Jomablue has released Sponsor & Exhibitor Manager, which reads an uploaded sponsorship prospectus and builds the event and sponsor programme from it in minutes. Adam Parry on the product and the more interesting decision behind it: shipping it as a standalone tool rather than as another module.
For 15 years, the money in event technology has followed the attendee. Registration, mobile apps, matchmaking, badge scanning, post-event dashboards. The delegate journey has been rebuilt several times over. The people who actually fund the event have not had the same attention.
Sponsors and exhibitors are still, at most major events, managed on spreadsheets and shared inboxes. Logos chased over email. Deliverables tracked in a document nobody trusts by the week of the show. It is the least glamorous corner of the business and, for that reason, the least touched.
Jomablue thinks that is the next thing to fix. The Australian event technology company has released Sponsor and Exhibitor Manager, and the pitch is blunt: point it at your sponsorship prospectus, and it builds the programme for you.
“Sponsor and exhibitor administration is one of the last genuinely manual jobs at a major event,” says David Haysom-McDowell, CEO at Jomablue. “The people actually paying for the event are still being managed through spreadsheets, shared inboxes and a lot of chasing.”
What Sponsor & Exhibitor Manager actually does
The mechanic is the product. An organiser uploads their prospectus, and the system reads it and builds the programme and branded portal based on what it finds: sponsorship tiers and packages, the deliverables owed for each tier, the task lists, and the form fields needed to collect each asset. The organiser reviews and adjusts rather than configuring from a blank page.
That is the part worth being precise about, because “AI-powered” has become a slippery label in event tech. Plenty of products now carry the badge for adding a chat assistant that answers exhibitor questions about a manual a human still had to write. Useful, but a different order of things.
“The distinction that matters is between AI that builds the programme and AI that answers questions about one somebody else built,” Tuey said. It holds, and it is the useful test: building the thing is different work from answering questions about it.
The major capability pillars were live when I got to see it and the product reached general availability in June 2026: the prospectus build, sponsorship tier and package generation, deliverables and task lists mapped to each tier, and the form and data-collection setup and, importantly, those important sponsor newsletter broadcasts. Automated brand asset retrieval, email copy help and communication sequencing are near-term additions shipping this quarter. Jomablue says the build runs on a mix of commercially contracted large language models and its own models trained on event-industry data. The wider platform, and now standalone Sponsor and Exhibitor Manager, sit within Jomablue’s SOC 2 Type II badge, which matters most to the enterprise buyer today, but needs to matter to all of us.
Why build it standalone
Here is the decision I find most interesting, and it is a deliberate one. Sponsor & Exhibitor Manager does not require you to run the rest of your event on Jomablue. It is a standalone tool that sits alongside whatever stack you already have.
For a platform business, that is not the obvious move. The obvious move is to bake the feature into the core product and use it to pull more customers onto the platform.
“Building it into our core platform would have solved it for our own customers and nobody else,” Haysom-McDowell said. “Most organisers and agencies do not run a single platform. They run a stack that has accumulated over the years.”
That is the honest reading of the market. Sponsor admin is a bad fit for the all-in-one model precisely because it sits in the gaps between teams. Sponsorship sales own the relationship, operations own delivery, marketing owns the assets, and those teams rarely share a system. A tool that only works once everyone moves onto one platform is solving a different, easier problem than the one organisers actually have.
There is also a timing argument the company is quieter about, and I think it is the real enabler. A standalone point tool only makes sense if it is cheap to stand up and cheap to run. What has changed is that AI now does the build. When configuration is minutes rather than a services engagement, a focused single-job product becomes viable in a way it was not a few years ago. The unbundling that AI makes possible is arguably the bigger story here than any one feature.
The unbundling that AI makes possible is arguably the bigger story here than any one feature.
The caveat is the one every standalone tool carries: it has to prove it genuinely plays well with the systems around it, not just in a demo. That is the test that matters over the next year.
Where it goes next
Two things are worth watching. The first is what Jomablue does with the Model Context Protocol, the emerging standard that lets you query a system in plain language through an AI model. It is live across the wider Jomablue platform today and on the roadmap for Sponsor and Exhibitor Manager. The company is careful not to claim a first; others in event technology shipped MCP servers earlier this year. Haysom-McDowell’s point is about use, not bragging rights.
“What an organiser actually does with it is ask a question about their event in plain language, rather than clicking through menus or building a report to find the answer,” he said. In practice that means checking every public-facing asset carries the right positioning in one pass, confirming a venue change has landed on every page, or spotting the audience segments a scheduled email is about to miss, without building a view to do it.
The second is revenue. The near-term additions point to the commercial side of the sponsor relationship and the renewal case that sits atop it. Giving each sponsor clear evidence of what their money delivered is the quiet feature that decides whether they come back.
That case is only as good as the records behind it. When they are kept by hand, things get missed, and a report is only as accurate as the last person who updated the sheet. The workload behind it does not arrive in a way anyone can plan for either.
Alex Magowan, Senior Manager, Strategic Programs at Jomablue, puts the demand side of it more plainly. “What organisers tell us is that it never arrives in one batch. Sponsorship and exhibitor sales run right up to the door, so onboarding is rolling, and the admin grows with every deal you close. And tracking is only half of it. Each sponsor needs different reminders depending on what they bought and how far along they are, and most organisers are still scheduling all of that by hand.”
That is the gap the product targets, and that is why the standalone decision matters. The work does not wait for anyone to standardise their stack.
What organisers should take from this
If sponsor and exhibitor admin still lives in spreadsheets at your events, the ground under that has shifted, and it is worth an hour to see what a prospectus-to-portal build looks like now. And if you run a mixed stack, the more useful question is not which suite to standardise on, but which single jobs can now be handled by a focused tool that reads your documents and works with what you already have. Sponsor admin is the first obvious candidate. It will not be the last.
Frequently asked questions
Is Sponsor and Exhibitor Manager a standalone product?
Yes. It works alongside an organiser’s existing stack and does not require the wider event to run on Jomablue. Jomablue chose this deliberately, to serve organisers and agencies who run a mix of platforms rather than a single suite.
What does the AI actually do?
An organiser uploads their sponsorship prospectus and the system builds the programme from it: sponsorship tiers and packages, deliverables against each tier, task lists, and the forms needed to collect each asset. The organiser reviews and adjusts rather than configuring from scratch.
Is it available now?
Yes. Sponsor and Exhibitor Manager reached general availability in June 2026. Since then almost weekly releases are building this into a powerhouse for anyone who manages sponsors and exhibitors
Does it use the Model Context Protocol?
MCP is live across the wider Jomablue platform and on the roadmap for Sponsor and Exhibitor Manager. The intended use is querying event data in plain language, rather than clicking through menus or building reports by hand.
