Can you share a bit about your role at Easyfairs and what it entails?
As CTO, my role is to keep Easyfairs at the forefront of technology in all aspects: efficiency, customer experience and products.
I’m lucky enough to be part of the Easyfairs adventure since its inception and, from the start, we have decided that technology would be one of our main competitive advantages. Over the years, I have been allowed to build a great team of innovators who have the freedom to experiment and are not afraid of failure. We learn so much more from failures than from successes!
We do a lot of software development: we build our own event management platform called “My Easyfairs”, our own Data Aggregation Platform and AI algorithms, our own Data Management Platform, etc. I love the process of creating software and platforms, as I’ve been trained as a developer myself. So, in a nutshell, my role is innovating while ensuring the best efficiency and stability, to allow our teams to deliver incredible experiences to our customers!
How has Easyfairs embraced digital transformation in its operations and services?
From its creation, Easyfairs has been about digital. We operate all our events across a common “technology stack”: one single CRM, one single ERP, one single CMS, etc. I spend a lot of time and effort keeping our technology landscape as clean and integrated as possible!
This is not just to keep things simple and costs down. It also allows for faster innovation at a larger scale. If we would allow a proliferation of heterogenous platforms, any innovation would be contained in a small area and difficult to scale up. At Easyfairs, any innovation we roll out is immediately available to all events and venues of the group. Every investment we make in technology instantly gets a better R.O.I and provides better economies of scale. That would not be possible if we weren’t so strict about being 100% digital and 100% standardised across the whole group.
What are some of the key digital initiatives that Easyfairs has undertaken recently? In what ways has technology contributed to its growth and success?
Easyfairs’ most significant digital initiative has been the decision to create a line of digital products, called EasyGo, that has been rolled out across all our B2B events in a standardised way. Supported by our “My Easyfairs” platform, EasyGo is the perfect complement of the physical stand, but in the digital world. It provides online visibility, efficiency, data collection and lead generation to all B2B exhibitors though the use, for example, of NFC badges, IoT touch points on all stands, and mobile applications. It also greatly improves the experience of the visitor by digitalising all business card exchanges and printed collaterals.
Also, we have decided to build our Data Aggregation Platform, a large-scale datawarehouse where we store all of Easyfairs’ data. With more than 15 years of historical data about all aspects of our events, it gives us not only an ideal place to develop all of our dashboarding and reporting but also the perfect platfrom to train our own A.I. algorithms.
How do you navigate the balance between traditional methods and innovative digital solutions in the events industry?
Compared to the exhibition industry as a whole, Easyfairs is a young company. We don’t have to deal with “old habits” or “we’ve always done it that way“. Change is never seen as a pain: it’s always welcomed and I never lack volunteers to try out new technologies and products. That is just how we function: we try to constantly improve ourselves and our customer’s experience, and technology is one of the main levers to achieve that.
But this can only happen because Easyfairs’ management promotes innovation, loves tech, and celebrates (quick) failure that brings learning. Innovative managers hire innovative team members, so the whole organisation is “wired” for innovation and is not afraid of shaking the tree of traditional exhibitions.
And, as a CTO, that’s the best place for me to be!
What opportunities do you see for Easyfairs in leveraging emerging technologies for future growth?
The future is unoudbtedly in data. With the quick progress and wide availability of artificial intelligence, data can be exploited in new ways and new insights can be discovered in the Terabytes that companies like us have patiently collected over the years.
In B2C, large companies like Amazon, Meta or Alibaba know more about you than you know yourself. But in B2B, it is much more difficult to discover real insights: what are the emerging trends? Which sectors are more interested in which types of products? How are talents moving around the industries? Tradeshows are key to uncover answers to those questions in the future!
How has digital transformation impacted the experience of attendees and exhibitors at Easyfairs events? What strategies does Easyfairs employ to enhance customer engagement and satisfaction through digital channels?
