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by Joanna Harvey on June 12, 2026
Walk the floor of any major trade show and the experience is largely the same for every attendee: a badge, a paper map or a directory link, and thousands of square feet of booths between you and whatever you actually came to find. For an attendee with two days and a specific problem to solve, the odds of finding the right exhibitor through browsing alone are not great. For an exhibitor who invested tens of thousands of dollars on the show, the odds of that attendee locating them are not vastly better.
This is one our CEO Don Kline has spent years thinking about. "What excites me most is the central role of events, conferences, and large-scale trade shows in the industries they serve," he told Exhibition World magazine in April 2026. "The people who run events make the industries they serve stronger. They build connections, drive business, and create platforms where ideas and expertise can flourish."
The question driving MYS's product direction is how AI changes what's possible inside the moment of connection. The answer, as Kline sees it, is not incremental improvement - it's a fundamental shift in what an event can be for every person who attends.
The Problem with One-Size-Fits-All Event Experiences
Every attendee arrives at an event with different goals, different constraints, and a different definition of a successful show. A procurement manager at a packaging company is not looking for the same things as a product engineer at a food manufacturer, even if they are walking the same floor at the same time.
Traditional event technology treats them identically. The directory shows everyone the same listings. The floor map gives everyone the same view. The session guide presents the same schedule. Attendees are expected to filter this undifferentiated mass of information themselves, usually under time pressure, usually on their feet.
The friction this creates is real. Attendees miss exhibitors worth seeing because they never found them. They attend sessions that do not match their actual needs because nothing pointed them toward better options. They often leave with a feeling that they left stones unturned because they couldn’t cover all the ground they might have imagined they could.
"As an attendee to PACK EXPO -- and I've stood on that show floor many times myself - it's overwhelming," Kline said in a recent PMMI podcast. "What we're trying to do with MYS Connected is unify this experience."
What Hyper-Personalization Actually Means in Practice
Hyper-personalization at events is not about sending targeted emails before the show. It is about the platform learning what each attendee cares about and using that understanding to shape their entire experience -- before, during, and after the event.
MYS Connected pulls together exhibitor data, session information, and attendee behavioral signals across the platform to build a continuously updated picture of what each person is looking for. As the attendee interacts with the platform, it learns. Recommendations become more specific. Suggestions become more relevant. The experience gets smarter the more it is used.
"MYS Connected enables organizers to deliver a personalized journey for every attendee," Kline explained in Exhibition World. "We use AI to leverage behavioral data to guide visitors to the most relevant exhibitors, sessions, products, suppliers, and networking opportunities before, during, and after the event. The result is a hyper-personalized experience that becomes more powerful the more it's used."
The practical output is an event experience where an attendee searching for beverage packaging solutions does not wade through hundreds of irrelevant booths. They see a prioritized list of exhibitors matched to their actual interests. They get session suggestions relevant to their role. They receive walking directions that optimize their route through the venue so they cover more ground in less time. And when they connect with an exhibitor, both sides arrive at that conversation already oriented toward each other.
Ask Lina, the AI assistant within MYS Connected, makes this available on demand. Available through the platform and the MYS Mobile App, Ask Lina answers event-specific questions, surfaces recommendations based on the attendee's behavior, helps fill open time slots in their agenda, and provides point-to-point navigation through the venue. It is not a chatbot it's a continuously learning planning partner working to improve every interaction.
How Personalization Creates Value for Exhibitors, Not Just Attendees
The benefits of attendee personalization are not one-sided. Every time AI guides an attendee toward the right exhibitor, that exhibitor gains something too: a more qualified conversation, a warmer introduction, and a shorter path to a genuine sales opportunity.
Kline is direct about this connection. Speaking on the PMMI podcast, he said:
"We're trying to put more attendees in front of these exhibitors. We're trying to provide more value to that exhibitor who's investing in the event. And we do that by creating more connections, facilitating that connection between the buyer and seller. That's what we've always done as the trade show industry, and this helps that."
Don Kline
CEO - Map Your Show
The MYS Sales Accelerator sits on the other side of that connection. It uses the same behavioral data that powers attendee recommendations to give exhibitors a ranked list of leads by buying intent. An exhibitor who knows which attendees demonstrated genuine interest in their product category -- through directory searches, session attendance, and floor plan interaction -- can reach out after the show with specific, relevant context rather than a generic follow-up.
"It's not a cold introduction," Kline said. "It's, 'Hey, we'd like to show you more about this that you may be interested in,' because you know that these are things they've searched on. And because we can see behavior across their entire agenda planner, we can get pretty detailed into the kind of information we provide the exhibitor on how to talk to that attendee and meet them where they are."
Why Data Quality Is the Foundation of All of It
Personalization at scale is only as good as the data behind it. An AI system that recommends exhibitors based on incomplete listings, sparse attendee profiles, or disconnected data streams delivers mediocre results regardless of how sophisticated the model is.
