe in-person events are their most impactful marketing channel.
Industry confidence is broadly positive. 55% of survey respondents described themselves as very or extremely confident about the future of business events through to 2030. Only 7% expressed low or no confidence.
But confidence about the industry is not the same as confidence that any specific event will thrive. The operating environment has become harder, not easier. Rising costs were named as the single biggest change of the past twelve months by 36% of respondents, more than double any other factor. At the same time, 54% reported budgets staying flat. In real terms, flat budgets against rising costs mean declining budgets.
The conclusion the research reaches is this: business events are not facing a crisis of demand. They are facing a crisis of relevance. People want to attend events. They understand the value of being in a room together. What has changed is that they need a stronger reason to be in your room, specifically.
Six Themes Shaping Business Events to 2030
Across all three research streams, six themes surfaced consistently. They are not predictions. They are shifts already underway, each reshaping how events are designed, delivered, and valued. Together, they define the agenda for the next five years.
Each theme represents a movement from how the industry has traditionally operated to what audiences, clients, and the broader operating environment now demand.
1. Experience: From Attending to Feeling
Audiences are no longer benchmarking your event against other conferences. They are benchmarking it against every experience in their lives. One in six event professionals named increased demand for better experiences as the single biggest attendee behaviour shift of the past twelve months. A further 26% are already delivering experiential or immersive formats. For every professional who expects experiential formats to decrease, four expect them to grow.
Production excellence is now table stakes. Experience design is the differentiator. And behavioural science is clear: people judge an experience by how they felt at its most intense moment and how they felt as they left. Everything else fades.
2. Connection: From Networking to Intentional Community
56% of event professionals report a stronger desire for connection and networking as the number one shift in attendee behaviour, ahead of price sensitivity, wellbeing, and every other factor in the survey. Lack of networking is the second most common attendee complaint. Yet most events still treat connection as what happens around the programme rather than as part of it.
Remote and hybrid work hollowed out the informal interactions where trust, friendship, and culture actually form. Events are uniquely placed to address that deficit. But a drinks reception with no structure is not connection design. The research is detailed that the events getting this right are treating the connection with the same design rigour they give the programme itself.
3. Relevance: From Content as Draw to Content as Commodity
Irrelevant or impractical content is the number one attendee complaint. Content that can be consumed just as effectively on demand or through AI is no longer a sufficient reason to be in a room. In an age where anyone can access tailored information at any depth, events must deliver what a screen cannot: access to the person behind the ideas, the conversation that changes how someone thinks about a problem, the right people in the right room at the right time.
Relevance to the audience is now the number one factor organisers value when selecting Speakers, rated three times more important than name recognition or profile. 51% of respondents named it their primary selection criterion.
4. Personalisation: From One-Size-Fits-All to Individually Tailored
One in three attendees now expects a more personalised event experience. Personalisation ranks as the second most important factor the industry expects to matter by 2030, behind only measurable ROI, with 66% of event professionals rating it as essential or very important. The format the industry most wants to leave behind is the one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter event.
Meaningful personalisation does not require expensive technology. Offering three tracks instead of one, asking attendees what they most want before the event starts, and acting on those answers represent a significant step. The design challenge is curation, not customisation for its own sake.
5. Quality: From More-Is-More to Fewer-Done-Better
57% of respondents predict that smaller, more targeted events will be the dominant growth format by 2030, the highest of any format in the survey. Long multi-day conferences are among the formats expected to decline most significantly. Audiences are voting with their time.
The smarter response to rising costs is redesign, not reduction. Cutting Speakers, shortening programmes, and booking cheaper venues does not produce leaner events. It produces worse ones. Quality comes from intention. The measure of a successful event is no longer how many people came. It is how many people felt it was worth their time.
6. Proof: From Attendance to Outcome Measurement
Measurable ROI is the single strongest consensus finding in the entire survey. 72% of respondents rated measurable attendee outcomes as essential or very important by 2030. Yet the most valuable things events deliver, trust, relationships, belonging, and shared culture, are the hardest to capture in a post-event survey.
The events that survive budget scrutiny will be those that can articulate what they delivered in language that resonates beyond the events team. The industry needs to shift from describing what happened at an event to connecting it to what happened in the organisation afterwards.
What Future-Ready Events Look Like
The events that thrive through to 2030 will not be the biggest or the longest. They will be the ones built on clearer intent, stronger design choices, and a sharper focus on impact. The research does not call for reinvention. It calls for more deliberate choices about what stays, what shifts, and what no longer earns its place on the programme.
The six themes are interconnected. An event that is designed for genuine connection will almost certainly also deliver a stronger experience and more relevant content. The gains are not isolated. But they do require someone asking a different set of questions at the start of the design process, beginning not with the venue or the run sheet, but with what the audience should feel, learn, and do differently as a result of being in the room.
Also in this series:
- Pillar 1: Why Event Experience Design Is Now the Differentiator
- Pillar 2: Why Traditional Event Networking Fails and What to Do Instead
- Pillar 3: How to Choose the Right Keynote Speaker: Why Audience Relevance Now Beats Name Recognition
- Pillar 4: How to Personalise Your Event Programme: What Attendees Expect by 2030
- Pillar 5: Smaller, More Targeted Events Are the Dominant Growth Format
- Pillar 6: How to Measure Event ROI: Why 72% of the Industry Says Outcome Measurement Is Now Essential
Fill out the form below to download a copy of the research.
The Future of Business Events 2030 and Beyond was commissioned by Saxton and conducted by ThinkerTank. Research was conducted between January and February 2026 across 363 survey respondents, 14 stakeholder interviews, and more than 20 published industry sources from across the Australian and New Zealand business events ecosystem. Photo credit: Diprose Media
