AI
Meet your AI interns: a startup’ s playbook for data-led events
Founder of data business Events Intelligence, Mark Parsons offers a personal example of how he has used AI to inject new energy, scale and opportunity into his business
’ d like to share my
I sometimes messy, often exhilarating, journey of applying AI within my own data start up. Some of these experiences may be relevant to exhibition organisers, now and in the future. For context, I began my career as an auditor and deal doer; I later stumbled into the exhibitions industry and found my tribe. Since 2016, I’ ve run a start up and taken an entrepreneurial journey, one that has evolved from assisting with deals to providing exhibitor insight to organisers, via HuntEx – a solution which helps organisers find their next 100 exhibitors.
This start up journey, like many, has been full of creative ideas, pitches, pivots and much wasted effort while learning what works and what doesn’ t. This article isn’ t about that path, but rather about the way AI has injected new energy, scale and opportunity into the business. It’ s about the late nights, the light bulb moments and the frustrations that come from weaving AI, prompts, code and agents into our processes, a journey that, I suspect, many organisers are also making right now.
Turning raw exhibitor data into actionable clusters I’ ve always been drawn to the idea of clustering similar companies together, since exhibitions are, after all, a perfect example of bringing clusters of sellers and buyers together. The stronger the show, the more cohesive the clusters and the value of the connections. In 2017, I decided to act on this interest, collecting data on exhibitors at shows and using machine learning to cluster companies. Our early HuntEx models took endless hours to build; we drowned in data, spreadsheets and manual processes. Truthfully, while it worked, we struggled to achieve real insight.
Then came June 2022, and the first time I properly used OpenAI’ s GPT www. exhibitionworld. co. uk Issue 4 2025 19