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We’re always on the look out at AMO for ways operators are using AI to actually, tangibly drive a return for their business—and it doesn’t get much more tangible than the $1 million Questex generated in 90 days with its AI sales agent “Julian.” |
Read on for more on that plus Terry O’Dwyer’s new event aibl, which promises to strip away speakers and panels and get attendees to “actually do things.” |
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Questex Used AI Agents to Close $1 Million in 90 Days |
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When a prospective exhibitor submits a form expressing interest in a Questex trade show, an AI sales agent named Julian is on the phone within two minutes. No queue; no waiting for a sales rep to circle back. During a three-month pilot program, that speed translated into more than $1 million in closed revenue. |
Read full story here. |
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AI Event Launch Features No Speakers, No Panels, No Firesides, No PowerPoint |
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Events veteran Terry O'Dwyer is building out aibl, a media and events company focused on AI that will hold its major inaugural gathering in October. Don’t expect speakers, panels, lectures, fireside chats and definitely don’t expect death by PowerPoint. |
Instead, attendees will get practical use cases, workflows, live demos and interactive roundtable discussions where people get their laptops out and actually do things, getting down to the nitty gritty and getting their hands dirty, O’Dwyer told AMO. |
“There's a ton of hype out there, a lot of noise around what AI is and how wonderful it's going to be, and a lot of fear around it as well, so part of our mission is to try to demystify that a little bit,” O’Dwyer said. “It's this combination of speaking plain English using very practical approaches and interactive dialogue driven formats, rather than didactic approaches. Those are things that we think cut through the noise a little bit.” |
The focus is on a mid-market audience across industries, leaving aside large enterprises, startups and solopreneurs. The reasoning? Those, he said, are scaling rapidly. |
O’Dwyer is the main investor in the company that started operating in September with a newsletter. It held its first invitation-only leadership summit, of about 50 executives, earlier this month. |
O’Dwyer’s back in the events saddle after a career that included a long stint at Terrapin where he launched and scaled all kinds of gatherings before getting the itch to do his own thing. That became LSX, focused on executives in life sciences, which sold to Informa in 2023 for "low-8 figures.” |
After, he came across B2B executive Richard Breeden, who had a business plan for aibl, and O’Dwyer loved the idea. |
“It's back, nose to the grindstone founder, 2.0 mode, basically,” O’Dwyer said. He still does some consulting and is a member of the Events Venture Group, but his core focus now is building aibl, or AI For Business Leaders. |
They have 1,000 newsletter subscribers and some 5,000 followers on LinkedIn, which is a primary focus for audience growth. They do sponsored content and quantitative and qualitative research into AI adoption. Audiences will include sales marketing leaders, tech leaders, one operations leaders, finance and so forth. |
Revenue will come from media and events, with the latter including sponsorship and delegate revenue. Commercially sponsored research should also come into play. |
“We're using an event led model, in this first year, building the audience, which then feeds the event, generates the revenue, and we then, hopefully, will be able to monetize the audience later,” O’Dwyer said. |
In May, they held their first leadership summit featuring about 80 chief people officers in Clapham, a London suburb, that got the ball rolling on the event side—and will help drive demand for the big one in October. |
For now, the team is small, composed of O’Dwyer, Breeden as CEO, a COO, a full-time sales rep and a commercial executive. They tap into different agencies for needs from marketing to content, which helps with the research and newsletter curation. |
“There's quite a lot of capital that's gone into the launch and making it happen,” most of which has come from O’Dwyer, and some of which has come from 10x Humans, “a platform for the AI Enablement sector.” The company was careful of who it took money from and why. |
“We took the view that we were only going to take strategic capital… I could have funded the whole thing if we wanted to, but the view was very much that 10x Humans could bring an enormous amount of value as a strategic investor,” O’Dwyer said. Starting event-heavy was part of that strategizing—events are cash generative. |
“We built the business plan according to what we believe the opportunity represented, and then we worked backwards from that,” O’Dwyer said. |
The target audience includes leaders from mid-market companies, which means revenue between £20 million and £500 million and more than 50 employees. |
Sponsors take the form of really anything that includes AI—training, consultancies, services, etc. |
Aibl is going hard on LinkedIn, even as the platform itself has an admitted AI slop problem, and O’Dwyer has noted it himself. Nonetheless, “I do know from the data that we've seen and the progress that we've had that it is effective as a marketing channel and a vehicle. So it must be doing things right for some people, right?” |
That said, email as a way to reach audience is still “incredibly important,” but “the best platform is live events, meeting people face to face and having those touch points is going to be, I think, the difference maker for most.” |
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