Nobody walks to the info desk any more
They ask their phone. And what their phone tells them about your event is, more and more often, a confident guess. This is the problem we built for.
How it actually goes
- 01
The desk is in one place. The question is everywhere.
Somebody at the back of the hall with a question does not walk fifteen minutes to ask it. A former producer reviewing Google Cloud Next said exactly this: the staff were good and the lines were short, and it still needed help desks throughout the venue rather than one, because parts of the site were a ten-to-fifteen-minute walk away.
- 02
So they use the phone already in their hand.
They open your site, on mobile data, in a crowd, looking for one line. But a programme is written to be read at a desk, all at once — not one question at a time by somebody who is late and standing up.
- 03
And more and more, they do not search at all. They ask an assistant.
This is the part that changed recently. People now ask a general AI assistant anything, and it answers — fluently, confidently, and about an event that is not yours. It is a genuinely brilliant tool that has never read your programme. It does not know your shuttle times, your bag policy, or that Stage 2 moved.
- 04
Either way, the question comes back to you.
To the radio, the inbox, the DMs, and the volunteer with the notepad — the thinnest resource you have, on the busiest day of your year. Or worse, it does not come back at all, and somebody simply gets it wrong and tells you about it afterwards.
- 05
And you find out what people needed once everyone has gone home.
The industry instrument for “what did attendees actually want” is a survey, sent after the event, answered by a small and unrepresentative slice of the people who came. By the time it says four hundred people could not find the water, the water is packed up and the money is spent.
- 06
So it is easy to believe it went better than it did.
Freeman asked both sides of this in 2025 and found the gap: 78% of organisers believed they were delivering a standout moment, and only 40% of attendees said they had one. That is not a failure of care. It is what happens when the only feedback loop you have runs once, afterwards, through people who chose to reply.
Figures from Freeman’s 2025 trends report “Unpacking XLNC”, a survey of over 2,600 attendees and organisers run with IMEX. Freeman sells services to this industry, so weigh it accordingly — we quote it because it is the clearest published measurement of the gap, not because it is neutral.
What we made
Every event already keeps this list. On paper, at the desk, in someone’s head.
Every event runs an information desk with a notepad on it, where a volunteer writes down what people keep asking. That notepad is the most valuable document your event produces and it is thrown away on Sunday night. We are that notepad, digitised — and we start writing in it before the doors open. Your attendees ask a link instead of a queue, they get an answer from your programme rather than a guess, and you get the list of what they needed while there is still time to do something about it.
The fair questions
Two things you are right to be sceptical about
- Will attendees actually use it?
- They will not download anything, and we would not ask them to — app adoption is the reason we are not an app. It is a link and a QR code, opened in the browser already on their phone, with no account and nothing to install. The best answer we can give you is not an argument, though: the concierge on our home page is the real thing running on a real event’s content. Open it on your own phone and ask it something awkward.
- What happens at three in the morning, or at the gate?
- It answers, from what you have already given it — that is the whole point of it being a concierge rather than an inbox. When it does not know, it says so plainly instead of guessing, and puts the question in front of you so you can answer it once and everyone after that gets your answer. What it will never do is tell somebody a human is coming when nobody is. We would rather it said “I don’t know” at 3am than invent a reassurance with your name on it.
Find out what your event forgot to say.
Point it at the site you have already written. The check runs on a draft, before you publish and before you pay anything, and tells you what your attendees are going to ask that you have not answered yet.