The Amex GBT 2026 forecast brings a signal the corporate events sector should read carefully. Amex GBT — American Express Global Business Travel, the world's largest corporate travel management company — has just published its 2026 Global Meetings & Events Forecast. The annual report, built on a survey of hundreds of industry professionals across multiple regions, is in many ways the most credible barometer of where the global MICE sector actually stands.
And in its 2026 edition, something has shifted.
What the Amex GBT 2026 Forecast Confirms
The report is built on a YouGov survey of 601 meeting professionals across eight countries, fielded July 14–21, 2025. Among its findings, one deserves particular attention: neuroscience-informed formats are no longer experimental. They have become an established feature of contemporary event design.
The finding doesn't stand alone. For the second consecutive year, memorable attendee experience ranks as meeting professionals' top priority for 2026, named by 33% as their leading strategic focus, above cost control and technology adoption. At the same time, rising costs have emerged as the sector's top operational challenge, with 71% of planners expecting their costs to increase in the year ahead.
Translated into industry terms: the outcome professionals themselves rank as most important — an experience that actually leaves a mark — is exactly what cognitive neuroscience has been studying for decades. The overlap is not incidental. It's validation.
The science behind the message
To accompany this strategic shift, Amex GBT has partnered with Dr. Sahar Yousef, cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 2025 report The Art & Science Behind Unforgettable Events. The work brings together perspectives from event leaders alongside the scientific evidence on memory retention and emotional engagement.
Yousef locates the core mechanism in the emotional dimension: memories consolidate when experience is vivid and emotionally intense, not when it is merely information-rich. She identifies three emotions with particular power to fix memories in an event context — awe, excitement, and fear.
She adds something every events professional should print and keep in view: "Anticipation triggers dopamine, which primes curiosity and strengthens memory. It tells the brain: pay attention, this matters." And yet, anticipation remains one of the most underused mechanisms in event design.
This is not light popular science. It's solid evidence about how the temporal architecture of an event — what happens before, what is anticipated, how expectation is built — directly affects attendees' cognitive capacity to process and retain what they encounter during the event itself.
What's still missing
The work Amex GBT and Yousef have put together is valuable and necessary. It brings the scientific conversation into the center of the industry debate. But it has a clear limit, and it's worth naming.
Their materials describe principles. They do not offer process.
Knowing that anticipation activates dopamine is useful. But how does that translate into concrete decisions during the design of a two-day corporate conference? At which point in the agenda? With what kind of stimulus? How does it combine with the management of cognitive load across the day?
There are dimensions the report does not address:
Agenda structure as a physiological variable. Sustained attention deteriorates progressively with duration in the absence of dynamic change (Robertson et al., 1997). In a day built around uninterrupted 50–60 minute blocks, attendees operate the second half of each block with significantly reduced attentional resources. The most important message lands when the brain has already begun to disengage. This is not a content problem. It's a design problem.
F&B as a cognitive intervention. A meal rich in simple carbohydrates produces a glycemic spike followed by reactive hypoglycemia — an energy drop and attention decline in the 90 to 150 minute window after intake. If that coffee break precedes the most important session of the day, the organizer is investing budget into creating the physiological conditions for their own message not to be retained.
The physical environment as a regulator of the nervous system. Temperature, acoustics, lighting and spatial design are not aesthetic variables. They modulate cortisol levels, cognitive load and the attendee's state of activation across the entire day.
Measurement beyond the satisfaction survey. The Forecast identifies ROI as a growing priority and notes that planners are beginning to adopt the concept of Return on Experience (ROE). But the dominant measurement tool remains the post-event satisfaction survey. A 1-to-5 scale on whether "the event met your expectations" measures neither content retention, nor cognitive state during the day, nor subsequent behavioral impact.
From principles to process
This is not a critique of Amex GBT's work, nor of Dr. Yousef's. It is an honest description of where the industry currently stands — and where the opportunity sits.
The sector already understands that neuroscience matters. What it still lacks, in a systematic form, is the bridge between that knowledge and the concrete decisions of event design: what to change in the agenda, how to rethink the menu, how to manage sensory stimuli, how to measure whether the design actually worked.
That bridge is exactly what NeuroEvents delivers as a platform: a structured evaluation process — pre-event diagnostic, field observation during the event, and an automated IDN report scoring four cognitive dimensions — that turns neuroscientific evidence into operational decisions.
The conversation Amex GBT has put on the table is the right one. The next step is applying it.
References
Amex GBT (2025). 2026 Global Meetings & Events Forecast. American Express Global Business Travel. · Amex GBT Experience Studio (2025). The Art & Science Behind Unforgettable Events. · Yousef, S. (2025). Statements published in Amex GBT Meetings & Events public content. · Robertson, I.H., et al. (1997). Oops! Performance correlates of everyday attentional failures. Neuropsychologia, 35, 747–758.