We’re some way off sending our robot counterparts to events for us. That may mean that, as a sector, live B2B events and exhibitions are facing less of an existential threat from AI than other sectors. Leaders of Terrapinn, Nineteen Group, Emap and RX Global share their views of the AI opportunities for events and where they’re currently experimenting.
The Definitive AI Forum, held in London by Flashes & Flames and MediaVoices, explored the extent to which AI is a ‘golden opportunity’ for exhibitions and events organisers, with a panel comprising: Greg Hitchen, CEO of Terrapinn, Alison Jackson, CEO of Nineteen Group, Robin Booth, Managing Director of Emap, and Robin Tapp, CIO of RX Global. It was moderated by Flashes & Flames’ Colin Morrison.
Unlike some of the other media organisations sharing their stories, events and exhibitions companies are still in a much more experimental phase of AI – or as Nineteen Group’s Jackson said, in their ‘MySpace era’. There is a great deal of optimism about its potential, but few concrete examples of transformation so far.
This may be partly due to the natural resilience of events businesses. “While AI is destroying and disrupting many media, it cannot really destroy face-to-face,” Terrapinn’s Hitchen emphasised. “It can augment it, it can make it better, but I do not believe it will destroy it, there is no existential crisis.”
Jackson, whose business is almost 90% trade shows, also sees more opportunity than threat from AI: “Trade shows have been around since 1241, they’re not going anywhere. They bounced back from the pandemic. But they are very, very laborious processes, and there’s a lot that goes into it.”
Emap’s Booth can see plenty of ways AI can help at Emap, where the majority of the events business are conferences and awards – between 80-90 annually: “What we’re trying to think about more is not what can the AI do, but what event problems have we got that this might help with?” he explained. He identified two priority ‘problem’ areas which might benefit from AI. The first is in encouraging time-poor attendees to come to events. Second, there’s an opportunity to help with sponsor communications: “Sponsors have become much more demanding of RoI. I don’t think we’ve very good at explaining to them what they’re going to get, and then afterwards showing what they actually got, and the value to them. AI has a massive role to play there.”
Buyer and seller matching
The most tangible way AI could transform events and exhibitions businesses in the short-term is improved buyer and seller interactions: “If we can find a way to match buyers with sellers in a seamless way, that uses lots of metadata…we could apply that to our brands and our data, and we could potentially go into other media businesses,” Terrapinn’s Hitchen shared.
RX is already using advanced technology on the majority of its 400+ global events, and is starting to bring AI into the process. Tapp explained that it has been using very simple QR code scanning technology on exhibitor stands to gather information about who’s meeting who: “We’re now starting to augment that with feedback on [whether] that was a good meeting, why or why not.” RX is using that information to create real-time recommendations for attendees.
There is also value in this information for other events and their industry verticals, as Tapp explained: “We might have a construction trade show in London, Paris and New York. By the time we get to New York, we know what’s hot and what’s not this year in the industry, we know what’s going to work and what isn’t, and we can start to create insight products for our exhibitors to [make] New York more successful; this is the sort of stuff that’s working really well at the moment in London and Paris.”
As Hitchen and Booth agreed, augmentation of current events is the priority rather than dramatic transformation. RX’s Tapp highlighted that any data or information which can be used as insights for exhibitors partway through an event – rather than after – will improve rebooking and longer-term relationships: “If [exhibitors] have had a bad first day and you come along with some advice, and they have a fantastic second day, that drives up the overall satisfaction in the event.”
Nineteen’s Jackson sees buyer-seller matching as a difficult process that AI can’t necessarily help by itself. Instead, she sees potential in streamlining behind the scenes so the business can better focus on nurturing those relationships: “We’ve all been to trade shows where… you open the doors and no one comes in. For me, [AI is] a massive opportunity to take away all the processes, all the laborious work, and focus on delighting the customer and putting them in front of the right person.”
Data and content
Jackson’s goal for Nineteen Group this year is to move from experimenting with AI to being more systematic in its implementation. It is exploring the effective use of AI-powered sales, events and meeting apps, as well as better data analysis: “You’ve got 10,000 people in an exhibition hall, and they’re looking at 300 different sets of products. What you can do with that data is off the charts.”
Data is RX’s ‘secret sauce’, and something Tapp will be protecting rather than selling or licensing: “For anybody in the world of fast-paced AI, know what your differentiator is, and focus on protecting it like mad. So we will not be selling that data. We might sell insights arising from that data, but our key is to have better knowledge, better data from which to drive insight than others.”
Interestingly, when compared to B2B information businesses where content is the primary focus, there were fewer qualms among panelists about using AI to help produce content. Jackson explained that at Nineteen Group, where around 10% of the business is content, editorial teams have been “producing the content faster and thinking about how we might monetise it outside of the trade show experience” with AI.
Emap’s Booth still sees a vital role for human writers but with caveats. It has started feeding audio from events into AI-powered transcription tools, which give an almost ‘live’ record of what’s been said; something we ourselves also did at The Definitive AI Forum: “We use Otter AI to record the session live, we feed that into ChatGPT, and it pops up with the takeaways. Everybody wants takeaways from an event. What do I need to remember? What did I need to do?”
But this doesn’t necessarily need to be done by humans – although, from our own experience, we’d recommend stringent human oversight. Booth said: “If we keep on providing event content [by humans] about what has happened, we are never going to be as good as the LLMs – they’ll beat us to it. Content is going to need to be much more forward-looking. It’s going to need to be about conjecture, imagination and inspiration.”
Improved services
The third area the panelists considered was ripe for AI opportunity was service improvement. Jackson said that the trade show process itself is very simple: hire a hall and sell the space. “If you can use AI to help the sales people change their script, listen to their voice…you will sell more.”
Booth says Emap is beginning to see tangible improvements by using AI in its awards processes: “I don’t think we have ever provided a good enough service [on awards]. We expect entrants to take hours to fill out a very complicated entry form, and then we say, ‘Thanks for doing that. Bad luck, you weren’t shortlisted. See you next year.’ Would you come back next year?”
He shared an example of its Local Government Chronicle Awards, which attract over 2,000 entries each year, with an average on-the-night attendance of 1,400 people. There simply wasn’t capacity to gather and pass on feedback to those who weren’t shortlisted but “We will now provide judges’ feedback on every single entry, whether you were shortlisted or not,”, thanks to AI tools on its awards software which helps collect and distribute comments.Booth hopes this will translate to better entries in the future, and more satisfaction in the process all round.
A wake-up call
The panel warned about complacency in harnessing AI, despite the relative resilience of events and exhibitions.
RX’s Tapp said that it was vital not to approach AI like the tech is standing still: “In the next 2, 3, 5 years, it won’t be the same thing as it is now, it will be fantastically more capable. The key thing for us now is to gather the data, and get that machine working as effectively as we can.”
Emap’s Booth thinks AI is, ultimately, going to be a big wake-up call for the events industry as much as all others: “I think we’re a bit complacent in the events space; we’ve trotted out the same stuff on conferences for years. The experience has got to get better, the content has got to get better and the analytics have got to get better. And AI has a very big role to play in all three areas.”
Listen to the full session above, or by searching ‘The Publisher Podcast’ on your podcast app of choice.
