Conferences and other events are an excellent opportunity to bring talent into the region, for networking and knowledge exchange, and to promote Birmingham and the West Midlands as a thriving location of leading research and innovation. It was therefore my pleasure to organise the ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) in Birmingham in 2023. This highly prestigious international conference attracted more than 650 world-leading researchers and practitioners in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Data Science and Knowledge Management to Birmingham. Joining the Conference Ambassador Network provides a great opportunity for me to be involved in similar successful future events in the region.