Media Stage at the 2026 Event Production Network (EPN) Symposium

Greetings from Georgia! Media Stage was honored to attend the 2026 Event Production Network Symposium at the Marriott Northwest Galleria in Atlanta. The three-day conference focused on AI advances and how its new innovations are shaping the audiovisual industry. It was a great opportunity to be on the other side of a production, and to network with our peers all throughout North America.

There were four different tracks: Executives, Creative, Sales and Project Managers. Michael Alers, President & CEO, Larry Blocker, COO, and Gabby Kiger, Director of Marketing and Project Manager, were all in attendance representing Media Stage in their corresponding tracks.

Larry and Michael split their time between the Executives and Sales tracks and came away with many helpful insights on lead generation and how AI is impacting day-to-day workflows and operations within the AV industry. There was a networking golf outing on the first day of the conference, which of course Larry attended along with some of his close friends within EPN.

Gabby presented on stage for the Project Managers group in a “Shark Tank” style competition to showcase an AI-engineered truck packing app as part of an immersive one-stop-shop tool to execute a show from start to finish. Her fellow presenters for the PMs group spoke about the planning, quoting, render, shipping, and execution phases of this tool they created – and ended up winning the competition!

Gabby was also recognized with an award for her volunteer efforts leading several PM Hub calls throughout the last year alongside Erin Weir of Cleveland-based EPN member Colortone.

Patrick Brochu, our VP of Show Services, was acknowledged with an award remotely as well!

And lucky for us, the opening night welcome event was a night at the ballpark during which the Atlanta Braves hosted our local Miami Marlins. We enjoyed a fun night under the stadium lights, and also got to explore the local scene a couple nights later for the closing party at Live! at the Battery.

It was a great week from which we took home many new insights, industry trends and lasting memories with our EPN partners. A job well done to all who helped organize this event!