DARE TO WIN: WHAT I TOOK AWAY FROM AEO CONFERENCE 2026

By Andrew Williams, Chair of AEO Conference 2026

A room full of event organisers spent a day at the Vox working out what winning looks like, and very few of the answers involved working harder.

The theme was “Dare to win”. By the closing session it had turned into a question. What are we prepared to risk in order to win?

Keynote: Can I get an encore?

Dr Pippa Grange opened the day by taking apart an assumption most of us in this industry never examine: that performing better means pushing harder.

Pippa's work has taken her through rugby, Australian football, the England set-up and plenty of high-pressure business environments. She described her job as unlocking the fear and tightness that stops talented people performing - putting people in a position to win and keeping them in one piece.

She talked about apex moments, and how the biggest moments in a season cast a shadow. The event itself is rarely the problem. The damage comes from the build-up before it and the absence of any recovery afterwards.

Anyone who has run a show will recognise this. Twelve months of work funnels into three or four days. Then it ends, and the following Monday you're in a planning meeting for the next one.

Pippa's phrase for this was emotional hangover work: the debrief that happens close to the event to name what people are feeling, followed by a deeper one weeks later once the noise has died down. She described the alternative as skipping the psychological composting entirely, and the accumulated cost of that is depletion.

Pressure is contagious, she said. It travels through an environment via language, symbols and behaviour, which means the state of a leader's nervous system is not a private matter. It sets the tone whether they intend it to or not.

Her definition of composure was the ability to adapt and regulate when the pressure lands. A long way from how most of us use the word.

Underneath all of it was the perform, rest, renew triangle, and her argument that we've become very good at one corner of it and largely ignore the other two.

So put the recovery in the diary. If we can plan twelve months of build-up, we can plan the fortnight afterwards.

The next generation: Rethinking what it takes to win

Alison Willis picked up the thread with David Maguire, Maggie Law and Sophie Thesiger, and opened with a difficult question: which of the behaviours that supposedly support high performance do you find impossible to stop doing?

The answers were familiar: stepping in with the solution instead of letting someone work it out, taking work off a team member’s plate because they seem stretched, and crowding the team before a show when what they really need is space.

Every one of those comes from wanting to help. They also remove the space people need to get better at their jobs.

The panel's answer was that a high-performing environment has to make failure less frightening - and that there is no single template for a high performer. Different people work at different speeds and different intensities, and a leader's job is to build something that accommodates that rather than flattening everyone into one rhythm.

If we want the next generation to shape what this industry becomes, they need to believe they have permission to.

AI ROI: Show me the return

We've all bought licences, however this session pointed to what has or has not changed. Andrew Wyatt-Sames chaired a session on that gap with Fergal Kilroy, Sharon Rosen and Amin Mrini.

Sharon put it most directly: the time dividend remains unprovedn, but the value dividend is real - provided you've found a real use case. Fergal was honest that AI hasn't handed his team hours back; what it has done is let them go deeper on things they were already doing. Amin went further, arguing that chasing time savings is actively the wrong strategy, because it aims at the wrong metric.

Andrew played a clip of an AI agent running registration outreach, which prompted a useful exchange about how honest we should be with customers about what's on the other end of the line.

The practical advice was consistent. Don't bolt AI onto a process you haven't examined. Evaluate function by function, redesign the workflow, then deploy. And set the bar at transformational value, because cosmetic improvements don't repay the effort.

There was a talent challenge in there too. AI literacy can't live exclusively in a technology team. Leaders need enough fluency to ask sensible questions, and the people we hire need to combine deep industry knowledge with the curiosity to work out what's now possible.

The bigger opportunity is doing something we couldn't do before.

Dare to stay ahead: 73 years of Cannes Lions

Simon Cook joined Felicia Asiedu to talk about Cannes Lions, which started life as an awards show in Venice and is now, in its 73rd year, a global meeting place for the creative economy. The pivotal decision, around 2011, was to stop describing itself as an advertising festival and start talking about creativity - which opened the doors to an entirely broader audience.

The part that generated the most conversation afterwards was the fringe. Simon was candid that the team initially viewed the events springing up around the festival as parasites. Now they're treated as partners, part of a distributed model with official stages spread across the city.

There's a lesson there for organisers. You don't have to own everything happening around your event to benefit from it.

But he was equally clear that more is not automatically better. Too much choice tips attendees into FOMO. The answer is curation. Cannes now has a dedicated growth and innovation team whose job is to keep asking what customers will need next, while respecting seven decades of heritage.

