Meet Our Meetings Industry Influencers for 2023

Reggie Aggarwal

CEO and founder, Cvent

Reggie Aggarwal has steered Cvent through extreme highs and lows since he founded the company in 1999 — from a rise through the dot-com boom to near bankruptcy post-September 11th, followed by two stints as a public company and a $1.65 billion sale that took it private in between. As Cvent has grown — to some 4,800 employees and 20,000 customers — it has become an event-tech bellwether. That role was crucial this year, when a precipitous drop in demand for virtual events after pandemic-era investments had event-tech observers fretting.

Cvent’s $4.6 billion sale to Blackstone, first announced in March, represented a positive prognosis for the future of in-person events and a reminder that event-tech value extends far beyond digital-meetings platforms. 

For Aggarwal, leading a private company once again puts him in a good place. “Rather than addressing investors, I can focus on the business, the customers and the employees,” he says. “I like that.”

Lonise Carey, DMCP

Managing Partner, Island Destination Services; President, ADMEI

Destination management companies have long struggled to get paid for their ideas. Lonise Carey was determined to fix that when she joined the board of the Association of Destination Management Executives International in 2020, taking the president’s role this year. “When we recognize industry gaps and successfully close them, we create a more sustainable industry for DMCs,” says the native Bahamian.

Collaborations with Destinations International and the International Live Events Association helped bridge those gaps. "There is now a clear differentiation between proposals... and full-blown work plans," says Carey. "We were giving away a lot of the creative work and waiting for compensation that sometimes never came."

Joe Fijol, DMCP

Principal and founder, ETHOS Event Collective

When Joe Fijol launched ETHOS Event Collective in January 2021, he was determined to create a DMC with a difference. The company provides a full range of event services, with the caveat that every gathering must make a positive impact on the host destination.

“Some billion-dollar companies come into our cities and leave without doing anything,” says the hospitality veteran. “We help them do something good.”

The DMC seeks charitable opportunities in the destinations it serves (Orlando, Miami and Amelia Island, Fla.; Las Vegas; Savannah, Ga.; Chicago; Napa, Calif.; and the Cayman Islands). After researching the client’s core values, Ethos presents suggestions for giving back that align with the organization’s goals.

The charitable component “is part of every RFP we do” says Fijol, “even if clients don’t request it."

Annette Gregg, CMM

CEO, Society for Incentive Travel Excellence

“Where’s home?” is a tough question for Annette Gregg. Since taking the lead at SITE in October 2022, the longest she’s been in one place was a three-week stretch at her house in California this past July. During her travels, Gregg has been meeting with current and potential chapter members from New York City to Zimbabwe.

Rather than compete with similar organizations, Gregg sees value in strengthening ties. To that end, SITE and the Incentive Research Foundation have expanded their joint research projects and are now contributing to each other’s educational events.

“We’ve worked well with the IRF in the past; now it’s a little more robust and official,” explains Gregg, who was with Meeting Professionals International before joining SITE.

Her road trips also helped Gregg meet another year-one goal. As of July, SITE’s membership has grown from 1,900 back to its high of 2,500 members.

Megan Henshall

Global Events Strategic Solutions Lead, Google

Megan Henshall has a mission: to make meetings more inclusive for neuro­divergent people. That’s the purpose of Google’s Neu Project, launched in 2022 as an offshoot of Google’s Experience Institute (Xi). The effort became more personal, says Henshall, when her son was diagnosed with autism.

Sources estimate about 20 percent of the population is neurodiverse, an umbrella term for such conditions as autism, ADHD, OCD, Tourette’s and sensory-processing disorders. 

Henshall and her team dove into research around the effects meetings have on these groups. “We were overstimulating people; we weren’t giving them enough breaks. A lot of people left events exhausted and completely depleted, needing days or weeks to recover.” 

A variety of industry partners have joined the project, sharing data and testing solutions. “We have a really amazing, smart, diverse group of people informing and influencing the work,” she says. “It’s not about me and it’s not even about Google. It’s a lot bigger than that.”

Earla Jones, CMP

Director, conference services and operations, American Library Association

Book-lover Earla Jones landed her dream job when she joined the ALA in 2019. Out of the gate, she was tasked with revitalizing the organization’s struggling Midwinter Meeting, which focused on committees engaged in the governance of the association.

Jones and her team boldly scrapped the traditional show format and started over. A new education-focused event, rebranded as LibLearnX, was held virtually in 2022. 

