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Start the day in the company of friends and colleagues.
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ECEF convenes.
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Sam Lippman, President, Lippman Connects sets the tone for the day with this fast-paced session highlighting key data points that have big implications.
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Widen Your Leadership Perspective
Your leadership acumen has brought you great success. The ECEF 2026 Keynoter Edwina Kulego will give you the opportunity to build on that success when she presents “A Global Mindset Pays Off Even if You Operate Locally”.
Edwina will explain that a global mindset has nothing to do with borders or expansion. It’s much bigger than that. It really boils down to increasing the resilience of your organization in an era where uncertainty is never-ending.
Drawing on her role as Vice President of Global Business Development & Growth, Fashion, Informa, Edwina will explore how even small mindset shifts can create outsized leadership impacts.
Here are key takeaways you can look forward to:
- How a global mindset strengthens leadership, teams, and revenue.
- How diverse teams and partnerships reduce business risk.
- Practical ways to think globally while staying locally focused.
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Whom do you want to meet? Who has an opportunity for you? Every leader in the room stands up and introduces themselves to their peers.
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When does it pay off to leave money behind? For the past 24 years, the NACS show has been quietly doing just that. Bob Hughes, Vice President, NACS, shares their success strategy.
NACS does not leave it to the exhibitors to decide how big the next show will be. Their consistent success is built on making growth thoughtful, controlled, and intentional.
Counter-intuitively, they don’t conduct an onsite space drawing and don’t necessarily allow exhibitors to buy as much space as they want. Yet, the show always has a waiting list, and year-round engagement is thriving.
There’s a lot more to what NACS is doing. It’s all working, and it’s been working for a very long time. You’ve waited 24 years to hear this.
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Too few opportunities for independent organizers and associations to partner come to fruition because of an implied culture clash. It doesn’t have to be that way. In this candid and insightful session, Questex and AHLA pull back the curtain on their four-year partnership behind The Hospitality Show.
The ECEF audience will gain a behind-the-scenes look at how two distinct organizations aligned their visions, navigated challenges, and built a scalable, evolving event platform that continues to grow in impact and relevance.
Through real-world examples, this session will explore the critical role of strategic alignment, transparent communication, and shared accountability in making partnership models succeed. Speakers will discuss both the opportunities and the inevitable friction points that arise — and how to proactively manage them to stay on track.
Whether you're considering a similar collaboration or looking to strengthen an existing partnership, this session will provide practical frameworks and honest reflections to help you succeed.
Key Takeaways
1. Understand the benefits and potential pitfalls of partnerships between independent organizers and trade associations.
2. Learn how to define, measure, and evaluate success — and what to do when expectations aren’t met.
3. Gain strategies for managing team collaboration, roles, and responsibilities across organizations.
4. Discover how strong communication and alignment drive long-term growth and scalability. -
What happens on Capitol Hill and in the White House has never had a bigger impact on what happens on the show floor. That’s why the Exhibitions & Conferences Alliance (ECA) is the public policy voice of exhibition and conference executives in Washington, D.C. and state capitals nationwide. Join ECA board chair Fernando Fischer, President, Americas for RX, as he talks about ECA 2.0: a new initiative that will expand ECA’s advocacy impact, expand engagement across the industry, and build a more sustainable platform for long-term value creation. He will also talk about how ECEF attendees can get involved and preview ECA Legislative Action Day, where 200+ leaders like you will be going to Capitol Hill on behalf of our industry.
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The Annabelle Project (TAP) is a mentoring program, founded to feed the events industry pipeline with Next Gen talent. Sam will bring two TAP mentees on stage to report their impressions of conventions and conferences. They will share fresh perspectives from the POV of attendees, newcomers, representatives of the rising generation, potential professionals, and committed future in-person event goers.
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Last month, an AI agent managed promotional pricing across 12 markets. It analyzed competitors, adjusted margins, coordinated with partners, and executed changes—without asking anyone. The marketing directors found out when they saw the results.
Welcome to the agentic era.In this high-impact session, Shelly Palmer cuts through the hype to deliver what leaders actually need: a new vocabulary for AI (Model, Harness, System, Agent), a proven framework for deployment (Context & Evals), and the five shifts that will define winners in 2026—from "Share of Prompt" to why your organization must "Default to Distrust."
The technology is ready. Are you?
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Hosting, sponsoring, attending. We've done it all. And every time, we're watching people ask the same quiet question: is it worth coming back?
This session is a candid debrief on what's changing - why attendees are trading swag for subject matter experts, why the window to create value doesn't start at registration or end at teardown, and why the three days on the floor are more underutilized than anyone wants to admit.
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As organizers continue to rethink the role of learning at events, this session will explore how different formats, environments and interactions contribute to meaningful knowledge exchange. Ken Holsinger and Kimberly Hardcastle will be joined by two event leaders bringing distinct perspectives to the conversation: Rebecca Sausner of Yotta and Chris Peck of ASIS International (producer of GSX). Together, they will share how learning is being designed, tested, and evolved across very different event models.
Participants can expect to explore:
- How learning shows up across the full event experience, from structured sessions to informal, peer-driven, and experiential moments
- New and emerging formats that encourage participation, experimentation and real-world application (e.g., hands-on activations, problem-solving environments, off-site experiences)
- How to create environments that spark interaction and knowledge exchange, not just content consumption
- The role of audience design in shaping learning outcomes
- Balancing innovation with practicality. How both newer fast-growing events and established growth-seeking shows are testing ideas, iterating, and scaling what works and …
- What lessons these organizers have learned – including what has worked, what hasn’t and what’s still evolving
By bringing together perspectives from both established and emerging events, this session will highlight how innovative approaches to learning can take shape in different contexts and how organizers can apply these ideas in ways that align with their own audience, goals, and constraints.
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ECEF 2026
ECEF 2026
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