EventIntel Weekly

The intelligence briefing for senior event leaders.

Issue 006 — 27 September 2026Archive

The Five

The five most important developments event leaders should know this week.

01

PRA: Sharon Crichton appointed Chief Operating Officer · 10 February 2026

Future-proof your events career before you need to

The most useful career question for a senior event leader is not "what job comes next?" It is: what experience can I start collecting in my current role that prepares me for the role after Head of Events? The answer matters because the route beyond events increasingly runs through operating roles. Chief Operating Officer, Chief of Staff, Operations Director, Managing Director and, eventually, CEO are all plausible destinations for people who have run large, complex, high-risk programmes. In February, PRA appointed Sharon Crichton, formerly COO of Jack Morton Worldwide, as its Chief Operating Officer: one visible example of experiential leadership translating into enterprise operations. Those roles rarely go to the person with the most impressive event portfolio. They go to the person who can already show exposure to commercials and P&L, procurement and supplier strategy, business planning, technology transformation, AI implementation, risk, governance, executive stakeholder management, data and measurement, change management and people leadership beyond the events team. Don’t wait for someone to give you the next job before you start doing parts of it. If you manage a multimillion-pound event portfolio, start treating it like a business. Know the numbers without looking them up. Understand the contracts, not just the deadlines. Build a dashboard leadership would actually read. Find efficiencies and quantify them. Present recommendations rather than updates. Lead a cross-functional project, get a seat in technology and AI decisions, and ask for exposure to meetings and projects outside events.

Why it matters

SO WHAT FOR CORPORATE EVENT LEADERS? Each of those actions turns an events CV into a business leadership CV: the same work, described and owned differently. This is the first idea in a recurring EventIntel thread, BEYOND HEAD OF EVENTS, exploring what senior event professionals do next and how they prepare for it long before the move.

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Prompt of the Week

One AI prompt worth stealing this week.

Build your own EventIntel Radar

Copy + paste this prompt

Act as my cultural intelligence researcher for corporate events. I am responsible for creating distinctive events and experiences and want to identify opportunities before they become obvious to the wider events industry. Research developments expected over the next 3, 6 and 12 months across London, New York and [INSERT CITIES]. Look for: - New hotels and event venues - Major gallery and museum exhibitions - Immersive experiences - Restaurant openings - Private members’ clubs - Architecture and design launches - Cultural moments - New entertainment concepts - Technology experiences - Temporary installations and pop-ups - Major anniversaries - Unusual spaces becoming available for events Prioritise developments that are newly announced, not yet widely covered by event-industry media, or where early access, private hire or partnership opportunities may exist. For each opportunity tell me: 1. What it is 2. Opening/launch date 3. Why it matters for corporate events 4. Likely audience fit 5. Potential event application 6. Who I should contact now 7. The primary source Then identify five opportunities where acting now could give me an advantage before competitors discover them. Do not rely on search rankings alone. Verify dates and announcements against primary sources and clearly flag anything that has not yet been officially confirmed.

Why use it

Use it with a research-capable AI tool (a deep research or agent mode) at the start of each quarter, replacing [INSERT CITIES] with the destinations in your programme. Add your audience profile and typical event formats for sharper matches, then verify every date against the primary source before you contact anyone.

Before uploading budgets, contracts or confidential company information to an AI platform, follow your organisation’s AI and data-security policies.

EventIntel is exploring

Do you influence where events happen?

I’m exploring a new way to connect credible event-industry content creators with hotels, venues and destinations that want to reach actual event buyers.

This isn’t traditional influencer marketing. The idea is to connect suppliers with people whose audiences genuinely work in, buy and influence events.

For now, I’m simply testing interest from both sides.