Our industry is expert at telling the story of the global economic impact of business events. Here’s why — and how — we can and should — tell a bigger story.

Sherrif Karamat, CAE, President and CEO, PCMA and CEMA. Photo by Doug Sturgeon.

If the global business events industry were a national economy, its $1.8 trillion total GDP would make it the 16th largest economy in the world, according to the Events Industry Council’s (EIC) 2026 Global Economic Significance of Business Events Study, released in August. It generates more direct spending, the EIC study reported, than both the air transport and textiles industries.

As meetings professionals, we’re accustomed to measuring our success by the size of our industry and the economic output of our events — by room nights booked and job creation and the boosts to local businesses and supply chains. Those numbers demonstrate our power and reflect the enormous economic benefits our industry brings to individuals, companies, and destinations around the world.

Yet they represent only one way of looking at the global business events industry’s collective impact. The numbers can tell you how much happened, but they can’t tell you about what happened or about what changed — or didn’t change — as a result.

Some of the evidence that demonstrates the global business events industry’s ability to create change is coming from outside. For example, in a 2025 Project Management Journal article, economic geography professor Harald Bathelt and management professor Jörg Sydow argue that treating conferences and exhibitions solely as temporary gatherings misses their longer-lasting effects. Convening in-person is how professional communities and industries are built, they write, and where new initiatives are discussed and financed. Without those events, “many projects would never materialize.”

The fact that people meet face to face is essential, the authors add; business events bring together a field’s key actors and communities and will maintain critical global relevance as places for knowledge exchange in a digital world. Meeting professionals agree, the EIC study shows — when events industry professionals were asked what results achieved by business events are hardest to replace, seven out of 10 said building relationships through face-to-face interaction.

I continue to reinforce that we need to tell better stories about the outcomes of the global business events industry — and about the human-centered value our business events create. That thread is one that PCMA Insights, the business intelligence initiative we launched earlier this year, is following in our 2026 Outlook and sector reports. The reports map the size of key business events markets, but they also identify the human skills and behaviors that will better assist meeting professionals to design events that create real change — not just in economic terms, but for the advancement of business communities and the lives and careers of individuals.

For business event strategists, my invitation is to start with the outcomes — identifying the challenges your communities most need to solve for and the changes that will most benefit participants collectively and as individuals. And then to measure that, alongside economic impact.