12/22/2020

PCMA's Picks for the Business Event Trends of 2021

Discover what the organization believes will drive engagement next year

Many of the trends that were predicted for 2020 at the close of 2019 seem so far removed from our pandemic reality — didn’t we seem so innocent back then? So when I went to take a look at the trends Convene editors had their eye on at this time last year, I fully expected to find that they hadn’t aged well. But the pandemic hasn’t made the trends we spotlighted in our article obsolete — and digital editor Curt Wagner even seems prescient, writing, “As technology improves, virtual events are becoming more attractive.”

Still Have My Eye on A.I.

It’s a happy accident that I didn’t write about the first trend that came to my mind last December: How face-to-face experiences would become even more critical in 2020. Instead, I chose to write about how I would be following A.I. in 2020 and its impact on business events and society. Alas, like many other issues that were important to us last year, A.I. has taken a back seat to Convene’s coverage of the pandemic and the industry’s response. But, as our reliance on technology has grown and tech innovation has accelerated, A.I. has only become more a part of the largely unseen fabric of our lives.

Jeremy Kahn, who writes the “Eye on A.I.” newsletter for Fortune, published a recap of this month’s Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) virtual conference, the annual event for top academic A.I. researchers, which attracted more than 20,000 participants this year. Georgia Tech professor Charles Isbell was the opening keynoter, and Kahn said he urged the A.I. field to consider “how a piece of technology will operate in the world, who will use it, on whom will it be used or misused, and what could possible go wrong.” These are all questions that should be “front-and-center when A.I. researchers sit down to create an algorithm,” according to Kahn. “And to get answers, machine learning scientists need to collaborate far more with other stakeholders.”

Please select this link to read the complete article from Convene.