Ankush Gupta (0:14) Hi, I’m Ankush. I’m the founder of Eventible.com and the host of Building Awesome Events. Our guest today is Nick Borelli, Marketing Director at Zenus, a leader in the field of ethical facial analysis for events, retail brands, and airports.

Nick, welcome to our show!

Nick Borelli (0:28) Thanks for having me. This will be fun.

Ankush Gupta (0:31) I sure hope so, Nick. I’ve been waiting to discuss what you guys do. I think it’s incredibly interesting. I’m pretty sure the folks listening in will want to learn something new about facial analysis, you know, sentiment recognition at events. I think it’s definitely a hot topic. It’s something very interesting. So let’s just dive right in. 

Nick, I love listening to stories about how our guests got into the event space. In your case, you’ve been an outright events man throughout your career. So tell us instead what’s been the most interesting part of your career, you know, say over the last five years, perhaps navigating the pandemic era with a virtual events company or now seeing AI come in and make an impact. 

Nick Borelli (1:07) Yeah, well, you can’t talk about the last five years without the pandemic, which felt like, you know, I don’t know, 10 years ago and it felt like it lasted for 10 years, but neither of those are true. In that time, I was doing a lot of go-to-market strategies with tech companies who were pivoting into the virtual space, you know, something like a dating app that wanted to get into matchmaking for virtual networking.

I was doing a bunch of those things and then one of the companies that I’d worked with for quite some time as a consultant called AllSeated wanted to build a virtual platform, but in 3D and this is prior to the word metaverse being on everyone’s lips.

So I worked on that, and it was really interesting to me because it took the skills that I had previously, which are in intentional experience design and applied them to digital. The majority of the skills that I had didn’t apply one-to-one in most virtual platforms because it was more like broadcasting. But in 3D, there was all these kind of behaviours that came out that was very similar to the behaviours in person. I would be at an event and some presenter would be in a virtual keynote stage, and they would say, when I’m done with my presentation, I’m going to be in the back by the bar and you can come talk to me. And this is all in a virtual setting. So those types of human – that was so interesting.

So I enjoyed that because it gave me some new muscles to flex. The plus and the minus of – I mean, there’s a lot of minuses around the pandemic. If I’m going to say there’s a plus, we’re an industry that had an A/B test. We were shut off. And what does that mean? Immediately following the restrictions around the pandemic, did events survive? And the answer is yes. So we know in an absence of it, when everyone is trained on virtual, will they still decide to use in-person events? And I think in all metrics, yes, that is an answer.

There is changes that happen in behaviours. There’s behaviours and habits that were broken. But, I would say meetings, small meetings, those are happening more virtually than before and I would say teams are really spread out more than they’ve ever been before. So there is some truths with that. But that’s where I learned from that.

And then as things evolved into, OK, well, what does in-person need now that it’s back and it’s strong again? And the timing was perfect for AI to come as more of a Swiss Army knife because it’s a layer of solutions of all the things organisers need the most. They need time. They’re always needing more time. They need more resources in general. They don’t have enough team members. Intelligence, access to accessibility.

AI does all that stuff. It frees up your time. It gives you essentially virtual teammates in the form of large language model research or copywriters or designers and with the data that it can provide you, it can give you intelligence to make better decisions. So I’m in the empowerment business, really. That’s all it is. It’s just more horsepower. 

Ankush Gupta (4:14) And what do you think, Nick, about the loss of the in-person networking in the virtual world that really wasn’t able to crack this one problem of networking, pressing someone’s hand, grabbing a drink at a nearby bar? 

Nick Borelli (4:30) It didn’t. I think we can call it. I have friends on that side and I’m sure they’ll have their cases. But I don’t know what numbers they would be able to point to that would prove that that was the case.

Honestly, I think that with as much digitization that has happened everywhere else, I think everything is a push-pull and a craving of connection is something that is hard to beat. I think live events, honestly, I can’t believe that we’re still spending so much of our time in live events delivering lectures, which I think, frankly, Zoom and YouTube do better than our events do. I go to events, personally, I’m going to spend my time in the hallways. I want to meet new people and I want to meet as many people as possible. AI can give you even matchmaking to make sure that you meet the right people and I think that that will push this even further. But ultimately, I just don’t think that the acceleration of trust happens in a digital format in the same way that it does in person. 

Ankush Gupta (5:30) Yeah, I think well said and I think a lot of people that I know as well have come with the realisation that they can watch a session on Zoom, on YouTube. After the event and they really want to be at the event, maximising their time and making those connections that they think are going to further their businesses, their personal brands, etc. So that’s been an interesting insight.

