This week I’ve been in Nashville in the United States attending a global conference for the business events industry. Visit Britain have been here too, selling the UK as a place to bring conferences, exhibitions and events to a global audience. The competition is obviously fierce. Pretty much every major US city is represented here and so too are hundreds of other countries. The good news, however, is that the UK remains an extraordinarily popular place for people to want to visit and to do business. Reassuringly, I’ve had more people ask me about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle than Brexit!
However, the thing I wanted to share in my column this week was not really about the events industry at all but some of the things I’ve heard discussed in various speeches and presentations. The conference is called Convening Leaders and it is attended by leaders in the events industry from around the globe. The future of face-to-face engagement is one of the key themes and there have been some fascinating insights offered by academics, journalists, innovators and tech entrepreneurs on how things might actually evolve.
I’m a technophile and I’m hugely excited about how technology can enhance our lives. From energy to healthcare, and from entertainment to education, the boundaries are being stretched and the opportunities are almost boundless. However, the clear theme across it all is that increasingly we will merge ourselves with the technology to such a degree that we cease seeing it as a piece of equipment and instead it just becomes a part of us. That’s not to say that we’ll all become cyborgs but that our intuitive use of tech will reach a level where it starts to enhance our interaction with other humans rather than – as is perhaps the case now – replacing it.