Charlene Rabideau, BCD M&E’s senior vice president and managing director for North America
BCD Meetings & Events introduced its three-year ‘Thinking Forward’ plan in 2024, outlining investments in technology and initiatives designed to support rising business confidence following the post-pandemic resurgence in meetings and events.
Now, in the third and final year of that strategy, the company is beginning to map out its next phase of growth. While artificial intelligence is expected to play a role, it is by no means the focus. Instead, the company is directing attention to something more tangible: its creative services.
Launched in 2021 under the moniker The Collective, demand for BCD’s creative “agency within an agency” has seen “strong growth” in recent years, according BCD M&E’s senior vice president and managing director for North America, Charlene Rabideau — a trajectory the company expects will continue.
“Meetings management is a numbers game. There are a lot of high-volume meetings, and The Collective is an opportunity to spend more time on events and elevate the experience and the services,” Rabideau said, adding that The Collective now contributes roughly 30 per cent of M&E revenues in North America.
Mikael Ek, BCD M&E’s senior vice president and managing director in EMEA
The Collective provides integrated marketing campaigns, video and event production, and experience design services. It currently operates across the US and UK, with further expansion planned throughout EMEA this year.
“In the remaining EMEA markets, we're looking at specific countries either from an organic investment perspective or a joint venture, and we're also looking at mergers and acquisitions,” said Mikael Ek, BCD M&E’s senior vice president and managing director in the region.
Ek also pointed to potential future expansion in APAC and LATAM, while Rabideau confirmed the company is evaluating opportunities globally.
“We're looking everywhere — in all the markets, all the regions… we're going country by country based on the business need for clients,” she said.
Growth horizon
BCD M&E currently operates in more than 60 countries, so the potential to scale The Collective could be considerable.
BCD’s meetings and events division currently employs more than 2,200 people — representing about 15 per cent of the overall BCD Travel workforce — though Ek said that number could exceed 3,000 by the end of 2026 if planned M&A activity moves forward.
“Our contribution to the company, our footprint in the company, is growing and it's expected to continue to grow,” he said.
In 2025, BCD M&E booked approximately 1.7 million room nights, delivering 69,500 meetings and executing 250 incentive programmes. More than half of those events took place outside the US.
“In-person gatherings are increasingly viewed as strategic investments that strengthen alignment, culture and performance,” Ek said.
“As a result, companies are taking a closer look at which meetings truly require bringing people together in-person. They’re also managing their meeting portfolios more intentionally. For example, they are scheduling smaller meetings around major conferences or convening leadership teams at key industry events to maximise both impact and efficiency.”
That shift, he added, is changing the relationship between meetings management and corporate travel programmes.
“Some companies are now even looking at M&E as being the ‘mother’ [of a programme] versus travel, where meetings objectives and meetings policy dictate the travel policy,” Ek said.
“In the past, it was probably the other way around, where you had a travel policy with meetings as a subcomponent.”
The company is also seeing continued momentum in client retention and new business activity. Customer retention has remained at or above 95 per cent year over year, while Rabideau said RFP activity has increased by roughly 30 per cent.
Much of that demand, Rabideau said, is being driven by corporates seeking a more strategic approach to meetings programmes, whether through global consolidation or cost reduction opportunities. Broader industry consolidation — particularly Amex GBT’s $540 million acquisition of CWT — has generated additional interest.
“We've seen some natural conversation around it [the Amex GBT-CWT merger],” Ek said. “It doesn't mean that it's a given for us, but I think we've been quite successful and it's also helped our growth over the years [following the initial acquisition announcement in March 2024].”
AI investments
Against a backdrop of consolidation and increased focus on TMC-driven technologies, BCD Travel has continued to expand its own AI capabilities, including the deployment of Oversee’s agentic AI technology across its operational environment and a partnership with SkyLink to roll out an AI-powered travel assistant.
For BCD M&E, however, service remains at the centre of the strategy — even as AI adoption accelerates across the sector.
“We're using [AI] to improve the efficiency of our team, for our customers, and then also embracing it for idea generation… [but] we're not doing any product development for customers today,” Rabideau said.
BCD has developed its own proprietary Gen AI platform, Empower Assist, focused primarily on improving internal efficiencies. The tool integrates with existing meetings workflows to streamline processes including event sourcing, contracting and planning.
“We're not a technology company as a headline,” Ek said. “I mean, it's a part of our service offering, but we will probably never have a headline saying, ‘we're a tech company and this is how you should be you working with us’.”
Instead, he said, the near-term focus for any AI investment is on removing operational friction and improving employee engagement.
“What we're seeing is [AI] taking out those cumbersome tasks, which you typically get in a company of our size. We have processes, so if we can take out some of that and make the work more meaningful, it will drive engagement with our people… and that will then tail into what I hope is a margin improvement. But the core focus now is not on the margins, it's around driving engagement.”