Tell us, Nick, with your expertise in campaign design in the hospitality and events sector, what’s the one channel that you’ve depended on to bring in the registrations in the past? Do you think AI is going to fundamentally impact this channel and activity as well? 

Nick Borelli (6:06) Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to pick one, just one. If the parameters are what’s the one that closes and what has the straightest line, it’s still, it’s been emailed so consistently and, in that way, AI is really good at segmentation and personalization and just the likelihood for success of the deployment. 

Outside of that, I think it’s really storytelling and platforms are very, very specific to whatever type of event that you’re in or what have you and maybe crowdsourcing content in the storytelling. 

Overall, the biggest trend that I’ve seen over the last 10 years when it comes to event marketing is how blind people are to calls to action and advertising. It just, it’s very, we’re over it. We don’t even see it. I don’t even see the inorganic ads in Google anymore. Like my brain just glosses over them and in the same way of like generic call to actions or some kind of early bird, I don’t see early birds anymore. I don’t pay attention to that. Like I make my decisions and it’s hard to be pushed into it, except, I can be pushed by a colleague. I can be pushed by someone that I trust. 

So in the game of leveraging trust, I think that’s the most important channel that exists right now is being able to take everything from the events themselves and offer that. Because I’ll believe someone else who’s been in my position, but I’m not going to believe superlatives. This is the best, the biggest. 

Ankush Gupta (7:41) You know, that’s a fantastic observation, Nick. And that’s one of the reasons that I started Eventible, our conference review platform a couple of years back, because I wanted to, one of the problems that I was trying to address was of finding events and the way that you exactly described. I thought it was a bit broken because, how are most people finding conferences? Either through advertising on their LinkedIn feeds or their Facebook feeds or a water cooler conversation? Someone saying, but it wasn’t really the best scenario and if you asked anybody, do you know what ten conferences or five or three conferences you plan to go to this year? Nobody really had a list. It wasn’t a very structured activity.

So we wanted to take that bit out. It’s like recommending a movie to a friend versus going to the Netflix app and finding a bunch of stuff based on your interests that you can watch. Right. So which is what we’ve tried to do. We’ve sort of created a platform and depending on a person’s interests, whether somebody wants to network or learn something new, we show them the events that they could be attending.

Nick Borelli (8:40) That’s I mean, honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever attended a business conference without some sort of recommendation. If my network doesn’t know about it or someone is I can see in a position that I’m in, then I don’t think it’s probably mature enough to invest in. And I just don’t know what I’m getting into because I’ve been burned by too many events that sort of promise everything and don’t deliver. And I really think one of the biggest post event or post pandemic habits that I’ve created is I really, I don’t necessarily want to go to events unless it’s really valuable. Like I’m not just going to events as the single source of information or networking. Like I can do a lot of that digitally, but I go to the ones that are trying to do something differently and like I experience FOMO, but only through the lens of someone else. Like I don’t, I can’t be pushed into that from any kind of advertising copy.

But like on my LinkedIn over the last week, anecdotally, I saw a number of people that I know that were at C2 Montreal and I’m like, I should be there like that. These are smart people. I trust them. What they like I would like and that’s enough to push me to go. But none of their, their email copy, as good as it would be, would do that for me. It would have to be from someone that I can see myself in their shoes.

Ankush Gupta (10:05) Absolutely. Nick, tell us now, since joining Zenus, how have you guys been leveraging ethical AI to transform event experiences? And what are some of the tangible benefits that you’ve observed? And what is ethical AI in the first place? 

Nick Borelli (10:19) Yeah. Ethical AI is, it begs the question, what is unethical AI? So what’s rare in technology and certainly in bleeding edge technology is technology with some restraint. 

Generally speaking, if the genie is out of the bottle, you go full throttle. And if any country is guilty of that, it’s the U.S. Like we were definitely not thoughtful. The disruption usually means breaking stuff. Doesn’t always have to, but that’s generally the speed it goes. 

Ethical AI is the idea of utilising AI without harm, broadly speaking. And for us, we do something, it’s a vision AI variant called facial analysis. So a lot of times you’ll say, I’ll say those words and they go, oh, yeah, yeah, facial recognition, and they’re like, yeah, no,  it’s actually that’s where the restraint comes in. So facial recognition are cameras that are recording things and then accessing a database to determine who you are and what you’ve been doing. And then there’s the storage of that information and other access to other databases in order to follow people and their behaviours. Maybe there’s, there’s good times to use that. 

