Biomanufactured booths that can be quickly customized and then recycled are likely to be big in the future.

As Convene looks back on the past 40 years, we thought it might be fun to peek ahead to the next 10. What might we be reflecting on at the 50th anniversary?

This is a useful practice called foresight visioning. By looking at signals from today and asking what they could mean for our industry and our audiences, we can begin to make more intentional choices about the future we are shaping.

Time travel with me to 2036.

From Hybrid to Off-Grid

The first signals were subtle. Attendees opting out of event apps. Requests for phone-free sessions. Movements to ban smart glasses. Then in 2031, a major shift: The first off-grid events emerged.

Driven in part by Gen Z’s rejection of always-on technology, “offline” became a design choice. No phones, no Wi-Fi, no passive data collection, yet audience expectations for personalization remained high.

A printed schedule was not enough, and new models emerged. Physical knowledge hubs became the heartbeat of the event, offering tailored recommendations in real time. This is where participants found Conference Stylists to guide their experience and Matchmakers to curate networking based on needs, values, and interests.

For planners, this created an unexpected set of challenges. After years spent integrating technology and data, audiences began rejecting it, disrupting expensive systems. Session counts and flow monitoring returned to manual processes. And while more senior planners remembered planning without a phone, newer ones struggled with walkie-talkies and binders. And the audience was strict. If attendees saw a device in your hands, they called it “gridwashing,” and credibility was lost instantly.

Agent-Only Events

It started with attendees bringing personal AI agents to conferences. Planners responded with agent passes, giving full access to concurrent programming. Participants sat in one session, while their agents attended them all, synthesizing insights and capturing takeaways for future use.

This caught the attention of AI companies. As competition intensified, conferences revealed themselves as treasure troves of untapped information: emerging ideas, early data, and unpublished research. The real value was not just in the sessions, but in the patterns between them, the signals forming in real time. That was the advantage they were after.

Companies began buying agent passes at scale. Then in 2028, the first agent-only conference launched as part of IEEE’s Future Directions program. No keynote stage. No networking receptions. Just a continuous stream of presentations delivered by human presenters to an audience that never went to break.

The impact was immediate. Insights that once took months or years to move through an industry now showed up in research pipelines and product roadmaps in near real time.

Almost overnight, the event portfolio doubled, with some events focused on people and others reserved for agents only. Scientific and technical associations leaned into the model, and planners welcomed the new revenue stream from “clankercons,” AI agent–only events named after a slang term for bots. But they required a different kind of design. Content had to be structured and tagged for machine interpretation. Speakers needed coaching for machine audiences. The role of the digital event strategist expanded, shifting from supporting the experience to shaping how information is consumed.

Biomanufactured Booths

Programmable biology in 2036 is an emerging field, but it may offer a path toward a more sustainable show floor. Trade shows have faced increasing scrutiny for the waste they create, drawing more protests over time. When the 2034 PCMA Convening Leaders District hall setup was delayed by a Citizen Science blockade, industry leaders made a commitment to move faster.

Biomanufacturing offers a path forward. Programmable organisms can be coded to produce mycelium composites, woven into fabric or compressed into solid material. Production happened in days, using equipment that fits into the footprint of a parking space. The system is closed-loop; once the show ends, materials can be collected and reused as feeder stock.

We are already seeing early signs with biomanufactured elements like furniture appearing on the 2036 show floor. It is only a matter of time before full booths follow, once fire codes and load requirements catch up. It’s promising as on-site fabrication reduces freight, lowering both carbon impact and cost.

But sustainability comes with a new operational reality. A booth that is grown, not built, needs days, not hours, to appear. Start the conversations with your venue contacts now: Move-in timelines will need to expand, and parking lot space, where the fabrication happens, will be as hot as prime show-floor real estate. What began as an environmental commitment is quietly becoming a fundamental redesign of how exhibits are made.

With the rapid acceleration of technology and increasing pace of change, scenarios like these will be here faster than we think. The signals are already here, and how we proactively pay attention to them will define if we are shaping our future or simply reacting to it.

Beth Surmont, CMP-Fellow, FASAE, CAE, is head of event strategy and design for marketing, strategy, and experience agency 360 Live Media.

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