The January 2023 in-person debut drew 2,000 enthusiastic participants to New Orleans. A packed agenda offered more than 100 learning options: 15- to 20-minute Shop Talk sessions; 30- to 60-minute classes; and immersive workshops with forays to museums, bookstores and more. 

As chair of ASAE’s Meetings & Expositions Professionals Advisory Council, Jones is a vocal proponent of innovation, encouraging associations to make bold changes in order to stay relevant. “It takes a lot of courage to sunset a model that is no longer fiscally prudent,” she points out.

Sherrif Karamat

President and CEO, Professional Convention Management Association and Corporate Event Marketing Association

As PCMA’s CEO, Sherrif Karamat is driving positive change in a somewhat change-averse industry. Just this year, PCMA acquired the Event Leadership Institute to improve education, partnered with the American Geophysical Union to further climate action and allied with the National Coalition of Black Meeting Professionals. The latest collaboration is Project Spark, a venture with event-tech provider Gevme, which lets planners experiment with industry-specific AI tools. More than 2,200 are now using it to boost productivity. “Properly channeled,” says Karamat, “AI can empower each of us to accelerate innovation and progress for our audiences, our businesses and our careers.”

James Latham

Producer, The Iceberg

Industry entrepreneur James Latham has a challenge for meeting professionals: Stop measuring success in terms of hotel rooms filled or money spent.

“I wish we would stop talking in terms of consumption,” he says. “What about the mission of the organization, the purpose of the meeting, and developing a symbiotic relationship between a destination and an organization to drive positive impact?”

Latham produces The Iceberg, an industry website that curates content on the impact and legacy of events. This summer he ventured from his farm in England to Lviv, Ukraine, to support the events sector and learn how we can help revive meetings there when the war is over. “If ever we as a sector had an opportunity to illustrate that we are change agents and not travel agents, this is it,” he says.

This video, "Unbroken," from The Iceberg tells more about how international associations can help rebuild Ukraine.

Margaret Launzel-Pennes

CEO, POP Experiential

Before launching POP, Margaret Launzel-Pennes worked for a number of cutting-edge event producers; but her upcoming meeting is the first with an AI-powered CEO. “Mikey” is the AI tool set calling the shots for the spring 2024 AutonomousXP, the “first-ever event fully powered by AI,” and the brainchild of Launzel-Pennes and collaborators Mark Roberts and Audry Hegwood.

Launzel-Pennes, a seasoned planner who is on the MPI SoCal chapter board and speaks frequently about reinventing events, aims to demonstrate just how empowering AI can be — and how, when put to use by experienced event professionals, it not only can streamline their jobs but help to push creativity in unexpected directions and produce truly unique results.

Amanda Ma

CEO and founder, Innovate Marketing Group

In the nine years since Amanda Ma founded her event management agency, Innovate Marketing Group has grown to become a high-profile enterprise with an impressive client roster, including TikTok, Google, Toyota and Marriott. This past August, Inc. Magazine named the minority and woman-owned business one of the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in the United States.

When Ma isn’t busy strategizing with her 20-person team on new ways to leverage technology and create experiential events — using tools such as AI photo booths and projection-mapping — she can be found hosting the EventUp podcast. Ma, who was born in Taiwan and raised in Los Angeles, started the program two years ago as part of the Stop Asian Hate movement.

“My goal and vision at the time was to use this as a platform to highlight more women and diverse leaders in our industry, because I wasn’t seeing a lot of that,” she says. 

Podcast guests have included leaders at Fox Entertain­ment, LinkedIn, the NFL and Zoom. An outspoken DEI champion, Ma has served on the boards of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, California Events Coalition, Asian Pacific Community Fund and The Diversity Advisors. Her second novel, “EventUp,” is expected to debut later this year.

Panos Moutafis

CEO and cofounder, Zenus

Thanks to the soaring popularity of generative artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT, AI is the topic du jour, in the events industry and everyday life. But behind the headlines, Panos Moutafis has been developing innovative AI use cases for events for nearly a decade.

Moutafis wasn’t flying completely under the radar: His company, Zenus, was recognized several years ago for streamlining event check-in using facial recognition. This year Zenus is focused on what Moutafis calls “ethical AI” — in which the company’s powerful devices and software are employed for both badge-scanning and facial analysis, neither of which involves the storing or transmission of any personal data.

