RX首席运营官以击剑之道谈全球会展业务变革：统一基础、本地适应与AI应用

My son got me into fencing. He had been competing for years and kept encouraging me to join him at tournaments, usually with the words: “Well, at least I know I’ll never come last.” He had a point. Whenever we fenced, he destroyed me. Eventually, however, my competitive drive kicked in, and I discovered how much fun the sport could be. 

Fencing has taught me that a strategy can look perfect in theory but still fail when you face a real opponent. You have to read the situation, respond to new information and adapt, often in a matter of seconds.

That has sharpened how I think about leading change at RX. A clear strategy and strong foundations matter, but so does the ability to respond to different people, markets and circumstances. You cannot simply repeat what worked last time and assume the outcome will be the same.  

Every Event Is Unique 

I joined RX in 2017 after almost a decade at FedEx, and the events industry was unlike any I had experienced before. In technology, you launch when the product is ready. In events, the doors must open at a particular time, whether you are ready or not. 

Every team will tell you their event is special — and to be fair, each one is. Every event has distinctive customers, relationships and ways of doing business. But behind those individual experiences, the operational challenges often have a great deal in common. 

Solve Common Problems Once  

Some problems should be solved once and solved well.  

If teams in 25 markets are independently trying to solve the same technology problem, that is not entrepreneurship. It is a duplication of time, money and expertise.  

Technology infrastructure, cybersecurity, data and core business systems all benefit from common investment. At RX, establishing shared financial, sales and marketing systems has been a long march, but it enables us to move faster today. 

This is especially important as organizers adopt AI. Demonstrating a tool with one document or spreadsheet is easy; redesigning a workflow across multiple events requires connected systems and clean, consistent data. If businesses want to move beyond isolated experiments, they must first look after their foundations. 

The technology may be new. The need for strong foundations is not.  

Don’t Confuse Consistency with Sameness  

Shared foundations should not mean identical customer experiences.  

Customers do not experience a technology strategy. They experience whether something is useful and adds value.  

Our events in China provide a good example. Their digital experiences are built around WeChat because that is how customers communicate and conduct business locally. Imposing a journey designed for another market would make no sense. 

The underlying needs, however, are often the same. Customers want to discover relevant suppliers, plan their time, exchange information and follow up after meeting someone. The principles can travel even when the precise solution does not. 

Global scale should not mean instructions flowing only from the center. Local teams may apply a shared capability in a new way or uncover a customer need that has not appeared elsewhere. Our job is to recognize and share that insight, not automatically replicate the entire solution. 

Test, Measure and Be Prepared to Be Wrong  

One of the dangers in any large organization is confusing opinion with evidence.  

Ask why a particular product, conference format or customer experience works, and you will receive a convincing list of reasons. Move that “best practice” to another event two weeks later and it may fail completely. When that happens, we learn from it, adapt and improve. 

At RX, the PGA Show has become an important testing ground for new products. At the 2026 event, more than half of its 34,000 attendees used RX NOW. Visitor-led digital leads doubled, while the use of Colleqt QR codes tripled.  

The wider lesson is not that every organizer should adopt the same tools. It is that innovation should be judged by measurable customer behaviour, not by how impressive the technology appears.  

Those results give us evidence about the problems customers are trying to solve and which principles may be relevant elsewhere. The next step is to test again, measure again and adapt. 

Not every test succeeds. We have trialled remote participation where the technology worked but the customer experience did not. That reinforced something fundamental: Technology can improve face-to-face interaction, but it cannot replace it. Our digital products should help people prepare, connect and follow up more effectively, not remove the human encounters at the heart of an event. 

Keep Building the Path 

As we look toward 2027, the real opportunity from AI will not come from adding another tool to an existing process. It will come from redesigning complete workflows around the outcomes we want to achieve. 

That requires good data, common infrastructure and clear measures of success. It also requires local knowledge, experimentation and a willingness to admit when an idea has not worked. 

I do not see my role as COO at RX as controlling change. It is about helping people understand where we are going, bringing them with us and creating the conditions in which good ideas can improve. 

Before scaling an idea, every global organizer should ask three questions: Are we solving a problem shared by multiple events? What evidence do we have that the solution works? And what must be adapted for the local customer? 

Fencing operates on a common set of rules, but success depends on reading the opponent in front of you and adapting. Global events businesses should work in much the same way: standardize the foundations, learn from every contest and give the people closest to the customer the freedom to make the right move. 

Eight practical takeaways for applying AI in events  

For organizers, the challenge is no longer finding interesting uses for AI. It is turning those ideas into tools and experiences that work reliably for customers and teams. Based on what we have learned, eight practical principles stand out: 

1. Choose an outcome before choosing a tool.  
2. Invest in usable, connected data.  
3. Put AI inside an existing customer journey.  
4. Choose the right method for each task.  
5. Test in real show-floor conditions.  
6. Measure errors as well as engagement.  
7. Build control into the system, guided by RELX’s Responsible AI Principles.  
8. Scale through repeatable tests. 

The post From the Boardroom to the Piste: Leading Change in a Global Events Business appeared first on Trade Show Executive.