PODCAST: How Terrapinn boosts events with agentic AI

This feature has been written in partnership with Bridged Media. Hear more in the Media Briefs podcast episode from MediaVoices, with Sharon Roessen, Chief Operating Officer at Terrapin, discussing how the events organizer has worked with Bridged Media to develop a series of AI agents designed to streamline customer experience.

For publishers and event organizers, knowing where to start with AI is a common conundrum. For Bridged Media’s clients, the starting point is always a problem to be solved.

Welcome to the latest in our Media Briefs series of short, sharp sponsored episodes, this time featuring a senior executive working with a vendor that is making their businesses better.

In this episode, we hear from Sharon Roessen, COO at B2B events business Terrapinn, working with Bridged Media to develop a series of AI agents designed to streamline customer experience. Roessen spoke about the development process – from identifying a problem to developing a solution – and how one agentic AI experiment has led to a suite of agents that are increasing event attendance and easing registration bottlenecks.

Terrapinn is a UK-headquartered events business with a global footprint. The company organizes conferences and exhibitions around the world, from Europe to Asia, The Americas to The Middle East, Africa to Australasia. The 30-year old business operates in a range of industry sectors including aviation, education, transport, technology, finance and health.

“We have about 90 events globally,” said Roessen. “Our sweet spot is probably around the 3,500 to 5,000 attendee mark for the confex style events that we do. Then we’ve got the large scale exhibitions. They get up to 35,000 registrations.”

Terrapinn has almost 400 staff around the world with each office supporting its own marketing, sales and event production using a centralized technology stack. Roessen explained: “Everything that we do, we tend to pilot once or twice and then roll out. If you went to work for us in Sydney, you’d walk in and get pretty much the same tech stack as if you were working for us in London or in Dubai. We can share a lot of the insights and data across the business.”

Starting simple

Terrapinn began working with Bridged Media about a year ago. Roessen said the starting point was a relatively simple agent on its website answering visitors’ questions. “We piloted that on a few events and now, for this year, it’s on nearly 60.”

With the success of the original project, Roessen and her team looked at what else they could do with AI agents. They were interested in exploring WhatsApp as a marketing channel, particularly in relation to Asia and the Middle East, and decided to trial an agent that could send a WhatsApp message to past attendees to register them for an upcoming event.

Through WhatsApp, the agent confirms the attendee’s details and passes them to Terrapinn’s Salesforce registration system. Roessen explained that the solution means attendees don’t need to download a specific registration app. “Assuming we’ve got your right mobile number, it will take your registration on WhatsApp. It will register you in Salesforce, push that all out and the customer gets their ticket.”

The agent also has a ‘concierge mode’ that can answer any questions that users might have about the event. “You can go on to WhatsApp and we’ve got that one-to-one communication channel,” said Roessen. “I think now we’ve answered something close to 50,000 unique questions. So we now have that knowledge source and we can feed that back into the teams.”

Sending QR codes through WhatsApp has also reduced lines at registration. “That was actually the original problem that we were trying to solve: how can I get the QR code onto a device that you are going to guarantee to have with you and be able to find it really easy?”

Beyond shorter lines, improving registrations and answering questions, Roessen said she is really interested to see the potential for increasing event attendance through direct communication.

With attendee badges sent through WhatsApp, it is relatively simple to send regular reminders. “We might do that two or three times,” said Roessen, “to say ‘Remember the show’s on tomorrow. Scan this, get your badge really quick.”

Terrapinn has seen early success in Africa and Asia. “On one of our shows in Africa, we had around 4,500 people register through that WhatsApp channel, which I think accounted for close to 20% of all registrations. Our solar event in Malaysia had a 16% uplift from registration to attendance.”

Roessen acknowledges that success in other parts of the world may be slower to achieve. “In Africa and Asia they are used to doing business on WhatsApp. In Europe, we’re probably not as open to engaging on WhatsApp, but I think it will start to come.We had a show in London at the end of April and that saw a 4.5% lift in attendance, which is quite significant on a 15,000 reg show.”

Self-serve solutions

Bridged has built out Terrapinn’s agentic platform, the concierge service and the LLM behind it, plus web, email and WhatsApp integrations. Roessen added: “They’ve now built a portal, so that we can get some of our marketing people to self-serve it and it can come out of our central tech team.”

Terrapinn started its AI journey looking at revenue and attendance, rather than chasing headcount headcount reductions or internal gains. “We are looking at a lot of that as well, but really, where we’ve put the investment and the time originally is how can we move the needle either by revenue or by attendance.”

Working with Bridged, Terrapinn is looking at the potential to monetise the system. “We’re looking at something called topic takeovers,” said Roessen. “If we’ve got 50,000 questions being asked, and someone says, “What solar panels have you got on display at the solar event in London?’ people could buy those as keywords. We’re going to be piloting that on three shows in September.”

Roessens’s advice for businesses looking for an AI partner would be to avoid getting tied into long-term contracts because the technology is changing so quickly.

“We’ve actually been pulling out of long contracts, where [vendors] are trying to tie you in for two or three years. That’s why for us Bridged has been so great – we buy everything on tokens, so if the customer doesn’t use it, we don’t use the tokens. We’re charged on success. If you can prove that AI is having an impact, then I think you can build the business case without spending a fortune.”

This Media Briefs episode by MediaVoices is sponsored by Bridged Media, democratising AI for publishers. Through no-code AI solutions, Bridged lets publishers access the power of machine learning and Gen AI to meet their engagement and revenue objectives.