I just got back from UNLEASH America and Transform HR, which means I spent the better part of two weeks walking miles of carpeted convention center floors, collecting branded tote bags and water bottles I’ll never use and having the exact same conversation roughly 47 times with people who all insisted their AI is different, while struggling to actually differentiate.
While both shows were dramatically different in some ways, they were also sort of interchangeable: same industry, same buyer profile, same copy-paste talking points.
The booths were busy enough at both shows, the side events and parties were borderline overcrowded, and you couldn’t swing a lanyard without hitting someone who wanted to tell you about their platform’s agentic capabilities.
While there was plenty of hype, the fact that both shows felt like hiring and headcount were in the middle of a bull market rather than teetering on the precipice of a deep recession was surprising, to say the least.
If you judged success by foot traffic or registration numbers alone, you’d assume this channel has never been healthier – or at least, that trade shows aren’t actually a reliable leading economic indicator as has been the case in previous downturns
And that’s precisely the problem.
Two Events, Same Patterns
At one event, I watched a vendor demo an AI-powered talent intelligence platform. The demo looked polished, and it actually looked pretty cool even though it was hard to tell how much was live product and how much was Figma. The UI was gorgeous; the product marketer hit every buzzword with confidence.
When they finished, an actual HR leader asked how it integrates with their existing ATS. The presenter blinked, pivoted to a slide about “partnership ecosystems,” and moved on.
That interaction, right there, is the entire HR tech trade show experience in miniature. Beautiful solution. Real buyer question. Complete disconnect.
I saw versions of that problem everywhere: polished messaging, vague differentiation, and very little evidence that vendors were prepared to answer the practical questions serious buyers actually bring with them. I sat through panels on “the future of work” that could’ve been delivered, word-for-word, at any HR conference since 2014. The crowd nodded politely. Nobody asked a hard question.
I lost count of the vendors that approached me in the hallway, and every single one of them opened with some version of, “So what are you seeing in the market?”
To me, that question signals a different problem of, “We’re uncertain about how to translate product positioning into something buyers actually care about.”
That, more than anything else, is what these events revealed for me. Not a lack of energy or lack of activity. But misalignment between what vendors have to say and what buyers actually need to hear.
IMO What the Floor Actually Reveals
Here’s what both events had in common: dozens of booths staffed by enthusiastic SDRs who couldn’t tell you how their product is meaningfully different from the booth next door, demo stations running canned sequences that bore zero resemblance to how an actual practitioner would use the tool, and too much activity that felt disconnected from how serious buying decisions really get made.
The real kicker is that many of the people I talked to on the buy side already knew what they were looking for before they got there. They’d done their research. They had shortlists. They weren’t walking the floor to discover vendors; they were meeting up with friends or sitting down for podcast interviews.
That’s the fundamental misalignment that nobody in HR tech wants to confront: vendors are investing heavily to build awareness among buyers who don’t have an awareness problem.
They have an implementation problem, a budget problem, a “my last three vendors overpromised and underdelivered” problem. And none of those get solved by a badge scan, lead nurturing sequences or a fifteen-minute demo between keynotes.
If Events Still Matter, Use Them Better
Here’s the thing: even in the age of AI and intent data, companies are still pouring an absurd amount of budget into events, with an average of 31.6% of total marketing spend going to trade shows. And I’m not saying trade shows are useless.
Both Unleash and Transform had genuine value: the hallway conversations, the after-hours dinners where people actually say what they think, the chance to read the room on where the market’s actually headed versus where vendors claim it’s headed. That stuff matters, and you can’t replicate it in a Zoom call.
Trade shows aren’t becoming irrelevant because people stopped attending. Weirdly, people still show up by the thousands, ready to talk shop and take swag. They’re becoming less effective because GTM moved faster than the format, and HR tech, for all its talk about innovation, is still clinging to a go-to-market playbook that hasn’t meaningfully evolved since the last time anyone thought SaaS was a differentiator.
The modern buyer doesn’t need a booth to discover you. They need a reason to choose you.
And that rarely comes from a badge scan, a branded stress ball, or another polished deck full of bravado and buzzwords.
In my experience, the companies that get real value aren’t the ones with the loudest booths or the best swag. They’re the ones using events to validate messaging, pressure-test differentiation, deepen customer relationships, and listen for the questions buyers keep asking.
If vendors want more from trade shows (and they should, since they’re still investing in them) they need a different playbook:
Imagine if teams used their booths less like lead traps and more like home base, or that sessions were built around customer outcomes instead of product pitches.
Or if side conversations, analyst meetings, customer dinners, and practitioner feedback were prioritized as the real asset instead of photo ops for LinkedIn recaps.
I’ve seen that approach work. And it works a hell of a lot better than the version most vendors are still funding.
Bottom line: these shows are clearly only getting bigger. More power to them. But vendors need to stop spending as if visibility is the same thing as value.
I’m here to tell you it isn’t.
Then again, pretty much everything outperforms long-form blog posts, so what the hell do I know?