At a recent trade show, a man greeted an employee at a sleepy booth.
He went 10 seconds without an answer.
The man repeated the question, checking his microphone to make sure the worker could hear him.
The employee, a young woman in a tan turtleneck and long brown hair, blinked blankly from a screen as she waited for a cue. If her expression seemed a little unreal, that’s because it was. The woman was actually an AI-powered customer service agent, a creation of a company called Livex.AI, which sells virtual staffers that other companies can hire to deal with their customers.
“Oh, you have to turn it down,” the man told a human rep from Livex.AI, realizing that his microphone was picking up too much of the surrounding hubbub for the virtual agent to hear him.
This is a common sight throughout the country, as firms take their AI products to market faster than they can work out the kinks. AI startups took in almost half of the $209 billion in venture capital funding raised last year, according to Reuters, up from just 10 percent a decade earlier.
The sharp rise comes as companies get more comfortable turning to AI to fill gaps in business functions. According to a survey by McKinsey, 78 percent of organizations already use it in one capacity or another.
Like the Livex.AI support agent, some of the products are rudimentary and finicky, requiring a combination of perfect ambient conditions and simple inputs to work. Others are complex layers of AI-powered tools that can turn tedious, monotonous tasks into one-click efforts.
Enterpret is one such solution. The “customer intelligence platform” uses social listening, powered by AI, to combine Google reviews, social media rants and internal customer support tickets into digestible reports that engineers can use to tweak their products.
“There’s a lot of hype around AI, but I think people are just beginning to peel back the onion,” Kevin Wong told Vendelux.
Wong, who serves as Enterpret’s head of business operations, says the company’s marquee tool is built on a complex layer of 23 different LLMs, or large language models, that are each trained to do a specific task.
“I think we’re just scratching the surface of how deep AI can be,” he said.
Conferences adapt to a new reality
Back in 2023, Hal Wolf, the CEO of the healthcare technology conference HIMSS, told his team to give the AI buzz “six months.”
“That didn’t happen,” he admits.
By that point, OpenAI’s ChatGPT had already fired the opening shot in the AI race. As the healthcare industry adopted the technology at record speed, the conference struggled to catch up.
At this year’s HIMSS in Las Vegas, Wolf said, “I’ll defy anyone to try to find a booth that doesn’t mention AI.”
That’s true for most trade shows attended by Vendelux this year.
Conference organizers are now arbiters of AI as much as they are large-scale event planners. For the trade show floor, they choose what technologies are innovative and advanced enough to warrant the best booth spaces. For educational sessions, they stitch together curriculums that help ticket-buyers squeeze all they can out of budding AI tools. All of this makes each conference feel more and more like a showcase for what AI can do in that specific industry.
After Wolf’s speech, executives from the Samsung Medical Center in Seoul introduced the hospital’s two new AI-powered companions for pediatric patients: Nova and Lumi. The robots, which were programmed to be highly attentive and highly adorable, showed off what they can do for kids stuck in hospitals with few opportunities to play. They clapped along with the audience and listed off facts about the medicine they were programmed to dispense that day to a patient, but unimpressed audience.
The focus on AI may seem overwhelming, but Heather Griffin, who helps plan the Rethink summit for event professionals, tells Vendelux there’s little else on people’s minds.
“We ran several polls on what they’re interested in,” she said. “AI is something that people kept coming back to.”
As such, Griffin and her team organized a session at next month’s Rethink that will teach event planners how to brainstorm using ChatGPT.
“Feeling overwhelmed by all the AI buzz? You’re not alone,” reads the course description. “You’ll learn how to cut through the noise, spot opportunities worth pursuing, and use AI to unlock new ways to solve problems, collaborate, and adapt.”
AI isn’t just being talked about at events. It’s embedded in their very fabric, turning them into quiet AI laboratories that show what artificial intelligence can do for content, operations, engagement and analysis.
Some conferences are going even further. At this year’s COLLIDE data science gathering, the entire theme is “AI for enterprise.”
According to co-founder Brian Mink, that means all breakout sessions will be centered on going “beyond all the hype about AI and thinking about how to deploy impactful use cases at scale that are secure and accurate and reliable and move the needle from a use standpoint.”
Shame is lame
Toronto-based experiential producer Luke Nicol says he wasn’t always comfortable using AI to help him work.
“I thought it was ‘cheating the system,’” he told Vendelux. “I felt if I used it, I was less of a producer and professional.”
Now, there are consultants whose entire jobs have shifted toward teaching event professionals how to harness the power of LLMs.
Lina Tonk, chief marketing officer for subscription billing service Recurly, is now instructing her team to identify key gaps in their marketing strategy. From there, they will spend the next year looking at ways to deploy AI to fill them.
“The days of shame are over,” she told Vendelux at SubSummit, mere feet away from the Livex.AI booth. “The future of AI is not the future, it’s today.”
If anything, Tonk says, those who remain apprehensive for too long will risk getting left behind.
“Some of my team members were asking me, ‘Do you think AI is going to take up a lot of the junior roles?’ And I was very honest with them, and I said, ‘No. AI won’t take your roles, but AI will start taking the roles of people that don’t know AI,’” she said.
The future is narrow
Like Tonk, most people agree that the future of AI lies in tailored, creative uses instead of open-ended chatbots.
B2B conferences are the perfect marketplace for these tools. It doesn’t hurt that the spread of AI will also beget a whole other slew of solutions that can be marketed at the same conferences.
Ampersand, a company that just exhibited at its first conference last month, sells software that helps connect existing CRMs like Salesforce to third-party tools, many of them based on AI.
“We’re in this moment where there are lots of companies building AI products,” said Ampersand CEO Ayan Barua. “And AI products need to create integrations. These integrations take a lot of time…A lot of the business software world is going to be re-architected and re-platformed because of AI.”
Heritage brands are at an especially important crossroads, says Lauren Pienta, event and content manager at subscription-based service conference SubSummit. Many of them don’t know how to integrate these flashy new AI tools into their decades-old software arsenal.
When choosing AI solutions for the trade show floor, she looked at, “How can you provide a better customer experience, so [companies] can integrate AI into different parts of their business?”
Mink, from the COLLIDE conference, says we might see the letters “AI” disappear as we get used to the fact that this is just how companies are built now.
He compares it to the rise of the internet in the dot-com boom.
“Everything was about the internet. Then the internet turned into e-commerce and smartphones and all these other off-shoots,” he said. “‘AI’ may fade a bit as a buzzword, but all the downstream effects will remain relevant.”
