Every July, the regular migration begins. Investors go to Sun Valley. Founders and executives fill the Hamptons. Private dinners are replacing Zoom calls. Full conference schedules spill over into beach walks, tennis matches and backstage chats. At the same time that artificial intelligence is generating dozens of emails, marketing messages and content that can connect and engage with audiences anywhere, the world's most powerful business leaders still choose to be in the same place at the same time.
As technology greatly increases the volume of communication produced and received, physical proximity has become more, not less, economically valuable. The easier it is to exchange information digitally, the more valuable it is to share information that technology cannot reproduce: to gain trust, build confidence and develop relationships that support important decisions. Scarcity is access.
For many years, we thought that technology would gradually replace business mobility. Just as email is replacing letters, AI is now taking over work that once required teams of analysts, researchers and consultants. Therefore, the business will grow significantly. However, that prediction turned out to be correct.
Standard interactions work very well, but high-value interactions have become more mainstream. It's no coincidence that, as executives debate AI infrastructure and efficiency, they continue to meet in person to discuss, test ideas and build the trust that determines where the money flows. Instead of attending every meeting, leaders become more intentional about the times that are really appropriate to be together. The result is a selective trip with the highest expected return. This pattern is seen across the board 250,000 B2B events my company, Vendelux, tracks. Companies continue to invest heavily in conferences, executive meetings and customer gatherings because the results are difficult to replicate elsewhere. The most important meetings are rarely the ones on the published agenda. They happen during the breakfast before the keynote, during the opportunity presentation in the middle of the session or in the discussion that continues long after the presentation has ended.
Those moments are successful because trust develops differently in person than it does online. The most important business decisions involve uncertainty: hiring an executive, choosing a strategic partner, finalizing acquisition terms or investing in a startup. No amount of information completely eliminates risk. Sometimes, leaders stop checking the facts alone and start checking the people behind the deal. They look for judgment, consistency, curiosity and confidence. Those qualities are difficult to assess with a screen.
Behavioral research has long shown that trust is built through repeated, high-quality interactions rather than one-off transactions. Shared experiences, informal conversations and unstructured time create knowledge that doesn't come from a slide deck or follow-up email. You learn how someone thinks under pressure, how they react when challenged and whether their actions always match their words.
This is one of the reasons why high gathering places continue to be important. Sun Valley is not important because of the conference agenda, nor are the Hamptons because of any dinner or event. Their economic value comes from concentration. It compresses months of presentations, meetings and relationship building into a few days because the right people are there at once. The network effect is local.
That flexibility extends beyond invitation-only gatherings. In every industry, conferences have become one of the few places where customers, prospects, partners, investors and competitors all come together. While virtual events have increased reach dramatically, they haven't recreated the serenity that makes in-person gatherings so productive. A random chat is still more effective than a well-planned video call. A single introduction can change a hiring decision, close a partnership or redirect a company's strategy in ways that are hard to predict and impossible to plan.
The next competitive advantage will not come from choosing between digital and physical engagement. It will come from connecting the two. Companies already have huge amounts of data about who their customers are and how they behave online. What has been lacking historically is a common sense of where those people congregate in the physical world. As that gap closes, events and business travel can be more targeted: the right people, in the right place, at the right time. Location intelligence can be as valuable as audience intelligence.
As AI-generated content becomes ubiquitous, every email, proposal and presentation runs the risk of sounding the same. As AI makes it easier to create and personalize connections, the benefit shifts from generating more connections to knowing how and where those connections might be most valuable. In other words, the bottleneck is from creating messages to creating moments.
In the next decade, shared physical experiences will become the norm at the core of all business relationships. AI will continue to reduce the cost of information work while making authentic human interaction less and less important. The paradox of the AI age is that the easier it is to reach everyone, the more valuable it is to spend time with the right person. When normal communication is relaxed, trust becomes a barrier. And wherever trust goes down, your value goes up.
As another season of The Hamptons continues, it's tempting to dismiss these gatherings as networking practices or management culture rather than the important conversations that take place underneath. What appears to be social work is often economic infrastructure. These circles reveal an enduring truth about how business works. Technology can change the way information travels, but it cannot change the way confidence is built.