Easyfairs’ digital experience strategy relies on our EasyGo line of digital products and its supporting platform: My Easyfairs.
Through My Easyfairs, exhibitors can digitally manage all aspects of their participation: ordering furniture or features of their stand, inviting their customers to the event, creating an attractive online catalogue entry, generate leads, and manage their performance before and during the event. We also provide each B2B stand with at least one connected NFC reader (we call those ‘touchpoints’) that every visitor can touch with their badge to get information about the stand and products and exchange a digital business card with the exhibitor.
This way, visitors don’t have to carry around brochures and collaterals: it’s easier and better for the environment. They also receive a “digest” of all stands and products they have touched during the event, completed by a “What you might have missed” list of recommendations from our A.I. algorithms.
In the new version of EasyGo, we are rolling out a 365-days networking platform where all attendees and exhibitors will be able to interact, network, plan meetings, etc. In good Easyfairs fashion, we’re rolling this out in all our B2B events across all the countries where we’re active!
Can you share any success stories or notable feedback from customers regarding Easyfairs’ digital initiatives?
If it’s not measured, it didn’t happen! We regularly measure the satisfaction of our customers with our digital tools. I think the numbers speak for themselves.
For the integrated Smart Badge offering of EasyGo, we have a 78,5% exhibitor satisfaction and 88% for visitors! Both with a “Net Promoter Score” way above 20 (on a rage of -100 to +100).
The My Easyfairs platform, which we have developed internally, gets a 7.8/10 score from the exhibitors, and 80% of them give it a score of 7 or more on “User friendliness”.
From your perspective, what are some emerging trends or technologies that will significantly impact the events industry?
It makes no doubt that A.I. will have a profound impact on all industries, including ours. I often get the argument that “A.I. is the next Blockchain or Metaverse: it will come and go.” I deeply diagree with that for the simple reason that A.I. is already profoundly impacting our lives, unlike any of those previous “tech trends”.
Everyday day, when we use our smart phones, our home assistants, our cars, when we watch TV, read our emails or interact with our friends on social networks, A.I.s are improving our experience. And the pace of innovation has never been so intense. Remember that the availability of ChatGPT to a wide audience is not even two years old!
At Easyfairs we have many use for A.I.: we have trained our own “No Show” predictor that assigns to each pre-registered visitor of our events a probability of coming/not coming to the event in the end. We use A.I. to optimise our sales pipeline, to analyse answers to our surveys, for automated translations, etc… We even developed an LLM (Large Language Model, like ChatGPT, Gemini or Llama) to create a “post-event debriefing” for our teams, summarizing in clear text the positive and negative feedback from the exhibitors and visitors, and suggesting improvements for the next edition. They can even ask questions to the A.I. like “What did the exhibitors think about the food?”, or “Did the visitors see enough innovations?”.
It’s not a passing trend: it is here, it improves our business and customer experience already, and it will not go away! And remember: the A.I.s we have today are the best so far but the worst of what we’ll get later.
Can you share any memorable experiences or milestones from your career journey so far?
I’m in love with technology, but all the most memorable moments involve people. And when technology makes people come together, the magic happens.
Organising events is very stressfull for everyone: for the local teams having to deliver them physically, but also for the tech team having to make sure everything “just” works, that all elements interact together correctly and that the user experience is the best it can be.
But when you see with your own eyes that your platform, on which you and your team have worked so hard, make the lives of your colleagues easier and allow people to better interact, have great experiences and make business, both face-to-face and online, this has no price!
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers about Easyfairs or your role in driving digital innovation? Any message to the industry at large?
Stay relevant! As a person and as an industry, we must accept that we need to learn something new every day and reinvent ourselves constantly. This doesn’t mean that experience is not relevant, on the contrary. But, as an industry, being able to blend our centuries of experience in bringing people together with the efficiency and improved experience that technology can elevate every day will keep us relevant in the centuries to come.
