CHICAGO — In producing trade shows and live events, the operations team has a plethora of tasks to execute. From venue operations management to logistics to vendor and contractor coordination, the amount of information and documentation required to run events smoothly in a live environment can be overwhelming.
This can be especially true when onsite staff do not have an operations background and require more guidance than the operations leaders and teams have while onsite. At Fast Forward Events, one senior leader took this exact challenge and turned it into an opportunity to develop and implement a new way of working show-side that can evolve alongside the team.
Kristin Martinez, CEM, CMP, Vice President of Operations at Fast Forward Events, identified an opportunity to create an AI-driven system that not only better served her team, but allowed her to have more time to focus on high-value tasks. Her efforts led to her being named a Trade Show Executive (TSE) Woman to Watch in 2025.
TSE sat down with Martinez to learn more about her process for developing a new innovative system for her internal team and how that evolved into customer-facing tools, and to get a closer look at a real-life application of AI in event operations.
When Innovation Becomes a Necessity
While onsite at her events, Martinez recognized that her team needed a more efficient way to find and share important event information. The traditional binders of details were proving to be hard to sift through and easy to misplace, and she was answering repetitive questions that were in the provided documents.
“We have a really lean team, and we would give them this huge binder onsite,” Martinez explained. “A lot of our teams are not onsite operations people. They’re salespeople, marketing people, ops people and owners. This is not their normal day-to-day, and so when I hand them the binder, they’re really living and dying by it, because this is not their normal role. But I can’t be the person to tell them where to be because I have my own list of things to get done.”
It was this challenge that led to Martinez thinking about how she could provide the necessary information to her team in a way that they could adapt to easily.
“I was trying to think through what is something that is intuitive for everyone? What are we doing day in and day out that would feel intuitive for my team to be able to look for this information that they would never put down?” Martinez said. “No one loses their phone onsite. No one puts their phone down ever. So, can I make this the tool that they’re already using to communicate and find everything they need?”
Passion and Curiosity Fuel Innovation
While the need for a new tool to help operations came from necessity, the final AI-driven product was inspired by Martinez’s own interest in AI and from an educational session led by Jim Spellos, Owner of Meeting U. The hands-on workshop that Spellos led focused on the way organizers could leverage AI in an app for your attendees — and Martinez wondered if she could instead use AI to create an app for her team and staff.
“What if all the things I need my staff to know could live in this app?” Martinez said. “It’s about $120 a month, and I can go build as many apps and custom GPTs as I want. I can give my staff all of the things I’d hand them in a binder, but make it more sortable and searchable, and make it in a way that all the information is organized by the function they’re going to be doing onsite.”
It was an ambitious idea, and Martinez knew where to start. In developing these apps and custom GPTs, Martinez relied on AI to help her build out the interfaces to work how she envisioned.
“A lot of this is self-taught, and a lot of it is from podcasts. Anything you don’t know how to do, you can probably ask ChatGPT. There are things I wish I knew how to do to make this app function a certain way, and I ask GPT how I get it to do this,” Martinez said. “It’ll tell me to add this component, and if you need a little code, you can drop it right into this place. It really will walk you through everything.”
The Product
To solve the challenges she faced in her day-to-day role, and make her team’s experience onsite more seamless, Martinez developed a mobile app and custom ChatGPT to serve as an information source for the team.
“I created a custom ChatGPT that houses every single piece of on-site information. Instead of having them look through all the tabs [to find what they need on-site], I gave them something they could prompt, and that was only trained on the things I wanted it to learn,” Martinez said. “I don’t have to be that source of information, I just have to train that source of information, and now I’m free to go about my day and do my tasks while the team has what they need at their fingertips. It changed everything about the way that our internal teams function.”
Related. Meet the 2025 Women to Watch: Kristin Martinez, CEM, CMP
The staff app contains many modules, including a to-do list broken down by day, important contact information, schedules, run of show information, live maps, vendor contracts and directory listings for the event.
Along with being more sustainable than printing out multiple event binders to distribute onsite, the app and custom GPT have the additional benefit of speed. Martinez demonstrated how in an emergency situation, a team member can ask the GPT for the plan for a certain scenario, and it will almost instantly display the emergency preparedness plan.
A Natural Evolution to Customer-Facing Solutions
The app and custom GPT were so useful for the Fast Forward team, that Martinez expanded the idea to encompass exhibitors, sponsors and speakers.
“I expanded it in 2025, and we went from having our internal staff have an app and GPT, to giving an app to the exhibitors and sponsors,” Martinez said. “Instead of handing them hundreds of emails on a cadence and asking them to email me back all these things I don’t want to keep track of, I created forms that would collect their information. I put those in the app and gave them their exhibitor checklist in the same place. It’s now all consolidated in there, and if they, for example, forget how many samples they need to provide at the show, they can go in there, use their custom GPT and ask.”
While creating the app and GPT for exhibitors and sponsors, she was sure to train the AI only on the company’s event websites and documents that she uploaded. If a user asks the system a question it cannot find within those sources, it is directed to tell users to contact Martinez and her team. This helps to prevent hallucinations by the system, and ensures accurate information is being shared.
“Now, I can go back and train it to answer the questions that are escalated to me,” Martinez said. “Then it becomes something I don’t have to keep answering over and over, and it takes a lot of mundane day-to-day repetitive stuff off the plate so I can focus on higher value target items.”
Beyond using these tools for events, Martinez has also built a custom GPT and an AI agent to help with training interns at the company.
Bringing Innovation to Leadership
If someone was thinking of bringing a new tool or idea to leadership, Martinez had this advice:
“I think I’d like to see someone bring a new idea to leadership in the way I did it. Spend a little time with it and build the bones. I found the tool and developed the first one on the free version. This shows it is important enough for me to spend time on and develop, and while I didn’t fully flush it out, I got it to be functioning to a point where I could bring it to my leadership and show them the value. I could say, ‘What if we didn’t make binders anymore? Wouldn’t it be great if we had this digital tool that replaces that and significantly increases productivity and access to accurate information?’”
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