Every July, a familiar migration begins. Investors head to Sun Valley. Founders and executives fill the Hamptons. Private dinners replace Zoom calls. Packed conference schedules spill into beach walks, tennis matches and backyard conversations. At the same moment artificial intelligence is generating vast amounts of emails, marketing messages and content that can communicate and transact with audiences anywhere, the world’s most influential business leaders are still choosing to be in the same places at the same time.
As technology exponentially increases the volume of communication generated and received, physical proximity has become more, not less, economically valuable. The easier it becomes to exchange information digitally, the more valuable it becomes to share the experiences that technology still can’t reproduce: earning trust, building conviction and developing the relationships that underpin consequential decisions. The scarcity is access.
For years, we assumed technology would steadily replace business travel. Just as email replaced letters, A.I. now handles work that once required teams of analysts, researchers and coordinators. Accordingly, business would become increasingly virtual. However, that prediction has only proved half right.
Routine interactions are dramatically more efficient, but the highest-value interactions have become more concentrated. It’s no coincidence that, even as executives debate A.I. infrastructure and efficiency, they continue gathering in person to negotiate partnerships, test ideas and build the trust that ultimately determines where capital flows. Instead of traveling for every meeting, leaders are becoming more intentional about the moments that truly warrant being together. The result is more selective travel with a much higher expected return. This pattern is visible across the 250,000 B2B events my company, Vendelux, tracks. Companies continue to invest heavily in conferences, executive summits and customer gatherings because the outcomes are difficult to replicate elsewhere. The meetings that matter most are rarely the ones on the published agenda. They happen over breakfast before the keynote, during a chance introduction between sessions or in the conversation that continues long after the presentation ends.
Those moments succeed because trust develops differently in person than it does online. Most important business decisions involve uncertainty: hiring an executive, choosing a strategic partner, finalizing the terms for an acquisition or investing in a startup. No amount of information completely removes risk. At some point, leaders stop evaluating facts alone and begin evaluating the people behind the deal. They look for judgment, consistency, curiosity and confidence. Those qualities are difficult to assess through a screen.
Behavioral research has long shown that trust is built through repeated, high-quality interactions rather than single transactions. Shared experiences, informal conversations and unstructured time create information that doesn’t appear in a slide deck or follow-up email. You learn how someone thinks under pressure, how they respond when challenged and whether their actions consistently match their words.
This is one reason elite gathering places continue to matter. Sun Valley isn’t valuable because of the conference agenda, nor are the Hamptons because of any single dinner or event. Their economic value comes from concentration. It compresses months of introductions, meetings and relationship-building into a few days because the right people are present at the same time. The network effect is geographic.
That dynamic extends well beyond invitation-only gatherings. Across industries, conferences have become one of the few environments where customers, prospects, partners, investors and competitors all converge. While virtual events dramatically expanded access, they rarely recreated the serendipity that makes in-person gatherings productive. The unscheduled conversation still outperforms the perfectly scheduled video call. One introduction can change a hiring decision, close a partnership or redirect a company’s strategy in ways that are difficult to predict and impossible to schedule.
The next competitive advantage will not come from choosing between digital and physical engagement. It will come from connecting the two. Companies already have enormous amounts of data about who their customers are and how they behave online. What they have historically lacked is the same intelligence about where those people gather in the physical world. As that gap closes, events and business travel can become far more intentional: the right people, in the right place, at the right moment. Location intelligence may become just as valuable as audience intelligence.
As A.I.-generated content becomes ubiquitous, every email, proposal and presentation risks sounding increasingly similar. As A.I. makes it easier to create and personalize outreach, the advantage shifts from simply producing more communication to knowing when and where that communication is most likely to matter. In other words, the bottleneck moves from creating messages to creating moments.
Over the next decade, the shared physical experience will become a core tenet of every business relationship. A.I. will continue reducing the cost of knowledge work while making authentic human connection scarcer and more valuable. The paradox of the A.I. era is that the easier it becomes to reach everyone, the more valuable it becomes to spend time with the right someone. When routine communication becomes essentially free, trust becomes the constraint. And wherever trust becomes scarce, its value rises.
As another Hamptons season unfolds, it’s tempting to dismiss these gatherings as networking rituals or executive tradition and not the more consequential conversations happening under the surface. What looks like social activity is often economic infrastructure. These gatherings reveal an enduring truth about how business works. Technology can change how information moves, but it can not change how confidence is built.