Facial analysis has the potential to be a game-changing way to collect data on-site, gauging not only attendance numbers, foot traffic and demographics, but also attendee sentiment. The powerful analysis of facial expressions measures a baseline for each face against subtle changes over the course of a session. That data conveys which content is truly resonating.

Zenus is poised to make more headlines, as Moutafis negotiates deals with major exhibition producers such as Freeman and Expo Group to resell the technology. With this tech, “we’re not trying to understand who you are,” Moutafis explains. “We’re trying to understand what you care about.”

Photograph by Two Dudes Photo

Jaime Nack

President, Three Squares Inc.

Jaime Nack has made sustainability her mission for decades. In 2008, she founded green consulting firm Three Squares Inc., which in 2012 became the first U.S. firm to achieve ISO 20121 certification for sustainable event management. 

High-profile clients include ESPN, Disney and United Airlines. Nack has presided over sustainability plans for the past four Democratic National Conventions, and such large-scale events as Coachella and the Olympics.

“Coachella draws 250,000 people, which is bigger than most cities. When you think of the infrastructure, it’s essentially developing a sustainability plan for a temporary city,” says Nack.

Improvements don’t need to be temporary: Nack encourages venues and cities to keep such measures in place after the event. In fact, the compost recycling program her team implemented at the Colorado Convention Center for the 2008 DNC is still in use today.

Christine Renaud

CEO and cofounder, Braindate by e180

Five years ago Christine Renaud decided to take some time off from e180, the company she cofounded in 2010. Its signature product, a crowdsourced learning and networking app called Braindate, had gained notoriety at C2, the creative business event in Montreal. Renaud used her downtime to write a book and open a unique learning center in the city.

She returned to Braindate and the events industry in February 2023, rejuvenated and inspired by her projects. “I have such a deep passion for the work we do with Braindate,” Renaud notes, “and I’m excited to turn up the level on our guiding principles: to be a company driven by empathy and compassion.” 

The pandemic underscored our human need for personal connections, Renaud says. “People want to be more mindful, contemplative. Let’s not talk about speed networking anymore; let’s talk about deep networking. Let’s talk about community and belonging.”

The message resonates: In September, Salesforce used Braindate to facilitate connections at its 40,000-person Dreamforce conference. “This is what humans need when they attend a large event,” says Renaud. “They don’t need more chaos.”

Stacy Ritter

President and CEO, Visit Lauderdale

Few hospitality executives will speak publicly about how divisive legislation deters meetings and tourism. Stacy Ritter is a very vocal exception. “Everyone in Florida struggles with this problem,” says the leader of Visit Lauderdale, which represents Broward County. “We are all seeing lost business. We don’t think that should be swept under the rug.”

Ritter spends about 25 percent of her time telling planners, media, elected officials and anyone else who will listen that state laws are crushing the lifeblood of Florida’s economy. Broward County already has lost $20 million over the next three years, she estimates — the would-be impact of events that have pulled out of the state, citing laws on education, abortion, and the rights of immigrants, Blacks, LGBTQ+ people and others.

Ritter’s message — amplified by NPR, Fox, CNN, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times — is that “all of Florida does not speak with one voice.” Among the 2 million residents of Broward County, 170 nations are represented and 147 languages are spoken. “Diversity is in our DNA,” she says.

Lost tourism means lost jobs. “Our mission is to bring visitors to Broward County, but our calling is to keep people employed,” says Ritter. This is not about politics, she insists. “Hospitality has always been nonpartisan.… We just want people to have great experiences and bring home wonderful memories.”

Photograph by Graciela-Valdes

Alex Zapple, CMP, CAE, CEM, DES

Senior Director of Meetings, American Society of Nephrology 

While some groups avoid states with controversial legislation, the American Society of Nephrology decided to go ahead with its 10,000-person meeting in Orlando in 2022, despite Florida’s divisive political atmosphere. “We stayed to share our voice, and we were vocal about why and what we were doing,” says planner Alex Zapple.

Actions included a $25,000 donation to the OnePulse Foundation, which honors the 49 lives lost in the 2016 nightclub shooting, and an appearance by its founder. 

ASN is holding a future meeting in Texas, which is a challenge, “especially for an international medical meeting,” Zapple admits. “But we have members in all these places, and we want to make sure we are representing them and sharing our voice.” 

It’s an approach she encourages via committees and advisory boards for Destinations International, PCMA, the Events Industry Council and several CVBs.