Part of the AI in Events 2025 research from Event Tech Live. Interview by Adam Parry, founder, Event Tech Live. Published 14 February 2025. Last updated 18 April 2026.
Stephan Forseilles, Chief Technology Officer at Easyfairs, on the company’s in-house language model, the sentiment-scoring of surveys, and why AI agents will be the next wave. Easyfairs has moved past AI experimentation and into production use.
The three things Stephan says you need to know
AI has become a normal tool at Easyfairs. It spans marketing (visitor no-show prediction, footfall forecasting), sales (rebook likelihood, projected revenue), event improvement (sentiment scoring, survey analysis) and data management. Forseilles no longer tracks all the use cases.
Easyfairs has trained its own LLM. Called EasyGPT internally, it prepares post-event debriefings and answers questions like ‘How was the food?’ or ‘What did people think about the parking?’ from aggregated feedback, without exposing customer data to public models.
AI agents are the next impact wave. Forseilles expects agents and integrations to be the most significant technology shift in events in the next two years, because they let AI act on the world rather than just produce text.
How has Easyfairs integrated AI into its operations?
There are too many cases to enumerate. AI now spans marketing (visitor no-show prediction, footfall forecasting), sales (various scores like likelihood to rebook, interest for visitors, projected revenue), event improvement (analysis of event surveys, sentiment scoring), data management (deduplication, job title and taxonomy mapping), and more. Forseilles says AI has become a tool like any other at the company.
How is AI enhancing the attendee experience at Easyfairs trade shows?
Pre-show, AI makes recommendations to attendees, creates matchmaking proposals, and helps prepare onsite meetings. Post-event, it completes the experience (‘You could also like…’) or gives tailored information to no-shows (‘You have missed…’). Every survey answer gets a sentiment score. The company has also trained a private LLM, EasyGPT, that prepares a post-event debriefing. Events teams can ask it questions like ‘How was the food?’ or ‘What did they think about the parking?’
How could AI revolutionise matchmaking between exhibitors and attendees?
Matchmaking has existed for a long time, and good matchmaking was possible without AI using algorithms and statistics. AI brings it to the next level because recommendations are more precise (larger data sets) and can go beyond the recommendation itself. AI can explain why two people should meet, suggest a suitable time, and prepare a briefing so each side has a starting point for the conversation.
What ethical considerations matter most when deploying AI in events?
Forseilles’s position: AI is fine to use for almost anything, but when there is any doubt, the honest and transparent thing to do is say what is AI-generated and what is not. Many consequential decisions in business and government are already based on advanced statistics that few people understand. AI is an additional tool for people making important decisions. Knowing the limitations is the critical part.
How do you balance innovation with privacy?
Easyfairs has the same privacy policies regardless of whether AI is involved. In addition to respecting the law, the company applies the test of whether it would be happy for the same thing to be done to its own data. It has a strict AI Usage Policy governing what data can be shared with what types of AI. The company developed EasyGPT specifically so staff could work with private or sensitive data without exposing it to a public model like ChatGPT.
What AI advancement will have the biggest impact on events next?
AI agents and integrations, within the next two years. They will allow AI to interact with the world and with other platforms, rather than just generate text. The difference between asking ChatGPT to draft a marketing email you copy-paste, versus having it interface directly with your marketing automation platform, is the gap agents will close.
“AI brings it to the next level: the recommendations are more precise because they are based on a much larger data set.”
— Stephan Forseilles, Easyfairs
About Stephan Forseilles
Stephan Forseilles is the Chief Technology Officer at Easyfairs, the European trade show organiser running over 200 events across multiple sectors. He has led the company’s data science and AI strategy, including the development of EasyGPT, Easyfairs’ private large language model.
This interview is part of AI in Events 2025: Adoption, Barriers and Forecast. Download the full PDF report. Browse all Event Tech Live research.
