CHICAGO — Launched at the 2024 Expo! Expo! IAEE’s Annual Meeting & Exhibition, MCI’s AI agent Jade, part of its OneSystem Plus platform, simplifies registration, housing and lead management for events.
Jade, which was recently given voice functionality, handles 66% of the customer service inquiries that MCI receives and almost 90% of every exhibitor inquiry, and is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
At Expo! Expo! 2025, we sat down with Shawn Pierce, President of MCI USA’s Strategic Events, Meetings & Incentives Division, to learn about Jade one year out and discuss how MCI USA is leveraging AI to make the events it works with more effective and impactful.
ANDREW: Could you walk through what makes Jade different? How is an AI agent different from a chat bot?
SHAWN: Chatbots, by nature, will answer questions, such as, “Is it going to be sunny?” “Should I wear a coat?” and “What time is this general session open?”
It gives you all those answers — no problem.
But it doesn’t perform actions, [such as] “Hey, I’m Andrew, but I really want to be called Andy at this show.”
Jade can go right into that, updating the registration database and sending you a confirmation letter, and your badge will be updated when you arrive at the show, without talking to a human.
That’s the difference between a bot saying, “Yes, you can change your name to Andy. I’ll get somebody to that for you, and we’ll talk to you in a day.” It does it all.
ANDREW: Could you share how you are using AI to streamline MCI’s work with clients?
SHAWN: What we looked at first was the building of our sites. Right now, every organizer gives us a requirements document.
New clients come in and say, “Hey, here’s how this show’s supposed to work and here are all the rules and regulations.”
In the old days, it took a long time to read it, understand it, ask questions and start setting the database and system up. Once you made it all work, clients could give it back to you and say “No, we changed our rules last week,” and it becomes two weeks of back and forth.
Now, we load that entire document into an AI agent. It discerns it and starts filling out the entire database automatically, and it builds the inquiry database for customer service.
Now, when we hand it back to the account executive, we can say, “We have a site going … These 26 questions, let’s walk through them together and I’ll make changes with you as we go.”
Plus, AI is watching, learning from that, deciding, “Could I have done that from the data that I have?” and trying to make itself smarter, so next time it’ll go from 26 things left over to 20 to 15 to 10 and so forth.
We’re in the 10,000 little things business. Events aren’t hard. They are made of individual steps, but you’ve got to do all 10,000 in exactly the right order, at the right time, in the right way, or you look like a fool.
This helps you get rid of the tactical things and gets you focused on the things that are really valuable and make a difference, and gives you the time to make adjustments … and form strategy that makes a difference.
Related. MCI USA Adds Voice to “Jade” AI Agent to Streamline Event Registration and Housing
ANDREW: How else are you using AI internally?
SHAWN: We’re having AI run through all of our emails, our team’s messages and our project workflows, and trying to build agents.
What we tell our team is, “If I could give you an assistant tomorrow, it’s going to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, never complain and never ask for a raise, what would you have it do? And that’s what we’ll build the AI agents to do for you … [and] give you more bandwidth to do additional shows.”
We may have a limit now of five to seven shows, but maybe we can reach 10 without working 30% more … [and] probably working 10% less.
At the end of the day, events are fun. The one thing that’s great about our job is we work really hard all year, and then get to go to the actual event.
It feels fulfilling, right? You want to have that level of joy in your world, and focus less on the tactical aspects that AI can do.
ANDREW: What do you predict for the future of AI?
SHAWN: Now, we said [to organizers], “We’ll let you talk to your data yourself.”
You can go in and say, “For my show, I want to understand how many Presidents of companies have registered for a class in the last six months, and compare that to last year and tell me if I’m the same spot or not,” or, “I did a marketing campaign two weeks ago. What has been the effect of that? And give me the profile of the attendee that has registered in the last two weeks based on that campaign.”
We just launched that at Expo! Expo! 2025: Here’s your ability to talk to your data.
Attendees can walk over to our booth and start typing in their questions right now. That is a big next step in this world.
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