New benchmark data from event platform company RainFocus suggests AI is commoditizing event content. What it can’t copy is the reason people still show up at in-person meetings and events.

For decades, the business case for the conference rested on knowledge transfer. You flew in, filled a notebook, and went home smarter. Networking was the bonus, something that happened in the coffee line between the sessions that justified the trip.

That model, which has been changing for some time now, appears to have completed a full flip now, where connections are the main attendance driver and knowledge gain an ancillary benefit. RainFocus’s 2026 Mid-Year State of Events Report shows attendees voting with their feet, their calendars and their badge scans for the conversations that used to be happy accidents. The report draws on the company’s 2026 platform benchmarks, sessions from its INSIGHT 2026 conference, interviews with event professionals and a late-2025 survey of about 100 events and marketing professionals. The picture the data presents is one of an industry where people come to learn from each other, not to be presented to.

Fewer Sessions, More Meetings

The clearest signal is in how attendees spend their time on site. According to RainFocus benchmarks, meeting attendance rose 62% year over year. Meanwhile, the average number of sessions attended per person at large events fell from 5.3 to 4.2.

Given the choice between a session and a meeting, the report says, attendees pick their peers — and planners are responding accordingly. Sixty percent of survey respondents said they are adding networking time to their events. This doesn’t mean content no longer matters, but that attendees want to hear from people whose situations resemble their own and learn what has actually worked, rather than sit through a single expert at a podium.

The survey data on session formats makes this clear. The formats planners most often said they would expand in 2026 are the ones built around participation and proof:

• Case studies: 60%
• Workshops: 56%
• Birds-of-a-feather sessions: 36%
• Keynotes: 28%
• Traditional breakouts: 26%

How does AI factor into this trend? According to the report, the more people use AI in their everyday work, the more value they place on what feels human and trustworthy. So it logically follows that if AI can summarize a recorded keynote in 30 seconds, the keynote alone is not a reason to board a plane. Brent Turner, EVP of strategy and solutions at Opus Agency, framed this in his INSIGHT 2026 keynote as the “interactive life” of events. He defined these as “the moments that cannot be recorded or summarized by AI, such as a meeting up to get coffee.”

Some strategists are designing for connection from the ground up. Event tech evangelist Dahlia El Gazzar of Dahlia+Agency calls the approach “vibe eventing,” meaning deliberately building unstructured space for spontaneous, low-pressure interaction. Planners, she noted in the report, are creating “unstructured zones, such as mocktail lounges or ad-hoc gathering spaces,” where attendees can decompress and connect naturally. When the space exists, she said, attendees fill it, and those moments often become what they remember most.

Smaller Rooms, Deeper Relationships

The focus on connection is also reshaping event portfolios. Organizations that once put everything into one flagship user conference are adding roadshows, regional meetups and ancillary events, either alongside the main event or in place of it. At the end of 2025, 36% of surveyed companies planned to host more small ancillary events in 2026, and 35% planned more roadshows. The report says this is because aattendees increasingly prefer events closer to home, and because small settings work better for the relationships they want. Benchmarks show small events had 6.4% higher attendance and 69% more meeting participation year over year.

“Smaller events give us the opportunity to design for depth instead of scale,” said Rodney Hart, RainFocus’s VP of events. They don’t replace the energy of a large event, he added, but they create room for conversation that is harder to achieve at scale.

The same pattern holds online. Large virtual conferences are declining in both volume and performance, while webinars are surging. At 49%, webinars were the event type respondents most often planned to increase, just ahead of in-person events at 47%. Large-scale virtual content delivery appears to be losing to smaller, more targeted formats.

Sponsors are also buying into the concept of connection as a top value for attendees — literally. Because deals are almost never closed on the show floor, and sales cycles run for months or years, the report makes the case that smaller events can make it easier to build the relationships that eventually will close the deal.

Planners are building sponsor packages around this. Among strategies for signing sponsors, offering new networking opportunities ranked second (42%), behind only incentives to sign early (54%). Sponsored sessions (35%) and gamification that includes booth visits (24%) followed. The most effective sponsors, according to the report, are adopting a relationship-first playbook. They study attendee data against their ideal customer profiles before the event and lead with value, such as a relevant article or a personal note, before asking for a meeting. Some are going analog, sending physical letters paired with a small booth gift to stand out from digital noise.

The report builds the argument that, if an event’s value lies in the connections it creates, planners who design, measure and demonstrate those connections are the ones who will become strategic partners rather than logistics executors. Especially with the integration of AI in everything from data analysis to workflow automation, planners will have more time to focus on what AI can’t do, which is build trust with executives, stakeholders and long-time attendees. They also will be building events around those same qualities.