One of the highlights of the Human2Human Summit in Dubai on 15 January 2026 was the future of festivals at a human scale. It is a phrase that rewards a second look.
This piece does not retell what was said on stage. Instead, it offers the community's perspective on the idea itself, why it matters well beyond festivals, and what it might ask of the people who run exhibitions, venues, conferences and visitor attractions.
A paradox worth taking seriously
Festivals are, almost by definition, about scale: large crowds, several stages, a programme that runs from morning to night. Yet the phrase human scale suggests that the measure that matters is not the size of the site. It is the size of the experience as each person lives it.
That fits the idea at the heart of H2H. As AI and digital tools spread, face-to-face connection becomes more valuable, not less. The organisers call human connection "the ultimate currency". If that is right, the question for any large live event is not simply how many people it can hold, but how well it helps those people find each other.
Four ways to read human scale
We see at least four lenses. None of them is a formula; each is a prompt.
| Lens | What it might mean | A question to ask of your own event |
|---|---|---|
| Intimacy | Moments where a large crowd feels small: a close stage, a shared table, a conversation that does not need shouting | Where in your venue can two people actually hear each other? |
| Community | Audiences who return because they know others will be there | Do your guests recognise each other from last time? |
| Belonging | Visitors sensing the experience was made with people like them in mind | Who feels like a guest, and who feels like a number? |
| Curation | Choices made on the audience's behalf, so that less feels like more | What did you decide to leave out this year, and why? |
What venues and attractions can take from festivals
Part of the value of H2H is that sectors which rarely share a room can compare notes on the same audience challenges. A theme-park operator and a trade-show organiser may have more in common than they think. In our view, festivals sharpen that conversation. They face the challenge in its most visible form: making a vast site feel personal.
A few readings for the wider room:
- Design the room within the room. Large venues can create smaller, defined places for people to gather, pause and talk. Scale then becomes a collection of human-sized moments rather than one undifferentiated crowd.
- Content earns the crowd. Another highlight of the day was the growth story of ADIPEC, which grew into a show of 239,000 visitors by investing in content rather than margin. Our reading: size and human scale need not be opposites, because what draws people in large numbers is often what makes each of them feel personally served.
- Treat in-person as the premium. Exhibitor satisfaction data shared on the day, spanning 2017 to 2024, showed sentiment improving after COVID, with in-person experience positioned as a premium product. Premium rarely means bigger. More often, it means more considered.
- Let technology carry the friction. Five principles for using AI in live experiences were summed up on the day as "AI cleans the path, humans walk it." In a festival or attraction setting, we read that as technology handling queues, entry and wayfinding, so that people can spend their attention on each other and on the moment.
The summit as a small experiment
H2H makes its own modest case for human scale. The 2026 edition was one day and nine sessions of keynotes, roundtables and networking, with no exhibition: the day is built around content and conversation. We see leaving the show floor out as curation in practice. Members who were in the ballroom will have their own view on what that made possible, and we would like to hear it.
Questions for members
- What is the largest audience you have seen that still felt intimate, and what made it work?
- At what point does growth start to cost you belonging, and how do you notice?
- Which curation decisions have your audiences valued most, even if they never saw them being made?
- How are you using AI to remove friction without removing the human moments people came for?
- What could a visitor attraction learn from a festival, and what could a festival learn from a trade show?
Join the conversation
Bring your answers, and your own examples, to peers across the sector. Find members working on the same questions in Connect, revisit the day in the 2026 summit recap, or ask Amal anything about H2H. To help shape the themes of future editions, see how to get involved and what's next for H2H. More perspectives from the community are waiting in Insights.