What Planners Want From Speakers in 2027

Amex GBT's 2027 Global Meetings and Events Forecast, published in October 2026, found improving the attendee experience is the top priority for meetings professionals in every global region. Attendees are expected to want more personalized experiences (35 percent), more social activity and networking (31 percent) and more hands-on, interactive sessions and workshops (31 percent). For a speaker booking that favors formats an audience takes part in over formats it watches.

American Express Global Business Travel published its 2027 Global Meetings and Events Forecast on 13 October 2026, built on a YouGov survey of 500 meetings professionals across eleven countries, with fieldwork between 5 and 14 August. It is the clearest read available on what the people booking events intend to do next year.

Most of the coverage has led on the optimism numbers: 93 percent are optimistic about the health of the sector in 2027, and 91 percent expect overall meetings and events spend to increase. Those are good numbers and they are not the interesting ones.

The finding that should change a speaker brief

Improving the attendee experience is the top priority for meetings professionals in every global region.

Underneath that, the forecast reports what attendees are expected to want: 35 percent anticipate more personalized experiences, 31 percent more social activity and networking, and 31 percent more hands-on, interactive sessions and workshops.

Read those three together and they describe a direction, not three separate preferences. Personalized, social, hands-on. Every one of them is a format in which the audience does something.

That is an uncomfortable finding for an industry whose default product is one person talking to a seated room for an hour.

What this does not mean

It does not mean keynotes are finished, and anyone selling that reading is overclaiming.

A keynote remains the only format that puts a single frame in front of an entire audience at the same moment. Two thousand people can receive a keynote as effectively as two hundred; no workshop scales that way. When an event needs everyone leaving the room with the same reference point, the one-way session is the right instrument and the interaction is beside the point.

What the data pressures is narrower and more specific: the hour-long one-way session booked out of habit, with no participation attached, no stated job beyond filling the opening slot, and no answer to the question of what should be different afterwards.

The practical version

If attendee experience is genuinely the priority, three things change in how a speaker gets briefed.

Say what the audience will do, not only what they will hear. A speaker who knows the room is expected to participate will build for it. One who finds out on the day will deliver the standard talk and the interaction will be bolted on badly.

Ask directly whether a speaker works in both registers. Plenty of strong main-stage performers are uncomfortable running a room that talks back, and plenty of excellent facilitators are thin on a big stage. Neither is a flaw; booking the wrong one for the format is.

Consider the keynote plus session shape rather than a longer keynote. A 30 to 40 minute talk that opens a structured discussion usually serves an experience-led agenda better than 60 minutes of talk, and it often costs less than booking two people.

The disruption numbers matter for your contract

The forecast also records how meetings professionals are already responding to instability: 39 percent report a change of destination or city, 37 percent report holding more virtual meetings, and 30 percent report smaller meetings or a change of venue. Separately, 79 percent say they already apply risk management practices to all or most of their meetings.

For a speaker booking that is a contracting instruction rather than a statistic. If roughly two in five events are moving city, the clause covering what happens when your event moves is no longer boilerplate. Agree the fee treatment for a change of city, a change of date and a conversion to virtual at the point of booking, when you have leverage and goodwill, rather than in the week you need to use it.

Postponement and cancellation are usually treated very differently in a speaker agreement, and a move to a virtual format sits awkwardly between them unless somebody names it in advance.

Where AI actually shows up

The forecast asked where meetings professionals plan to use AI. The answers are operational: 34 percent to equip onsite staff with insights for personalized service, 32 percent for event communications, 30 percent for logistics, 24 percent for sourcing.

Nothing in the published findings points at AI selecting the people on stage or replacing them. That is worth holding onto, because the pitch that AI is coming for the keynote is being made loudly by people with something to sell. What this data shows is AI going into the plumbing of an event, which is where most new technology goes first.

The honest summary

Budgets are not collapsing. Confidence is high. The number of events is not falling.

What is changing is the standard an event is held to. Experience ranks above cost reduction as a stated priority, and the experience attendees are said to want is participatory. A speaker line that can show it serves that standard is defensible. One that cannot is the easiest thing on the budget to describe as optional, which is exactly the conversation a flat-cost environment produces.

Tell us the room, the format, and what has to be true when the session ends, and we will shortlist speakers who actually work that way rather than ones who will accept the date.