Meetings Innovators: Elyse Dawson

A familiar face in the financial meeting planning segment and 2026 chair-elect of the Financial and Insurance Conference Professionals (FICP) board of directors, Elyse Dawson is known for her authenticity and candor. She’s someone who’s not afraid to say what she thinks for the sake of moving the industry forward.

Dawson has spent the majority of her career at investment management company Invesco, where she was senior manager, corporate events and conference center, until she moved to wealth management firm HB Wealth as senior event manager in February of 2025. 

She has relied on AI to automate meeting planning processes, and become known for speaking on the topic at industry events.

Skift Meetings caught up with Dawson to talk about one of her favorite topics, innovation.

How do you define innovation?

We are in an age of transformation. 

With all the focus on AI, the next level of innovation is going to come from how we humanize our programs. It sounds so counterintuitive. But everything else is pushing toward artificial intelligence, so people are probably going to revert back to their primal desire for connectivity. How do we create these pockets and moments that feel intimate and less AI-generated? 

During a talk by Will Guidara [author of Unreasonable Hospitality] at FICP [Annual Conference in November], he spoke about looking at every touchpoint of a customer interaction. There were hundreds. You can’t rely on a software system to do that.

The time and effort around innovation needs to be about how we can make events more personalized, more human. You’ll have a group of people who will try to solve this challenge by using generative AI but you’ll also have those people who will sit around a table with other humans who have empathy and who know what people want to experience.

I think true innovation is going to lie with the people who are working with other people to figure this out.

What’s a recent innovation of yours?

We always send surveys to our internal clients for feedback on our processes, but the missing voice was the clients. What did they think about it? 

The salespeople didn’t want us to talk to their clients directly. They wanted to control the mechanism and the form in which we asked for feedback. But then that information never got back to me, the planner.

So we started asking questions about the clients’ experiences from the minute they walked in the door. We had QR codes posted where they could give feedback, and they even allowed me to speak from the main stage, to thank everyone for coming and ask how their experience was. We were able to start collecting that feedback and making changes, and it showed the attendees the faces of the people behind the scenes that they didn’t know.

How can the meetings industry be more innovative?

I see some really innovative things that are happening in the industry from a marketing and branding standpoint. But I think it’s going to take time.

I remember when I started in my career, we decided to stop using paper. We had these binders with all of the presentations in them, and we spent days assembling and collating. I remember that the first year we brought in a mobile app with all the presentations on it, we still printed a binder for everyone, because we knew that people were going to want their binders. 

Some of them were saying, “Why are we doing this? You can’t just change things like that.” 

But it just took a year, maybe two, to migrate people away from the binders. Now every conference you go to has a mobile app.

I think that’s where we are right now with innovation. A lot of great things are happening and we’re trying to lean into it, but we have these people who want to stay where they are. I think ultimately there’s still a large portion of people who are not ready, and some who are willing to try new things, 

Do you think older planners are more resistant to change?

I wouldn’t say it’s about age alone. I think it is dictated more by the unknown, and the fear of failure. The fear that this is going to bomb and people are going to talk about it and you’re going to get complaints. But someone has to be the risk taker. 

Which areas of events need more innovation?

I think we are bypassing the real reason people come to meetings. We know that the most important thing is connectivity, but still people get to a meeting and are forced to sit in a room for hours. That is one of our biggest opportunities: to change how we are building these programs.

We design meetings around the content, but what if we shifted that around and made connectivity the core purpose? People want to network, so how can we make that the foundational block and layer our content on top of that? Maybe start with the welcome reception and do breakouts from that. Maybe bring select individuals together for networking and then they can break out into conversations. 

That’s where the potential for innovation lies. Build the agenda with more white space and opportunities to connect, then pepper in your content around that. The main stage will always be there. You will always need an opener and a closer. But figure out how to marry networking and content where it is more 60:40 (networking:content) vs. our model right now, which is more like 30:70. And do this without making the conference longer.

In my case, we need to foster the existing relationships with our clients, because the biggest way we get new business is through referrals. So we’ve been looking at attendees’ interests, not from a content perspective, but their personal interests. Rather than just inviting them to hear a speaker, what if we invited them to a wine pairing event when we found out they love wine? Or even better, do it at the newest one-star Michelin restaurant and have the chef come out to welcome them?  

My goal is to create experiences that are so curated they’re a once-in-a-lifetime experience, every time. And to do it in a small setting so they get to have conversations.

Innovation is a cycle. We’ve been pushing to do the newest thing. But now we’re going back to our roots as humans, and creating communities around what attendees are interested in, rather than bringing people together and making them be a community.

It’s intentional and thoughtful, and created with them in mind.

Where do you get your inspiration to be innovative?

The way I get inspiration is by looking at every other industry outside of the meetings industry, every demographic other than mine, and every other region of the world other than where I am. I intentionally look beyond myself at what everyone else is doing.

I ingest a lot of content in all ways, and I ingest it with openmindedness. For example, a Kamala Harris podcast where she’s talking about her 107 days of the presidential race. I’m not in politics, but I can learn things from her story.

I’m on Instagram, where I follow DMCs, catering companies, even my competitors, because I want to know what they’re doing. I don’t just follow U.S. companies, I follow accounts in Asia-Pac and Dubai because they’re doing things I’ve never seen in the States. What a great way to be on the front end of that.