Not Short of Experts: How Congresses Source Speakers and Who Gets Left Unseen

Of 1,200 people reviewed across business conferences held between April 2025 and June 2026, 92% had no public record of what they can speak about, in what format, or for whom. Nick Zhuchkov, SpeakUp CEO, asks what that says about how congress programmes are built, and about the expertise the industry never gets to see.

We reviewed 1,200 people who appeared on the published programmes of 84 business conferences in the United States, the United Kingdom, India and the United Arab Emirates between April 2025 and June 2026, and asked how many could be found by a stranger looking for exactly what they know: not a LinkedIn page, which almost everyone has, but a structured public profile anywhere stating topics, formats, fee range and evidence of past talks.

Ninety-seven had one. The other 92 per cent existed, as speakers, only as a name in a programme and a line on LinkedIn. Every one had already stood on a stage and been judged worth an hour of a delegate's time; for the next organiser they were as good as invisible.

The review is a manual check of one sample, not a census. But the result raises a broader question about how the industry finds its speakers.
 

How Congresses Source Speakers Today

An association's education programme is assembled in layers. The call for abstracts and its peer review fill most of the parallel sessions with members' own work, and that route already surfaces practitioners.

The invited sessions and plenaries, where the committee's judgement is most exposed, are filled differently. A chair may start with names carried over from the previous programme, suggestions raised in committee calls, last year's evaluation scores, a bureau's list or a talk that a board member happened to see.

Every session must earn its place against learning outcomes and, increasingly, CPD accreditation, and the committee answers for those choices to a board and to members. A plenary that falls flat is the chair's problem at the next board meeting. That helps explain why invited-speaker searches tend to begin with people who already come with evidence, and why filling those slots can take weeks.

A senior programme curator in the Gulf put it plainly: “We are not short of experts, we are short of ways to find them. Every year I know there is someone in a member company who has actually solved the problem we want to discuss.” The challenge, she said, is knowing who that person is.
 

What the Data Shows

Part of that gap can be measured. In the year to August 2026, SpeakUp, the platform where I am chief technology officer, published 7,214 briefs from associations, congress organisers and corporate event teams.

A brief is a written speaker request setting out the topic, format and budget, opened to speakers once it has passed moderation. Patterns held across all three groups. Speed is useful, but it is not the most interesting part of the data. Among briefs that received a qualified reply -one from a speaker with a complete profile, within budget where one was set and not automatically rejected  the median wait for the first was 38 minutes.

Across all briefs, 80 per cent drew a reply within 24 hours and 11 per cent drew none. The median time to a booking accepted by both sides was 4.2 days. The distribution of those bookings tells us more. Of 2,386 confirmed bookings, the top 10 per cent of speakers took 38 per cent, so familiar patterns of concentration remain. But 32 per cent of bookings were the speaker's first through the platform, and 6 per cent went to people who said at registration that they had never spoken in public.

Demand was narrow: 13 expertise areas accounted for 84 per cent of it. Some categories were much harder to fill than others. A brief in data analytics drew an average of 1.4 qualified replies, compared with 7.4 for software architecture.
 

The Invisible Pool

Speakers themselves tell a similar story. Of 2,905 who registered during the year and answered the onboarding question, 90 per cent had no profile with any bureau or marketplace. The sample is self-selected, but it describes people who consider themselves speakers and who, until then, could usually be found only by someone who already knew their name.

The geography is revealing too. Forty-six per cent of bookings crossed a border; 94 per cent of bookings of Indian speakers came from abroad.

Making expertise visible does not only mean reaching the practitioner three time zones away. It can also reveal the equally qualified person forty kilometres from the venue: someone who needs no flight and whose experience may be much closer to the audience in the room.

That distinction matters because programme quality is not always tied to prominence. Some of the most useful sessions come from practitioners who are not established conference names but who have direct experience of the problem delegates are being asked to solve.

For a programme committee, that kind of speaker is difficult to choose if there is no practical way to discover them in the first place.

 

What This Changes for Programme Committees

None of this is an argument against known names. Committees choose familiar speakers because accountability sits with them, not because they are unwilling to search more widely. A known speaker carries evidence: previous talks, references, audience feedback and often a track record that can be checked. That makes the decision easier to defend internally.

The more useful question is whether the committee had enough information to know what alternatives existed. Bureaux, likewise, provide curation and a guarantee that a self-written profile does not. A profile is evidence, not endorsement.

A structured pool could itself become another gatekeeper; the concentration above shows that tendency, though the share of first bookings suggests the door is not shut. Evidence can also be gamed, which is why the useful part of a profile is not simply what somebody claims to know, but the record behind it: the talk that can be watched, the organiser who can be contacted, the work that can be examined.

For each invited slot, a committee can ask whether it chose the person who has done the relevant work or simply the person it already knew and whether it had any practical way to tell the difference. Once that gap is visible, the committee can decide for itself where to close it: through the call for abstracts, member companies, its PCO, a bureau or another source.
 

Waiting to Be Found

The meetings industry likes to say its value is the human encounter no technology replaces. The 92 per cent suggests many of those encounters may never happen.

Somewhere among a federation's members is the engineer who has already solved the problem. Somewhere in a host city is the plant manager who has already done the thing delegates are being asked to do.

The harder problem is not reaching them once their name is known. It is giving programme committees a realistic chance of discovering that they exist.

Nick Zhuchkov is СEO and Chief Technology Officer of SpeakUp, a platform that matches organisers' speaker requests with structured expert profiles. The figures are drawn from platform data for 1 September 2025 to 31 August 2026 and from a manual review of 1,200 conference speakers appearing on published programmes between April 2025 and June 2026; methodology is available on request.
 

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