With 24 halls, 2,500 exhibitors, and over 55,000 attendees, Gulfood Manufacturing & GulfHost 2024 brought together two leading trade events under one roof. Organised by the Dubai World Trade Centre, Gulfood Manufacturing 2024 reaffirmed its status as the region’s top trade event for food processing, packaging, and production. Running alongside GulfHost 2024, a premier hospitality & foodservice equipment exhibition, the events drew in a diverse audience of international buyers, manufacturers, and distributors.

Featuring insightful activities such as the Food Tech Summit, expert-led workshops, and innovation tours, the event offered attendees valuable insights into industry advancements. With procurement managers, business owners, and decision-makers present, the event provided a dynamic platform for exhibitors to showcase innovations, build business relationships, and stay ahead of industry trends.

Seamless Attendee Engagement through Technology

Given the scale and complexity of the event, ensuring a highly interactive attendee experience was a top priority for the organisers. The focus was on enhancing the attendee journey by integrating innovative tools that streamlined participation, improved navigation, and maximised networking outcomes. Partnering with Jublia, the organisers implemented the Jublia Engagement Hub to foster continuous interaction and enhance engagement performance between attendees and exhibitors. By leveraging AI-powered solutions, they successfully enabled measurable outcomes while ensuring smooth navigation and engagement in a large-scale, multi-faceted environment.

Fostering Meaningful Connections with AI Matchmaking

The matchmaking campaign played a crucial role in facilitating purposeful and targeted interactions within a complex, fast-paced event setting. By introducing an AI-driven matchmaking platform, organisers delivered personalised recommendations tailored to attendees’ profiles and business objectives, making every connection relevant and impactful.

For elite participants, a concierge-led meetings program offered a curated and well-coordinated experience, aligning them with key exhibitors and decision-makers for high-value interactions. Additionally, matchmaking sessions and dedicated networking lounges helped attendees engage with pre-recommended profiles, fostering efficiency and focus.

Interactive Content and Digital Engagement 

To enhance attendee engagement, the Event App integrated interactive content with a unified personal schedule and 3D interactive mapping, ensuring attendees could navigate both their schedules and the event venue effortlessly.

Through 3D interactive mapping technology by Invisual, attendees could visually explore the venue, pinpointing key exhibitors, sessions, and networking zones within the co-located halls. This spatial awareness complemented the unified personal schedule, allowing attendees to not only plan their agenda, but also efficiently map their movements and navigate across the event venue.

Furthermore, by consolidating sessions, meetings, and activities into a unified schedule, attendees could manage their agendas without fragmentation, staying focused on high-priority engagements. Additionally, interactive product and company listings provided instant detailed access to exhibitor profiles and session details, enabling attendees to strategically pre-plan their visits while navigating the event space with clarity and intent.

Enhancing Exhibitor Success through Strategic Networking

Beyond enhancing attendee experience and engagement, the organisers also priorited exhibitor success by integrating smart lead scanning and structured networking opportunities. The monetised lead scanner, embedded in the event’s Native App, enabled exhibitors and attendees to capture high-quality interaction data beyond what you will typically see in a namecard. 

In addition to lead scanning, the organisers further strengthened business connections through efficient meeting scheduling, facilitating over 4,000 highly targeted meetings. By integrating an intelligent scheduling tool within the event’s digital platform, participants could efficiently coordinate meetings, optimising their time, and engage with the right stakeholders. This data-driven approach to networking ensured that interactions were purposeful, fostering valuable connections that extended beyond the show floor.

AI-Driven Event Assistant: Judy AI

Judy AI played a crucial multi-faceted role in streamlining attendee support at the event and sentiment analysis for organisers. 

By managing around 2,500 event queries and offering real-time assistance, it minimized reliance on onsite helpdesks and spared attendees the frustration of locating and walking to physical info counters.

Beyond enhancing the attendee experience, Judy AI also worked in the background to provide event organisers with valuable insights through sentiment analysis. By analyzing the huge amount of attendee feedback and engagement data, it helped provide useful nuggets of information that the event organiser can use to refine future editions, all in the spirit of continuous improvement to fostering higher event engagement.

Post-Event Success and Impact

The impact of Jublia’s digital enhancements was evident in supporting the event’s strong engagement sentiments.

The 4.1 (out of 5) customer satisfaction score for both the digital platform and onsite experience is a testament that not only shows the effectiveness of the digital enhancements that support the event experience, it also showcases the event’s brand value and commitment in delivering success for the stakeholders.

Recognising Jublia’s role in optimising engagement, the event organiser acknowledged its contributions in creating a more interactive and impactful experience for attendees and exhibitors alike.

Unlock Holistic Event Engagement with Jublia

The success at Gulfood Manufacturing and Gulfhost 2024 showcased the organisers’ dedication to transforming their event experiences through smart, seamless engagement. Achieve the same success by discovering how Jublia Engagement Hub can elevate your event’s potential. Connect with our Solution Specialists to learn more and follow us on LinkedIn for insights on the future of event engagement.

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