Kline is emphatic on this point. "Data is a living asset that constantly evolves," he told Exhibition World. "It underpins the quality of any technology you deploy and should be one of the core pillars of every organization. Without that foundation, it would be impossible to fully leverage AI."
For organizers, this means treating data infrastructure as a strategic priority rather than an IT concern. It means ensuring exhibitor listings are complete, accurate, and category-specific. It means connecting attendee registration data, behavioral signals, and engagement analytics into a unified platform view. And it means using that unified view to inform decisions -- not just as a record, but as intelligence that shapes programming, floor planning, and outreach.
"With accurate attendee, exhibitor, and behavioral insights, organizers can optimize floor plans, tailor their marketing, forecast demand, and understand how their event is performing in real time," Kline noted. "Our goal is simple: to provide not just data, but clarity that helps organizers take confident, informed action."
MYS Insights supports this directly, giving organizers access to AI-driven event analytics including revenue forecasting, exhibitor risk analysis, and benchmarking against comparable shows. The platform's churn predictor identifies with 75% accuracy the likelihood of an exhibitor returning, enabling more targeted and proactive rebooking strategies.
Personalization as a Compounding Advantage
The case for AI-powered personalization is not just about improving a single event. Each event cycle generates richer data, and richer data produces better personalization at the next show. Organizers who build this capability now are not just improving the current attendee experience -- they are compounding a strategic advantage that grows with every show they run.
MYS delivered over 600 events in 2025 and grew revenue 13% year over year. With the launch of MYS Connected and the expanded product suite, the goal is 30% growth in 2026. The bet behind that ambition is that events capable of delivering a genuinely personalized experience for every attendee and every exhibitor represent a meaningfully different value proposition than shows that do not.
"In mid 2024, we recognized that a new wave of powerful technology was emerging," Kline explained. "Our earliest work on Sales Accelerator made it clear that we were building something truly game-changing for the industry."
The organizers who act on that shift now -- building data infrastructure, deploying personalization tools, and measuring outcomes at the individual attendee and exhibitor level -- will run shows worth attending, worth exhibiting at, and worth coming back to year after year.
Frequently Asked Questions About AI Personalization at Events
What is attendee personalization at events? Attendee personalization uses behavioral data, AI, and real-time signals to tailor each attendee's event experience individually -- recommending relevant exhibitors, suggesting sessions aligned with their interests, facilitating appropriate connections, and optimizing their physical route through the venue. The goal is to make every attendee's time at the event as productive as possible rather than presenting everyone with the same undifferentiated information.
How does AI improve attendee engagement at trade shows? AI improves attendee engagement by reducing the search burden on attendees and surfacing what is most relevant to them at the right moment. Rather than requiring attendees to filter thousands of exhibitors and sessions manually, AI tools analyze behavioral patterns to deliver prioritized recommendations, turn-by-turn venue navigation, and intelligent matchmaking with exhibitors and other attendees.
How does personalization benefit exhibitors? Personalization benefits exhibitors by directing higher-quality attendee traffic to their booths. When an AI system recommends an exhibitor to an attendee based on demonstrated interest and behavioral alignment, that introduction is warmer and more relevant than a random floor encounter. Exhibitors also gain access to ranked lead lists based on attendee behavior, enabling more targeted and effective post-show follow-up.
What data does AI use to personalize the event experience? AI personalization tools draw on exhibitor listing data, attendee registration information, behavioral signals across the platform, session engagement, directory searches, floor plan interactions, and in-app activity. The more complete and accurate the underlying data, the more precise the personalization. Exhibitor listing quality is particularly important -- AI systems can only surface relevant exhibitors to attendees if those listings accurately reflect what the exhibitor offers.
What is MYS Connected? MYS Connected is Map Your Show's AI-powered attendee personalization platform. It uses behavioral data from across the MYS ecosystem to deliver hyper-personalized exhibitor recommendations, session suggestions, networking matches, and venue navigation for every attendee. Its AI assistant, Ask Lina, learns from each attendee's interactions throughout the event and becomes more precise in its recommendations over time. MYS Connected is integrated with the MYS Mobile App and the Attendee View Floor Plan.
Every Attendee Deserves a Different Show
The most powerful thing AI brings to events is relevance. When every attendee experiences the show through the lens of their own interests, goals, and schedule, the event becomes more valuable for everyone. Attendees find answers and solutions. Exhibitors reach the buyers most likely to convert. Organizers build shows worth renewing.
That's the vision the Map Your Show team are building toward and with the addition of MYS Connected to the event platform, its already here.
Read the full interview with Don Kline in Exhibition World magazine (April/May 2026), or listen to him discuss AI and the future of trade shows on the PMMI Unpacked podcast. To see how MYS Connected and the full MYS platform bring this vision to life, explore MYS Connected or get a demo.
