Pull up a chair, not a slide deck

William Goddard has spent close to three decades in and around those rooms. He is the founder and president of GoTo Marketers Inc., and has spent almost three decades helping technology companies understand, engage and support IT and business leaders. His industry colleague Sophie Danby has been in those same rooms as a vendor, as a marketer and as a delegate. An independent ITSM marketing consultant and co-founder of ITSM.tools, she is known across the sector for cutting through its jargon and for the communities she has built inside it.

Between them, William and Sophie have sat through hundreds of events, and they kept noticing the same thing.

"The greatest value comes from the conversations that happen afterward, in the bar," Sophie says. "So we said, why don't we build a format around that. Just peer conversations, with some food, with some drinks. Take out the transactional element, take out the prescriptive presentations, and make the small bit that's valuable at other conferences the big bit."

"The most valuable conversations don't happen in the theater, listening to a presentation. They don't happen at the vendor booth," William adds. "They happen at the bar after the event, where people have their guard down and feel like they're talking with their next-door neighbor about the problems at work."

So they built an entire event around that hour, and cofounded IT Leader Exchange.

What's ITLEX?

IT Leader Exchange runs invitation-only dinners for senior IT leaders. William says they set out to model ITLEX "to help IT leaders solve problems with valuable experiences amongst their peers in a safe place". The environment is strictly no sales and no marketing. There are no product pitches, no vendor presentations and no staged conversations.

"IT leaders get invited to plenty of events, and almost all of them are built around what someone wants to tell them," Sophie says. "Sitting in an audience is not how anyone learns what their peers are doing. Our job is to get the right people together for valuable conversations, so they leave with something that makes a difference to their organization."

The new ITLEX format follows from that. A small group sits around a table and discusses over dinner anything they have on their mind about their daily work, AI, the future of IT, or anything else they'd like to discuss with a colleague. ITLEX places a facilitator at the table to help keep things moving and stop the evening drifting into chitchat about holiday plans, but beyond that, the room decides what it wants to talk about. The agenda is shaped around what IT leaders themselves say they want to discuss, with input from local leadership communities, independent experts and the people attending each event.

The topics stay loose on purpose. A rigid agenda can pigeonhole people into subjects that may not be their real problem. Start with AI security, for instance, and the actual issue may sit one step away, in infrastructure, governance or organizational change. The idea is to get the conversation started and let it take its course.

"We're bringing to the table what we think the market needs. But if the people who attend say they need something different, we'll deliver something different," Sophie says.

Why ITLEX, why now

The dinner format ITLEX uses is not new. Today, however, most are built around targeted invitations for a ten-person dinner under the promise that nobody will sell them anything, when selling them something is the entire point.

Sophie has a story that captures the incentive drift. Walking the floor at a conference, she dropped her phone. A man at a nearby booth crouched down as she bent to pick it up.

"I thought, oh, that's nice, he's going to pick my phone up for me," she says. "He didn't pick my phone up. He scanned my badge, and then he went back to what he was doing. He left my phone on the floor."

William says even sessions that aren't pitches tend to stop short of the thing people came for. "A lot of the conference sessions are people saying, this is the problem, this is why there's a problem," he says, "but nobody ever seems to address the 'how do we fix the problem' part."

ITLEX is designed around the gap between identifying a problem and actually figuring out what to do about it.

For a long time, this was an idea they turned over between events. What tipped them towards action was the noise created by AI.

The old playbooks are becoming less useful just as IT leaders are being asked to make decisions with little precedent. What does an AI-first IT organization look like? How should teams govern AI agents? Which work should be automated, and which should remain with people? There are plenty of opinions, but fewer places to work through the answers with peers facing the same questions.

Turning that idea into more than 35 dinners across three countries isn't easy. It needed a sponsor willing to fund the whole thing and stay out of the way.

SuperOps turned out to be the best fit, in large part because its CEO had been circling the same conviction about events from his own side of the industry.

"Earlier, there were industry experts, playbooks, and proven ways of working. But the era we are in right now, there are no more playbooks to follow, so keynote sessions and presentations don't serve the same purpose they used to," Arvind Parthiban, CEO and co-founder of SuperOps says. The way to write new ones, as he sees it, is collective. "The only way to do that is by bringing the sharpest minds together, the users, the vendors, the industry leaders," he says. He summarizes the whole shift to six words - new era, new challenges, new format.

"Sometimes we forget that the most important thing about a community is the learning, guiding, and moving forward together," he says.

This is particularly important now, when AI is evolving and everything is changing by the minute. "Everybody is lost. Not just the vendors. Not just IT. Not just the influencers."

But there is an obvious question attached to the model: if SuperOps is paying for the dinners, how independent can the conversation really be?

The nuances of a no-pitch sponsorship

SuperOps signed on as founding sponsor, but the terms are unusual. The company funds the initial program and then stays out of it. It does not control the agendas, discussions, or published conclusions. SuperOps' employees attend the dinners, but as participants not presenters. And after the event, anyone who wants to hear from SuperOps or its event partners has to explicitly opt in.

The decision reflects a broader belief that Arvind holds, that technology industries move forward when the people working within them can learn, exchange ideas and shape what gets built next.

"SuperOps understood what we were trying to build from the beginning," Sophie says. "They recognized that the most useful thing they could do was make the events possible and then leave the content to us. That is harder for a sponsor to agree to than it sounds, because most sponsors want their pitch in the program. You don't need to constantly show everybody what your product looks like, which unfortunately most vendors do not understand," she says.

Arvind's reasoning for investing in ITLEX is that a room full of candid senior practitioners is worth more than any stage time. "We are not going to pitch the product," he says. "Learning is the biggest objective. We want to share and learn with the community." He frames the return in almost unfashionable terms. "It's business karma. Genuinely do good for the community, and the brand takes care of itself."

For SuperOps, the sponsorship is therefore less about owning a platform than creating one. For Sophie and William, it is a way to put the people in the room ahead of the people selling to them. Both are, in their own ways, trying something different.

What comes next

That feels fitting for an industry in the middle of its own experiment. AI is changing the technology, the work and the assumptions that have shaped IT for years. There is no established formula for what comes next, leaving companies, leaders and teams to experiment with new ways of working, learning and building.

Nobody knows exactly what IT looks like in an AI-first world yet. ITLEX is creating a place for the people who have to figure that out to compare notes.

The first event is October 21. What happens around those tables will be another step in figuring out what that new era can look like. For more details, visit itleaderexchange.com.