Amy McWhirter

Amy McWhirter is the host to book when the event is going through a camera, which is a genuinely different job from hosting a ballroom and is usually underestimated by planners who have only done one of them.

On a stage, an emcee reads the room and adjusts. On a broadcast there is no room: there is a lens, a countdown, a producer in your ear, a chat feed, and an audience that can leave in one click without anyone noticing. Holding that requires camera presence, tight timing to the second, and the ability to talk through a technical failure without the pause becoming dead air. She came to it from production rather than from the stage, having worked as a video producer, scriptwriter and on-camera host, which is why the material behind the hosting tends to be structured rather than improvised.

Her corporate work sits heavily in technology, hosting for NVIDIA, Veeam, Infosys, TSMC, BMC, Hexnode, Leidos and Mercedes-Benz, across sales training, internal and external live broadcasts, team building, webcasts and hybrid conferences. She also hosted the PBS docuseries Built to Last: The Green Home, and holds a bachelor of science in biopsychology with honors from the University of Michigan, which is a useful thing in a host who has to sound credible introducing technical content.

She moderates as well as hosts, which matters for the format most conferences now run: a panel where the moderator is the difference between four people delivering prepared statements and an actual exchange.

She is based in Chicago and works in person, virtually and hybrid. The strongest case for her is an event with a significant remote audience, a technical subject, or a program that is being broadcast as well as staged.