For years, the events industry has talked about personalization like it was a nice upgrade — the premium option for organizations with extra budget and ambition. That era is over.
At OX9, two of the most data-forward executives in the events space made it clear: personalization isn’t a differentiator anymore. It’s the price of admission.
Rhiannon James, Group President at Questex, put it plainly. Budgets are being scrutinized. Buyer committees have more stakeholders. And attendees have gotten ruthless about their time. “If an event does not feel like it’s been built for you,” she said, “you’re just not going to turn up.”
Narisa Wild, Chief Digital Officer at Clarion Events, framed the shift this way: personalization used to be a cool thing to do. Now it’s a service. And like any good service, it has to deliver something real. “By giving, I get,” she said — and what the attendee gets has to be accurate, timely, and genuinely useful.
The question, then, isn’t whether to personalize. It’s how to build the infrastructure that makes it possible at scale.
Start Before the Registration Form
One of the most important things Rhiannon said — and it’s easy to miss — is that the personalization work at Questex starts long before an attendee fills out a single field.
Through their internal program QActivate, Questex identifies buyers based on behavioral signals from their digital and editorial properties: what they’re reading, what topics they’re searching, where they are in a procurement cycle. Industry relations managers then reach out to those buyers and guide them through a more targeted intake process — focused not on basic contact details, but on intent. What do you want to get out of this event? Which vendors do you actually want to meet?
That data feeds directly into QConnect, Questex’s AI-powered matchmaking system for curated one-to-one buyer meetings. The result: a single meeting at a recent Broadband Nation Expo led to a sponsor closing a $400,000 deal — and renewing their package immediately.
The insight here isn’t just that the tool worked. It’s that the data behind it was gathered thoughtfully, well in advance, and with a clear purpose.
AI Accelerates. Humans Decide.
Both panelists have built AI into their event operations, and both were honest about where it earns its keep — and where it falls short.
For Questex, AI does the heavy lifting of matching buyers and sellers at volume and speed. But Rhiannon was direct about its limits: AI doesn’t understand the politics of a buyer committee. It doesn’t know that two people had a bad meeting last year. It can’t read the chemistry in a room. So human reviewers — Questex’s industry relations managers — stay in the loop, validating and refining every match the algorithm produces.
Clarion’s ConvergePlus product takes a similar approach but extends it deeper into the exhibitor experience. Rather than simply delivering a list of booth scans, ConvergePlus captures the actual conversations happening on the show floor — notes, key talking points, products discussed — and uses AI to summarize them into actionable follow-ups in real time. The goal is to shift exhibitors away from volume metrics (300 scans a day) toward quality ones: depth of conversation, intent signals, and clear next steps.
“We want to be niche and deep, entrenched into those conversations,” Narisa said. That’s a generational shift in how exhibitors think about event ROI — and not an easy one to drive. But her point was sharp: the organizations building for the next generation of exhibitors will be the ones still standing when the transition completes.
The 365-Day Event Is Finally Real
One of the most underrated ideas in the events industry has always been the notion of extending engagement beyond the three days on the show floor. It’s been promised for decades. Clarion is actually doing it.
By delivering AI-generated session summaries to attendees after the event — not during, so people stay present — Clarion has created a content experience that keeps sponsors visible and relevant long after the badges are packed away. Narisa shared that attendees are engaging with these summaries three and four months post-event, driven by genuine curiosity and a desire to reference what they learned.
For sponsors, that means continued opportunities to capture intent signals around their topics, and new packaging possibilities — panel recaps, webinars, curated content series — built directly from event content.
Rhiannon noted that the industry has been notoriously bad at putting that content to work. What Clarion is building is a model for how to stop leaving value on the table.
Personalization Needs Consent to Work
There’s a version of all this data collection that goes wrong, and both panelists have felt the edges of it.
The line between curation and surveillance, Rhiannon said, comes down to two things: transparency and consent. People will share data if they understand what you’ll do with it and they trust you’ll use it in their interest. What destroys that trust is handing contact information to sponsors who immediately flood attendees with irrelevant outreach. “Audience fatigue is real,” she said. “Personalization needs to be a service to people — not positioned as surveillance.”
For Clarion, that’s shaped how they’ve designed ConvergePlus — including a feature they’re piloting this year: an AI coach that calls attendees post-registration to ask deeper questions and build out a curated day-one agenda. The framing matters enormously. It has to feel like a concierge, not a data grab.
One Thing to Operationalize Now
Both panelists closed with practical advice for the room — and it applies just as well to anyone building audience strategy across media and events.
Narisa’s take: don’t try to solve everything at once. Pick one specific moment in the attendee or sponsor journey. Define a clear test. Set a measurable outcome. Start there.
Rhiannon’s was more direct: stop asking so many questions at registration. The data you actually need — intent, goals, who they want to meet — is a small fraction of what most forms ask for. And the rest? You can get it elsewhere. As she put it, platforms like Omeda exist precisely so you don’t have to interrogate your audience at every touchpoint. The behavioral data, the appended profile fields, the cross-channel signals — it’s already there. You just have to use it.
That’s the shift underpinning everything Rhiannon and Narisa described: from collecting everything to collecting the right things. From measuring volume to measuring depth. From three days to 365. The organizations that make that transition — and build the audience data infrastructure to support it — are the ones that will turn their events into something attendees and sponsors actually fight to be part of.
Want to go deeper on turning event data into year-round audience intelligence? Check out How to Put Your Event Data to Work — then request a demo to see how Omeda helps media and publishing companies make the most of every attendee interaction.
