eduWeb Summit 2026: What We Brought Back From Orlando

We just wrapped up a few days at eduWeb Summit 2026 in Orlando, and it was another great opportunity to connect with marketing peers and partners in the higher education world.

On-site as an exhibitor this year, Push10 was part of the carefully curated mix of higher ed marketers, enrollment leaders, and web strategists all contemplating the same question: how do you get a prospective student’s attention, and keep it, in a world that’s changing faster than most institutions can staff for?

Three days, 70+ sessions, and a lot of hallway conversations later, we came home with more sticky notes than we know what to do with. A few themes kept surfacing wherever we went, whether we were sitting in a session or chatting with an enrollment director at our booth. Here’s what stuck.

AI Can Be Harnessed Instead Of Feared

The importance of AI in the enrollment conversation is now a matter of fact for colleges and universities. What institutions are now tasked with is strategizing how to show up when a prospective student asks ChatGPT or Perplexity where they should apply. If your program pages aren’t structured, clear, and honest about cost and outcomes, you’re simply not part of that answer.

The best sessions treated this less like an SEO hack and more like an institutional discipline. That means:

• Writing program pages that answer the exact questions a student would type into a search bar, not the ones that make sense on your internal org chart
• Putting real numbers on the page (cost, aid, timelines) instead of tucking them into a PDF three clicks away
• Treating AI adoption as a real strategy, not a one-time tech fix

Confidence Reads Better Than Caution

The institutions we heard from and that stuck with us weren’t exactly the safest ones in the room. One session argued for letting real personality into enrollment marketing, treating brand voice like a decision, not an accident. Another walked through how a single well-built experience, rather than another campaign, gave one university something genuinely different to talk about compared to its neighbors.

Our takeaway wasn’t “be loud for the sake of it.” It was that a brand voice sized honestly to your team, and used with some nerve, beats a safe one every time.

Give Leadership a Number They’ll Actually Believe

Despite the very valid AI positioning of the conference, our favorite session of the whole summit had nothing to do with AI. It was about the much older problem of proving marketing earned its budget. One presenter walked through a simple index her team built so that the next time a board member wonders whether the spend is paying off, there’s an honest, ready answer instead of a shrug. Every marketing team in that room has sat in that meeting, and it was refreshing to see someone hand out a real tool instead of a talking point.

Good Company, Good Conversations

Beyond the sessions, what we’ll remember most is just how good the conversations were, in the exhibit hall, over coffee, in line for the shuttle. Higher ed marketing is a tight-knit community, and everyone showed up ready to compare notes on the same challenges rather than guard them. That collaborative spirit is exactly why we keep showing up to events like this one.