Some months can be summed up with a list of dates. October at Eventscase wasn’t one of them.
We’ve been in Madrid, Valencia and Ibiza. We’ve supported the launch of a new awards programme, worked behind the scenes at a major technology event, joined community gatherings and had a lot — a lot — of conversations with people across the industry.
Perhaps that’s why, looking back, one idea keeps appearing: events work when they manage to set something in motion that continues after people leave the room.
A conversation. An award entry someone finally decides to submit. A contact worth meeting again. A question that is still going around your head a few days later.
That was October in The Event Loop.
AMICEING Event Manager Awards: putting the spotlight behind the event
We’re used to seeing outstanding projects, campaigns, productions, venues and technology recognised by the industry. It is less common to stop and recognise the person who had to make all those pieces fit together.
That is the thinking behind one of the initiatives we supported this month: the AMICEING Event Manager Awards, created by MeetIN Events and officially launched in Madrid on 14 October.
What makes the concept interesting is the change of perspective. The awards recognise the professionals who lead events from within companies and organisations: the people defining objectives, coordinating teams and suppliers, managing resources, making decisions and turning individual events into part of a wider strategy.
The first edition will feature ten categories, culminating in an awards ceremony on 14 January 2027. Entries are expected to explain the challenge, the decisions made and the impact achieved, rather than simply showcase an impressive end result.
Eventscase is supporting the initiative as its technology partner, with EVA also becoming part of the experience.
What stays with us most, though, is the thinking behind the awards. An event might last a few hours. Making it happen can take months. Recognising that work is another way of helping the profession mature.
Conecta One to One Ibiza: when networking stops being a slot in the agenda
A few days later, we swapped our usual office for Ibiza to join Conecta One to One.
At some events, networking appears in the agenda from 17:00 to 18:00. At others, it happens almost continuously: around a table, between two meetings, during an activity or in the unexpected conversation that turns out to be more valuable than several scheduled appointments.
Conecta belongs firmly in the second category.
We came away with new conversations, familiar faces and a reminder that isn’t particularly revolutionary, but is still worth repeating: however many networking tools we add to an event, we still need to create the conditions that make people want to talk to each other.
Technology can make the introduction easier. The conversation remains human.
Valencia Digital Summit: the part of an event that starts long before the doors open
We were also at Valencia Digital Summit (VDS), this time from a rather different perspective.
While thousands of people arrive at a venue, show a QR code, collect a freshly printed badge and carry on walking, there are teams behind the scenes preparing devices, testing access points, solving problems, checking people in and coordinating everything required to make that process feel entirely unremarkable.
In event operations, nobody having to think too much about the technology is usually a very good sign.
This month, we shared some of that work from behind the scenes: set-up, testing, registration, badge printing, access control and a lot of people moving around while, from the outside, it still looked as though the event hadn’t even started.
It is another side of event technology. Perhaps less spectacular than a product demo on a stage. Much closer to what really happens when thousands of attendees arrive at the same time.
beEMA 2026: communities need to meet too
October ended in Madrid with beEMA 2026, the annual gathering of Event Managers Association Spain.
This year had an additional significance: for the first time, members and sponsors from across Spain came together for one national event. EMA designed the 29 October gathering at The Palace Madrid as a chance for its community to meet, reflect on what had been built during the year and look towards what comes next.
After months of online meetings, working groups, projects and messages, meeting face to face still serves a purpose that is difficult to reproduce in any other way.
Not every conversation needs to result immediately in a collaboration or commercial opportunity. Communities are also built by accumulating context, trust and mutual understanding.
And that requires spending time together.
EVA Alliance: ending a series by opening up more questions
October also marked the end of a project that has accompanied us through much of 2026: EVA Learning Series: AI, Tools & Beyond – Powered by Eventscase, developed together with Events Voices Alliance.
The series started with a fairly simple idea: talk about AI in events without staying at surface level. Fewer sweeping claims, and more space to understand tools, real use cases, limitations, ethics, data and the decisions behind them.
Over the year, the conversations covered very different ground. We started by looking at what was genuinely changing with artificial intelligence, before moving into practical tools for event marketers, creativity and ethics, using data to improve operations and ROI, and the role women across the industry are playing in this transformation.
The final session, “The Future Is Female (and AI-Driven)”, took place on 22 October with Lucy Postlethwaite and brought that journey to a close.
Although “close” may not be quite the right word.
One of the most interesting things about running a series like this is seeing how quickly the conversation changes. At the beginning of the year, we were still spending considerable time explaining what AI could do. Now the questions are different: what is worth automating? Which decisions should we keep human? How should data be governed? Where does AI create genuine value, and where does it simply add another layer of complexity?
That shift says quite a lot about how quickly the industry itself is evolving.
For our part, what we take away most are the questions, the examples shared by the speakers and the conversations with everyone who joined the sessions. A good learning series probably shouldn’t finish by making us feel we have all the answers.
It should help us ask better questions.
Next stop at Eventscase: London
If October was busy, November appears to have little intention of slowing down.
On 11 and 12 November, Event Tech Live will once again bring event professionals, suppliers and communities together at ExCeL London around event technology.
We’ll arrive with two very different commitments which, interestingly, start from a similar idea: creating the conditions for conversation.
Club Ichi: can agreement draw something?
On 11 November, from 10:30 to 11:15, we’ll be supporting Club Ichi as hosts of its meetup at Event Tech Live.
The meetup format is deliberately designed to move away from commercial presentations: smaller, informal and interactive sessions where conversation and connection within the community come first.
We’ve taken the “interactive” part quite seriously.
Participants will find a small collective exercise designed to break the ice while also visualising how much agreement — or disagreement — exists in the room.
The technology will be there, but only as a mechanism for opening up questions. The interesting part begins when we see the result and someone has to explain why they answered the way they did.
Opinions that will, quite literally, end up drawing something together.
Event Tech World Supper Club: talking about the AI we actually have
Later that same day comes another conversation, this time around a dinner table.
Eventscase will be joining Event Tech World for its Corporate Event Leaders Supper Club in London, a deliberately small gathering held under the Chatham House Rule, creating space for a more candid discussion than is usually possible on stage.
The topic will be “AI in Events: The Real Version”, with Vanessa Lovatt and Jon Dodd leading a conversation intended to move away from the familiar claim that “AI is going to transform everything”.
Instead, the questions on the table will be much more specific. What is genuinely working today? Are organisations getting their data and processes in order before adding new layers of AI? What experiences do attendees actually want? And what happens when AI becomes part of the tools teams already use, rather than another separate system they need to manage?
That last question interests us in particular.
After a year of talking about agents, automation, assistants and new functionality, perhaps one of the most useful conversations we can have before 2026 ends is also one of the simplest:
What problem are we actually trying to solve?
Only then does it make sense to decide whether artificial intelligence is the right way to solve it.
What we’re taking from October
Put all these events together and it is difficult to find a single technology trend that sums them up. Perhaps that is the point.
This month we’ve talked about professional recognition at AMICEING, networking in Ibiza, onsite operations and technology in Valencia, and community at beEMA. Now we’re heading to London to talk about participation, opinions, artificial intelligence and event tech.
The formats are different. So are the conversations.
But the same idea keeps appearing: technology becomes far more useful when we understand which human behaviour we want it to enable.
Perhaps that is a good way to end October. Not by asking what technology we can add to the next event, but by knowing what we want to happen between the people who are there.