In December 2024, Skift Meetings published its annual Skift Meetings Megatrends 2025 report, outlining the forces expected to shape the business of events in the year ahead.
One year later, the results are mixed. Several trends materialized decisively. Others showed early promise but stalled amid operational, financial, or regulatory realities. Here’s how each prediction played out.
Download the Skift Meetings Megatrends 2026 report to get ready for the year now starting.
AI-Powered Event Tech Finally Delivers on the Promise of Event Personalization
Accuracy score: Continuing to improve
In 2025, AI improved event personalization across the entire event lifecycle, from marketing and registration to networking and post-event insights.
Platforms including Cvent, Grip, Swapcard, and Bizzabo made AI-driven tools accessible to organizations of all sizes, not just enterprise-level events. Personalization translated into measurable gains in registration conversion, attendee satisfaction, and networking effectiveness, while also reducing manual workloads for event teams.
Still, adoption was uneven. Smaller teams often lacked the data maturity to unlock AI’s full value, and much of the “personalization” remained limited to matchmaking and agenda recommendations rather than truly adaptive experiences.
Authenticity Over Aesthetics
Accuracy score: Keeping it real
Authenticity emerged as a powerful differentiator in an experience-driven meetings market. Attendees increasingly sought connections with local culture, communities, and environments that extended beyond curated, photo-ready moments.
In a tech-forward world, an authentic human connection carries added weight. The Freeman Trends Report identified authentic personal connection as a primary value driver for attendees.
Experiences centered on genuine immersion, such as learning directly from local chefs or participating in cultural traditions, consistently outperformed purely aesthetic activations. Event organizers reported a clear shift away from designing “Instagrammable” moments and toward programming that fostered deeper engagement and emotional resonance.
One downside is that scaling authenticity proved difficult, with some “local” experiences starting to feel standardized.
Meetings Industry Gets Flooded With Private Equity
Accuracy Score: On the money!
Private equity and strategic investment heated up in the meetings and events industry, especially at year-end.
Rather than blockbuster mega-deals, activity focused on targeted acquisitions designed to deepen service offerings and strengthen technology capabilities. Much of the dealmaking occurred late in the year, following a cautious first half marked by rising costs, geopolitical instability, and shifting U.S. trade policy.
Doug Emslie, chairman of Cuil Bay Capital, expects 2026 to bring “even bigger” deals fueled by increased private equity investment, adding that “confidence in the industry is coming through.”
EU Legislation Accelerates Event Sustainability Drive
Accuracy Score: Goalposts shifted
The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) influenced the events industry in 2025, but an October vote means that EU has eased off its ambitious green targets. While awareness increased and reporting infrastructure improved, implementation challenges persisted.
Measurement gaps, particularly around delegate travel and Scope 3 emissions, meant many organizations achieved technical compliance while still overlooking the most significant sources of their events’ carbon footprints. Larger organizations made measurable progress, but smaller event companies and those operating in less-regulated markets struggled to keep pace, creating an uneven sustainability landscape.
For many organizations, sustainability in 2025 became more about reporting readiness than behavioral change, raising questions about whether regulation alone can drive meaningful emissions reduction without clearer standards and more vigorous enforcement.
Mental Health Becomes a Standard in Event Planning
Accuracy Score: Mixed Emotions
While awareness of mental health remained high, 2025 saw much of the industry focused more on survival than self-care.
Organizations such as Event Minds Matter and The Neu Project continued to support event professionals through education, advocacy, and community-building.
Although mental health initiatives remained visible, widespread structural adoption lagged as economic pressures forced many organizations to prioritize operational resilience over wellness investments.
Planning for Five Different Generations
Accuracy Score: Genuine
Never before had meetings served such a broad generational mix. In 2025, planners increasingly had to account for the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z, each with distinct expectations around learning styles, technology use, and engagement.
As Baby Boomers continued to exit the workforce, planners struggled to balance programming for Gen Z entrants while still accommodating older generations. While no universal solution emerged, generational planning became a recognized and unavoidable complexity in event design.
Integrating Local Inspiration Into Events
Accuracy Score: Rooted
Local and hyper-local integration became one of the most widely adopted trends of 2025.
Farm-to-fork food and beverage, local art installations, and regionally inspired gifting moved from niche sustainability initiatives to mainstream event strategy. Corporate meetings, incentive programs, and conferences across sectors embraced local sourcing to enhance authenticity, manage costs, and support host communities.
The convergence of attendee demand for meaningful experiences, budget pressures favoring secondary markets, sustainability goals, and generational preferences created ideal conditions for this trend to flourish.
