Agenda for Day 2 - Tuesday 3 November, 2026Tuesday, 3 November 2026 - Europe/Lisbon

Event audiences’ behaviors are more predictable than they may seem, influenced by habits, context, and emotional cues as much as by content quality. Understanding the concept of “predictable irrationality” can help planners create more engaging experiences by:

• Design agendas that align with how people naturally interpret and process information

• Sustain attention through strategic use of emotional and contextual triggers

• Leverage behavioral insights to craft events that resonate with real audience engagement patterns

Geopolitical instability, rising costs, and workforce disruption continue to shape the global meetings landscape. Industry leaders examine how travel challenges, security considerations, talent shifts, and vendor capability gaps are impacting planning, risk management, and delivery across regions.

• Assess how geopolitical and economic trends are reshaping global meetings and travel

• Evaluate approaches to risk mitigation, safety planning, and operational resilience

• Identify workforce and vendor capability challenges affecting delivery

Engaging healthcare professionals requires balancing value, compliance, and trust in an increasingly complex regulatory environment. Discussions focus on cross border engagement challenges, VAT and tax considerations, meal caps, and evolving expectations from regulators, institutions, and HCPs themselves.

• Navigate complex regulatory and cross border requirements affecting HCP engagement

• Interpret VAT, tax, and country specific rules with practical application

• Identify tactics for sustaining trust while adapting to tighter compliance frameworks

Congress participation is influenced by career stage, motivation, and experience design. The discussion highlights best practices in congress planning, booth strategy, inclusivity, patient representation, and emerging expectations around accessibility and wellbeing.

• Tailor congress engagement strategies to career stages and motivations

• Apply best practices for ancillary meetings, booth design, and space planning

• Incorporate inclusivity, accessibility, and patient representation considerations

Explore how valuable HCP insights generated at congresses often fail to translate into meaningful commercial action, and what can be done to fix it. Through hands-on exercises and peer collaboration, uncover where intelligence is lost across booth interactions, symposia Q&A, and KOL conversations, and gain a practical approach to transform congress into a real-time intelligence and activation engine.

• Identify where critical HCP intelligence breaks down between the congress floor and CRM, field teams, or campaign planning

• Diagnose gaps in identity resolution, data flow, and field activation using real-world examples and peer input

• Develop a practical blueprint to resolve HCP signals, trigger timely follow-up, and enable real-time omnichannel orchestration

Artificial intelligence is rapidly entering the meetings and events ecosystem, offering new opportunities alongside new risks. Attention centers on practical internal applications, governance considerations, data protection, and balancing human expertise with AI‑enabled capabilities.

• Identify internal AI use cases that enhance planning, engagement, and efficiency

• Establish guardrails around governance, GDPR, and data protection

• Balance AI‑enabled capabilities with human expertise and judgement

As AI reshapes workflows, traditional pricing and delivery models are being challenged. The conversation examines how AI impacts vendor relationships, resourcing, return on value, and expectations around efficiency, expertise, and pricing transparency.

• Evaluate how AI is disrupting traditional agency pricing and delivery models

• Reframe value conversations beyond time‑based billing structures

• Align expectations between clients and partners in an AI‑enabled environment