You don't need 73 years of heritage to borrow the habit. Ask what your customers will need next, before something forces the question.

Super scaling: The challenge of staying entrepreneurial

Connor Agnew sat down with Gareth Bowhill and Louise White to talk about scaling, and the difficulty of preserving the thing that made you successful in the first place.

Both described the same transition: moving from being the person in control to leading through other people. Surrounding yourself with a team stronger than you, then working out when to lead from the front and when to nudge from behind.

Louise raised the challenge I keep coming back to. We spend enormous energy planning for what happens if things go wrong. How much do we plan for what happens when things go right? Being ready for success is a different discipline from reacting to it.

And if you want people to think entrepreneurially, they need psychological safety - the confidence that a good idea that didn't work won't follow them around for three years. As a business gets bigger, someone has to be actively protecting it.

Fearless selling: How great sales teams are winning today

Caitlin Read chaired a lively and energetic session with Greg Hitchen, Alison Jackson and Carsten Holm that opened with McKinsey's global B2B pulse data on Gen AI in sales, and then spent most of its time on things that haven't changed at all.

Alison reflected on starting out with a telephone and no spreadsheet. Greg talked about Gong, which listens to calls, scores them and surfaces patterns a team would otherwise never see. Carsten made the case that preparation and a real understanding of a client are what allow you to have an intelligent conversation in the first place.

The panel was unanimous on discounting. Carsten described a straightforward no-discount policy, rooted in confidence in the product. Alison agreed. Caitlin challenged the room to know what their product is worth and stop reaching for the discount button.

On what separates a good salesperson from a great one - confidence, attitude, and understanding the customer. Greg cited the recruiting principle of hiring for attitude and teaching the skill.

AI will make our sales teams better informed. Nobody on that panel thought it was going to build the relationships.

Dare to be anything but normal

Mike Seaman closed the day in conversation with Doug Emslie.

Doug's 33 years in this industry took him through Blenheim, UBM and then Tarsus, which he took public, scaled through buy-and-build, and eventually sold to Informa for around a billion dollars. He's now behind Cuil Bay Capital and holds stakes in event businesses around the world.

It started with Doug telling people at a UBM Christmas party exactly what he thought of the corporate culture compared to Blenheim's. He left, joined Neville Buch, acquired Labelexpo in 1998, and built Tarsus on three principles: be international, be different, have fun.

His argument to the room was that roughly 90% of the businesses represented look broadly the same, and that the causes are structural. Consolidation standardises systems and reduces risk. Private equity buy-and-build models work to a three-to-five-year return window, prefer acquiring events to launching them, and tend to lock founders up after an exit precisely when they're best placed to build the next thing.

He also took aim at "follow the data". Data is backward-looking. It tells you what has happened, not what is going to. Good entrepreneurs read it for shifts and patterns, then go looking for the white space.

On risk, he quoted a non-executive who once told him: "your job is to take risks, my job is to back you or sack you". Mike described a moment when Doug simply said "Mike, I understand risk", and how much that permission was worth when he was weighing up a bold launch.

Doug's formula is discipline plus optimism, and he illustrated it with Roger Federer: twenty majors, won while taking only about 54% of the points he played. Winning is more often about making fewer mistakes than hitting spectacular winners. Don't chase the last 5%. Better to be fast and wrong than slow and right, provided the risk is controlled.

He was equally open about getting it wrong. Around 2000, Tarsus bought an internet business at the top of the dot-com boom - six people, minimal revenue, enormous promises - scaled it to eighty, and then had to take it back to six when the bubble burst. Financially painful, and worse for the people involved. It's why he's cautious about headcount to this day.

Asked why he's still going after an exit like that, his answer was that he's not normal - restless, curious, happiest building. A coach once asked him what made him happy, and the honest answer was building businesses and helping other people build them. He talked about wanting to develop a "Class of '92" for this industry: a generation of standout talent brought through together.

He closed on the exit, or rather on everything that comes before it. Build something good, create real value, enjoy doing it. The rest tends to follow.

So, what does it really take to win?

Different speakers, same handful of ideas.

Give people room to think. Don't confuse being busy with performing well. Use AI because it solves a problem, not because everyone else is. Know what you're worth and defend it. Plan for success, not just failure. And don't let scale make you frightened of a risk you'd have taken ten years ago.

Thank you to every speaker, sponsor, partner and attendee who came to the Vox, and to the venue team for hosting us.

I'm taking on the AEO chair with all of this in my mind, and every intention of acting on it.