The Numbers Don't Lie

Mark Shashoua is CEO of Hyve Group, the London-based company that runs 31 major industry events worldwide — from Shoptalk and Groceryshop to HLTH, Manifest and Fintech Meetup. He has spent his career in the events business, a trade he learned from his father. He sees the current moment clearly.

"There's no question," Shashoua told me at Shoptalk. "The number of people coming to events is more than before — and it's not entirely because of AI. It's also the fact that COVID fundamentally shifted the working patterns of most people. The days of sales trips where you'd go from Florida to New York and try to see all your customers in one or two days — you can't do that anymore because they're not in the office. So instead of one day, you're probably going to have to stay four days. Suddenly your cost has gone up, and your return on investment is getting lower. That makes events like this even more important."

According to Menreet Kaur, Hyve's Global Head of Communications and PR, Shoptalk's numbers tell the story. More than 50,000 pre-arranged "double opt-in" meetings took place over three days — meaning both parties agreed in advance to meet, reviewed each other's profiles and allocated time on their schedules. 95% of those meetings lead to a follow-up. Roughly 3,000 of Shoptalk's 10,000 attendees are the core senior buyers Shashoua calls "the gold dust" — and they come from more than 50 countries.

"You could get six months' worth of leads in three days," Shashoua said. "That's why they come."

Get Off Zoom and Into the Room

The numbers are compelling. But the case for in-person isn't just economic — it's also human.

Seth Redlus, Executive Director of the Association of Professional Investment Consultants, has been running conferences for years and has watched the contrast between virtual and in-person sharpen considerably. He doesn't sugarcoat his view of the alternative.

"The virtual world is fake — or if it's not fake, it's highly edited," he said. "That speaker on the webinar is wearing a suit jacket and has a well-constructed background, but under his desk he's only wearing gym shorts. The non-verbal cues we receive that can only be experienced in person are immeasurable. People are hungry for truth in their interactions and that's something they get from live events."

Sometimes the case for in-person makes itself. Glance, an AI-native commerce platform that made its U.S. debut during New York Fashion Week last fall, came to Shoptalk Spring to demonstrate its "agentic commerce" — AI-powered product discovery that shares relevant items before a consumer even begins to search. The technology, which includes immersive virtual try-on that generates magazine-quality, AI-styled looks from a single selfie, is the kind of thing that's difficult to convey on a slide deck or a Zoom call. It has to be experienced.

“We talk a lot about the intelligence of AI, but at Shoptalk, we witnessed the emotion of it,” said Mansi Jain, COO of Glance. ”There is a specific kind of magic when someone sees the Glance experience come alive in shopping for the first time. It’s a mix of surprise and delight. You see their eyes light up, they nudge the person next to them, and suddenly it stops being about the technology and becomes about the person next to you. That instinct, to turn and say ‘did you see that,’ is something no screen can replicate. The most personal AI experiences are also the most human ones.”

Melissa Campanelli, co-founder of the Women in Retail Leadership Circle, a members-only networking organization for senior women in the retail industry that also had a presence at this year’s Shoptalk Spring event, agrees that in-person has become more valuable precisely because it has become less routine.

"I actually think it's become more important," she said. "We're all spending so much time on screens, on Zoom and with AI, that the value of being in a room with peers has gone way up. The best ideas, the real talk, the relationship-building — it always happens in person. AI and virtual tools are great for scale and efficiency, but face-to-face is where trust and community are really built."

What Conferences Have Learned

The best conferences have reinvented their formats to match what attendees say they actually want: not passive listening but real connection, not another panel but a peer conversation.

Campanelli describes a deliberate evolution at the Women in Retail Leadership Circle, which draws more than 500 attendees. "We're very intentional about mixing things up. It's not just about panels anymore. Each year we incorporate different content formats, breakouts and small group and one-to-one meetups so attendees can engage in different ways throughout the event. What we consistently hear is that attendees want three things: actionable insights, real peer connection and access to people they wouldn't normally get time with."

This year the organization introduced Executive Office Hours — off-the-record, executive-led sessions designed for candid conversation and direct access to senior leaders in an intimate setting.

At Hyve, the innovation is structural. Peer-to-peer "Tabletalks" at Shoptalk seat eight retailers together at lunch, organized around a shared topic, with no vendors allowed — a deliberate space to think alongside peers without being pitched to. Everything, Shashoua emphasizes, is pre-engineered so that spontaneity has room to happen.

"How do you make something of scale smaller?" he asked. "That's the question we're always asking. Because otherwise it's overwhelming."

Redlus takes a similar approach at APIC, where the board that shapes conference content is drawn directly from the same audience that attends it. "We rely heavily on content that comes directly from the people who consume it," he said. "We're always willing to give the oddball idea a try. Our improvement is incremental — we try something until we find something that works, and then we carefully monitor that success so that we implement change just before stagnation approaches."

The More Virtual We Get, the More We Need to Show Up

Here is the paradox at the heart of all of it: artificial intelligence, the very technology that makes remote work easier and digital communication more seamless, is one of the reasons people are more eager to gather in person.

Shashoua put it this way: "With AI coming in, what's real, what's not real? That's actually increased the reason to come see the content. The content sessions are more packed than they have been for years."

Beth Kessenich, VP of Sales and Business Development at whynow, attended SXSW in Austin this spring for the fourth time and came away with the same conclusion. In her Substack recap she wrote that the demand for real stories — human, emotional and culturally relevant — has never been greater. "Some things still can’t be AI automated," she noted. "There is still a major need for human connection and human-led storytelling. Brands are embracing creators and human-led storytelling approaches because there is a huge desire for what is real and relatable. Being deeply human — having intuition, the ability to take risks, being a creative thinker — will be a key to success."

The Handshake AI Can't Replicate

Kessenich is candid that SXSW's vast programming can feel overwhelming, and she'd love to see more curated, industry-specific networking built into the structure. It's a fair critique — and a reminder that the best events are the ones that have figured out how to engineer serendipity, creating the conditions for meaningful human moments rather than simply hoping they occur.

Shashoua, who grew up watching his father pioneer large-scale events in emerging markets, describes the mission simply: "We bring people together. We love show business."

In a world where AI can write your emails, schedule your meetings and simulate conversations, the thing it cannot do is sit across the table from another person and build the kind of trust that moves business forward.

For that, you still have to be in the room.