The Question Our Project Manager Asked Me 15 Years Ago

This article was originally published on LinkedIn.

Fifteen years ago, we built something nobody else in our market had at the time.

An online registration system. Fully custom. Delegates could register themselves, directly through the website, without sending us an email or picking up a phone. The data flowed straight into our system. No manual entry. No transcription errors. Online payments.

For a professional congress organiser in the mid-2000s in small Croatia, this was genuinely radical.

I remember the moment we went live. Our project manager — one of the best I have worked with, someone who had spent years carefully processing registrations that arrived by email one by one, checking each one, entering each one, confirming each one — came to my desk.

She looked at me and asked, completely seriously:

"Are we going to be out of a job?"

I understood why she was asking. She had just watched the thing she spent most of her working day doing get automated. Not assisted. Automated. The registrations would now arrive already entered, already formatted, already in the system. The work she had been doing with her hands for years was simply — gone.

I thought about it for a moment. Then I told her the truth as I saw it.

"No. You are not going to be out of a job. You are going to stop being a registration handler and start being a complete congress organiser."

What actually happened

Before the online registration system, one experienced person could manage two congresses a year. Maybe three if the events were smaller and the timing worked out.

After it, the same person could manage four, five, sometimes six congresses in a year.

Not because they were working harder. Because they were no longer spending the majority of their time on work that did not require their judgment — processing registrations, entering data, sending confirmations, correcting transcription errors.

The system handled all of that. What it could not handle — the relationships with clients or suppliers, the decisions about programme structure, the management of speakers and venues and the hundred things that go wrong in the week before a congress — that still required a person. A skilled, experienced, well-organised person.

My project manager did not lose her job. She grew into a much bigger one. The technology did not replace her. It cleared the ground so she could do the work that actually needed her and where she could make a difference.

I have been thinking about that conversation a lot recently

Because I am watching the same moment happen again.

The tools have changed. The question — are we going to be out of a job — is back. And my answer is exactly the same as it was fifteen years ago.

No. You are going to transform.

What is being automated this time is not data entry. It is the entire registration conversation 24/7 — the back-and-forth emails, the proforma requests, the invoice corrections, the VAT queries, the payment chasing, the confirmation sending. All of it.

A delegate sends a WhatsApp message. They answer a few questions. The system identifies their registration category, collects their billing details, generates the proforma, processes the payment, and delivers the confirmation, badge QR, and personalised agenda — automatically, in under a minute, with no human touching any part of it.

This is what Conwayo does. And when I first looked at it properly, I had the same feeling I had when we launched our own registration system fifteen years ago. Not anxiety. Recognition.

I have seen this before.

What gets freed up

When I think about what my team currently spends time on that they should not have to — the invoice corrections, the payment follow-ups, the confirmation emails, the delegates who registered but never received anything and are now panicking three days before the congress — I calculate that a significant portion of the administrative work around a 500-person congress could run without us touching it.

Not because the people doing it are not capable of more. Because they absolutely are. But because the work has been occupying time that should be going somewhere else.

Somewhere like building better programmes. Deepening relationships with scientific committees. Creating delegate experiences that people remember and return to. Developing the kind of congress that defines a field for a year rather than just providing a venue for it.

That is the work that requires thirty-five years of experience. That is the work that no system automates. That is the work that a congress organiser is actually there to do.

The registration process is infrastructure. Important infrastructure — when it fails, everything fails. But infrastructure nonetheless. The goal is for it to work invisibly, reliably, without consuming the attention of the people who should be thinking about bigger things.

The question underneath the question

When my project manager asked me if we were going to be out of a job, she was really asking something else.

She was asking whether the thing she was good at still mattered. Whether the skills she had built still had value. Whether the industry she had chosen was still going to need her.

The answer was yes — just applied differently.

That is the same answer today. The congress organiser who understands delegate experience, who knows how to build a programme that serves a scientific community, who has the relationships and the judgment and the perspective that comes from years in this industry — that person is not being replaced by a WhatsApp bot.

They are being freed from the work that was never really theirs to begin with.

The fax machine gave way to email. Email gave way to the web form. The web form is giving way to the conversation.

Each time, the tool changed. Each time, someone asked if we were going to be out of a job.

Each time, the answer was the same.

We just had more time to do the real work.

Nikica Žunić is the CEO of Penta, a professional congress organiser based in Zagreb with 20+ years of experience running scientific and medical congresses across Europe. Conwayo (conwayo.ai) is a conversational registration platform for scientific congresses.