10/22/2021

Forecasting the Future of Meetings

The pandemic upended association meeting expectations

The future of meetings used to involve robots. The ASAE ForesightWorks “Virtualized Meetings” action brief, developed in 2017, forecasted that future meetings would need to account for telepresence robots that would allow attendees to navigate the event remotely. In addition, the brief forecasted that virtual and augmented reality platforms would offer attendees new engagement and networking opportunities. Society was in the early stages of moving toward that future, but the forecast was for rapid growth and acceleration.

And then the pandemic hit, and the mass movement to virtual meetings happened with the tools at hand—and these tools generally did not include robots.

That 2017 action brief has been recently updated to reflect the changes in the environment, with new data and supporting trends and new forecasts for the future. Now called “Hybrid Meetings,” the action brief will be released later this month.

Please select this link to read the complete article from ASAE's Center for Association Leadership.