The Next Shift in Strategic Event Management

Shawn DuBravac will present an action-oriented framework to help event strategists prepare for the future at PCMA Business Events Summit 2026, held at Puerto Rico’s El Conquistador Resort.

Owing to his work as a futurist and author of Digital Destiny: How the New Age of Data Will Transform the Way We Work, Live, and Communicate, Shawn DuBravac has a unique perspective on where the business events profession is headed. He is scheduled to share the factors having an impact on the events industry with PCMA’s 2026 Business Events Summit audience in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on Tuesday, June 23 at 8:30 a.m. As part of his talk, “From Operator to Orchestrator: The Next Shift in Strategic Event Management,” he will help attendees explore how that change in mindset about the role of event planner can position them and their organizations for success in the future.

Shawn DuBravac

“Time is probably the most scare resource for every event professional that I know, because they’re constantly putting out the next fire. They’re constantly working on the next thing. And when one event ends, they’re already often behind in the very next event,” DuBravac told Magdalina Atanassova, Convene’s digital media editor, in a forthcoming episode of the Convene Podcast.

He also called out event strategists’ need to monitor multiple possible futures even as they deal with the same time pressures as other corporate professionals. “When an event is imminent and when we’re focused on imminent time horizons, you’re really looking at precision, you’re looking at very well-defined metrics. But the future requires a very different mindset. One of the great challenges for every organization today, especially events organizations, is how do you work across these competing time horizons?”

Asking this question is the first step in becoming an orchestrator rather than an operator, the framework at the heart of DuBravac’s talk at BES 2026. “You have to be focused on what is imminent, what’s coming in the next six months, nine months, 12 months, but you also have to be thinking about, okay, what’s going to be relevant in five years? How do we start to build towards that future? And you have to do both of those at the same time, which for most of us is a very big challenge.”

Here are some more highlights from their conversation:

Communicating How Events Bring Value to an Organization

“Building towards an event, we deliver the event with perfection, and then it’s over, and then we move on to the next planning cycle, and so we live in this cycle of planning cycles. I think to elevate the event professional is to recognize that they are a core component of the executive team, that they are delivering value across the organization, that they’re helping not only deliver the mission of the organization, but in many ways, they’re helping set the future of the organization and the strategy of the organization,” DuBravac said. He suggested instead reframing events as where an organization presents the core of its strategy to its people in real time. “I do think that the most savvy organizations are recognizing that events are not just something they do, but that they are a core component of their mission.”

Adapting to a New World Environment

“Looking back over the last decade with the pandemic and everything that we have seen, global recessions, other things that have impacted us, the organizations that had built that into their DNA, that could pivot quickly, could understand what was changing, and then adapt to a new world environment were the ones that ended up really thriving, and I learned from their examples,” DuBravac said on the Convene Podcast.

“The organizations that are rigid, that have precision when everything is going fine, look like they’re best in class. But when things change suddenly, they often are caught in a paralysis. They can’t make a decision. They’re not sure who’s going to lead them, who’s going to guide them, and where they should operate. Everything just grinds to an absolute halt when the landscape changes or when the environment changes, and so it’s less about being precise and being rigid and really about having the ability to be adaptable, to be flexible.”

Using AI to Improve Event Processes

DuBravac also stressed how AI has the potential to “rewire” the event-production process by churning through data to identify pain points and potential opportunities for content delivery. “When we’re using generative AI, that we’re not just taking the input as given, but that we’re using it as a thought partner, that we’re using it to help create some productivity as well as to enhance our processes,” he said. “You’re really seeing organizations building entirely new structures in how they think about their event strategy. So it isn’t just, okay, let’s change this form, and now let’s use AI to create this form. Instead it’s realizing that they can bring different data sources together to start to fundamentally restructure the event from the ground up,

from everything that happens before they even show up on site to everything that’s happening on site and even after the event concludes. So, it’s rewiring the organization in many ways.”

Shawn DuBravac will deliver his talk “From Operator to Orchestrator: The Next Shift in Strategic Event Management” on Tuesday, June 23 on the Main Stage at PCMA Business Events Summit 2026.

Kate Mulcrone is Convene’s digital managing editor.

On the Web

Learn more about Business Events Summit at businesseventssummit.org.
Learn more about Shawn DuBravac at shawndubravac.com