It’s fair to ask why tech still needs conferences at all. We can livestream anything now, replay talks at double speed, join global meetings without leaving a chair. Remote work proved that a lot of what once required travel actually doesn’t. And yet, conferences keep multiplying. New ones appear every year, niche, regional, oddly specific, sometimes overlapping in ways that make no sense on paper. That persistence isn’t nostalgia or inertia, it’s a quiet admission that some parts of how technology actually moves forward still resist being flattened into pixels.

Every autumn, the public relations world gathers for its biggest and most charged event of the year. This time, the stage is Washington, D.C., and the venue is the Washington Hilton, where PRSA ICON 2025 will unfold from October 28–30. The energy of the capital always infuses events with a certain urgency, but given how much communications itself is now wrapped in politics, data, culture wars, and AI-driven media, the choice of location feels especially fitting.