Want an assistant who works 24/7, speaks every language and provides responses in seconds?

MCI Group, a global engagement and marketing agency, launched its new AI Assistant, Jade, to provide automation tools for registration, housing and leads. At the International Association of Exhibitions and Events’ Expo! Expo! In December, MCI introduced six new AI products to help trade show organizers, corporate event planners and exhibitors save time, money and manpower, as well as offer insight into real-time analytics based on deep and vast data sets.

“We're anticipating that north of 85% of call center inquiries are going to be able to be handled by Jade,” said MCI USA Senior Vice President, Registration and Housing Chris Williams. “It’s such a game changer. It never goes to sleep. It works in real time, and it just gets smarter and smarter about the event.”

With more than 1,200 clients across 31 countries, MCI offers its One System platform, which uses Cvent's core registration and housing products and builds its own software on top. 

“What we've done is identified what features and functionality in their registration and housing platform are missing for the large complex shows in the market,” said Williams. “Our developer team focuses on building out what we would call the gaps that bring value to our customers that you can't get in the core platform.”

We sat down with Williams to get the scoop on how these AI tools work. Will they deliver on their promise? 

Watch our full interview with Williams here, or read our list of curated quotes and a run-down of the products and their features:

How it works with contact center operations: “All registration and housing companies get chats, emails and phone calls from people who want to do something with their registration or with their housing reservation. Jade allows you to send an email to a normal event inbox, and Jade can read the email and go into the database and make the updates. Then it sends an email back, letting the registrant know what it's done,” Williams explained.

How it works with lead scoring: “It matches up all the exhibiting companies with all the attendees, and it provides a score from one to 10. It analyzes the data, and it provides a score of how valuable any one attendee would be to any one exhibitor. So it's done the math to calculate a lead score when you walk in and then your behavior throughout the show. If you take more sessions that are related to what that exhibitor sells, your lead score would go up for that particular exhibitor. Or if your lead was scanned by competitors of that exhibiting company, you become more valuable to that particular exhibitor. 

What we're trying to do — and all of our competitors are trying to do — is to bring more value to the exhibitor and help them turn a lead into a sale. We've tried to improve the lead capture process by adding the scoring in to use more behavioral data about the attendee. It's trying to take some of the homework that a salesperson needs to do, cut to the chase and help them make the sale faster.”

Predictions and challenges: “I think what you're going to see is a heavy adoption of AI both inside and outside of our industry. Who knows what's going to be released by Open AI with functionality, but it's going to bring efficiencies to the process. It's going to speed everything up and automate everything. So the challenge is just getting our messaging out to our own clients and to the marketplace in general. Then coming up with the business model that allows everybody to use the products and hopefully improve the event experience for themselves, exhibitors, attendees, speakers — everybody involved.”

What’s next: “We are working on ways to summarize what the attendee and exhibitor experience was at the show, then use AI to summarize and provide it back to them in their portal. That's what AI does great – it can consume mass quantities of data, make heads or tails out of it and provide the summary very quickly in real time. Sometimes seconds, sometimes minutes. That's the next step…using AI to summarize their journey.”

Need to Know: 6 New AI Tools For Events

Jade for Contact Center

Available 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, Jade works in real-time and is multilingual. Jade performs contact center actions for registration, housing and lead retrieval, answers questions and updates records. Jade updates contact information, registration categories, sessions and reservations. Registrants can communicate with Jade via email and chat, and soon they will be able to communicate with Jade via SMS and voice. 

Jade for Lead Scoring

When an exhibitor captures a sales lead, Jade scores the lead using information collected in the registration process, behavioral information collected throughout the event and information collected via the Internet. Jade updates the lead score in real time throughout the event as the registrant acts at the show. A lead score increases when the registrant's behavior indicates they are more apt to purchase one of the exhibitor’s products or services. Each score is unique to the exhibiting company collecting the sales lead.

Jade for Analytics

Jade provides deep, data scientist-level analytics. The analytics can be performed on data MCI already has about the event, such as registration, session, housing or lead data, or MCI can add data collected by various vendors to enhance the data set and glean deeper, more insightful analytics. Jade performs the analytics quickly and sees trends that cannot be found with traditional reporting. 

Jade determines the personas of attendees and tells the organizer who the most valuable and engaged buyers are on the show floor. Jade can be used throughout the show cycle to provide guidance on how to strategically market the event, grow attendance and increase booth and sponsorship sales. Jade can also present the results in a report format with charts or a PowerPoint presentation. 

Jade for Recommendations

Jade makes real-time session recommendations during the registration process, based on information provided by the registrant and choices they make while registering.   Jade makes sure registrants never miss an opportunity to improve their experience at the event. Jade also recommends a list of exhibitors to visit while at the show based on the product interests of the registrant.  

Jade for Writing

Jade assists users in writing content for the event. For example, Jade can assist with writing session descriptions, confirmations or welcome emails. Jade speeds up the event setup process.

Jade for Event Set Up

Coming in 2024: Jade will assist users with various pieces of the event registration setup process. Jade will use event business rules provided by the client to automatically set up the online registration sites. This will decrease the set up time, increase accuracy and decrease the time it takes to perform the quality assurance testing.  

Have some event technology news to share? Please send announcements and high-resolution imagery to lisa.savas@informa.com and danica.tormohlen@informa.com.

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