Over the past year, B2B event teams have faced mounting challenges. A volatile economic and political climate has intensified existing pressures around inflation, budgets, and staffing. At the same time, competition for attendees and sponsors has grown fiercer, with leaders struggling to attract both the quantity and quality of participants needed to meet their goals.

Attendee behavior is also shifting — people are registering later and expecting more interactive, personalized experiences. As a result, planning and executing successful events has become increasingly complex. In fact, Forrester data shows that overall event satisfaction dropped by 8% from 2024 to 2025, as teams struggled to adapt.

To help leaders navigate this evolving landscape, Forrester’s Q1 2025 State Of B2B Events Survey gathered insights from more than 250 event decision-makers to uncover key trends. The findings show that:

 

Budgets and resources are strained.

For the second consecutive year, budgets are flat or down for two-thirds of event teams. Even among the 19% of organizations that have seen budgets increase, the reality is that due to inflation, they’re almost certainly flat or down in real terms.

The B2B event mix continues to evolve.

As budgets tighten, the B2B event mix is shifting. Marketers are prioritizing smaller hosted events, with 59% planning more of these events over the next 12 months. In contrast, the number of organizations planning more hosted large events fell 12% year-on-year as marketers shifted resources and focus onto smaller events.

Teams prioritize the basics.

More than 90% of organizations are focused on the core objectives of getting the right audience to their events, demonstrating ROI, and improving post-event follow-up. However, this focus on fundamentals has led to a deprioritization of longer-term considerations such as inclusivity, accessibility, and sustainability, which have fallen in importance year-on-year and rank lowest on the priority list.

B2B event technology is a missed opportunity.

More than a quarter (28%) of the largest organizations have deployed six or more event technology platforms, while just one in five has fully integrated their primary platform into their broader sales and marketing tech stack. Yet, data shows that when organizations do integrate, overall event satisfaction increases significantly.

AI uptake remains low.

Despite AI’s potential to enhance productivity, attendee personalization, data analytics, and content repurposing, the majority of organizations are still in learning mode. Using AI for content creation is the number one current use case, with 39% of marketers currently making use of it here, but a growing number plan to use AI much more extensively over the next 12 months.

B2B events are planned and run in functional silos.

In many organizations, events are planned by disparate teams, resulting in fragmented planning and suboptimal attendee experiences. However, the data shows that when a centralized team runs the majority of the events, overall event satisfaction levels rise significantly.

 

Forrester clients can listen to an on-demand webinar where we dig into the B2B event survey findings in more detail or request a guidance session to better understand what the trends mean for their teams and organization.