However, if you don’t want to traffic on individuals’ personalised information, if you want them to retain their anonymousness, but still be able to have business intelligence, what we do is, is that you can see that there were ‘a’ faces, like not ‘the’ face, but there is ‘a’ face here currently and many. And then we can determine what you did in that experience to determine if you had an impression of a specific sponsorship activation or booth. If there was somebody present and then for how long, which is dwell rates and then also if you had a positive experience in that area.

So the upshot is if I were to say at your event, there’s a big sign that there’s a sponsor that says VISA and VISA were to say to the show, how’d that do for me? You go, I mean, I guess good. We had a good show. Pretty meaningless statements.

With our data, you could say your signage had 2000 impressions, of those impressions, a 32nd to 62nd dwell rate made up 70% of those people. You had biological males that were there longer than women under 40. We can start telling you what that did in the grand scheme of things and give you brand metrics, top of the funnel stuff.

Ankush Gupta (12:51) So when you say facial expressions, facial analysis, are you looking for certain kinds of expressions to denote certain kinds of sentiment? So tell us a little bit about what kind of expressions are these beyond someone just smiling because a person could not be smiling, but could still be engaged and satisfied with what he’s experiencing. 

Nick Borelli (13:11) That’s right. Thousands and thousands of faces are in a bank of models called Fairface that we have access to. And first off, we’re not looking for anything that one individual is experiencing because there’s so much variance there. So we’re looking at groups and samples. 

And secondly, we’re not looking for a specific emotion because there’s lots of variances in there and then the numbers would be pretty poor. We’re looking for a number of different sentiments that would be bucketed into a larger bucket called positive sentiment. So it could be in this conversation like we’re having right now of anything of engagement. So if it’s a positive engagement where your head is moving and you’re interested and there’s that. OK, we’re going to call that positive sentiment because you’re not recoiling. So because it’s in a big bucket, the effectiveness of the likelihood for that is very high. If we were looking for anyone who was exclusively expressing wow, too specific, too much variance, your wow could be different from my wow. 

Nick Borelli (14:16) If we look at aggregate median scores of large groups of people, then it becomes very accurate. So, there’s only so much we can give people with a high degree of likelihood and that is one we can deliver on. And, there’s lots of purported use cases of AI for in the vision AI that says we can look for just one thing dubious.

So, again another limit that we have but with that, we would rather give you what we believe is real truth as opposed to a more exciting half truth. And honestly, return on experience data is very hard to come by, especially passively collected. 

Now, actively collected return on experience. Absolutely. And we really I think we partner with that really well. So lots of people in this area, 70 percent, we could even go down and say had a positive experience in this zone. 

We can tell you that we might not be able to tell you why. Now, post event data surveys, what have you, might be able to say, they’ll be, maybe not a high percentage, but enough that they will say, I really loved this. It’s like, OK, well, this married with this says, this is a phenomenon that’s happening and the anecdotal gives it a name. It makes it real and it makes it a story that is sticky and valuable. So we’re a big proponent of saying, like saying that we work well with the active data collection and we’re not definitely not going to be instead of, but we both of them sort of help each other out a lot. 

Ankush Gupta (15:54) Oh, that’s super interesting, Nick. And where do you think our listeners can hop onto and learn more about this to your website? You have some case studies in there?

Nick Borelli (16:02) We do have case studies. Yes. It’s Z-E-N-U-S dot A-I or “Z”, depending on where you’re at as far as the first letter. But yeah, we have case studies. We work with events like PCMAs, conferences, IMAX, IAEs, Expo, Expo, lots of industry events. But also we’ve worked with companies like Dell and Google and many others. Anyone who loves data, like our first wave of clients are the people who are starving for more data and the rest of the industry. It’s our job to be able to make data not sound scary and really just turn it into stories and that’s all data really is and events is listening. 

Ankush Gupta (16:42) That’s great. And I think events are becoming so much more about data, analysing data, collecting data, making sense of that data. And this is probably a takeaway from our pandemic era. 

Nick Borelli (16:53) I think so. I think it made people hungry. I think marketers got involved in the events more too and their whole lives are data. And you got to report up and you can’t report up saying it was a good event. Like wait, I just spent $100,000 and you’re telling me it was just good. Like, what is good to mean? So having something that’s more empirical and also the opportunity to be iterative as opposed to linear thinking is where data comes in and is vital. 

Ankush Gupta (17:20) Fantastic. Our next question, Nick, I know we’ve touched upon this a little bit, but has to be said again. Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in an interview said that due to the prevalence of AI, human-centred activities and opportunities to connect will ultimately take centre stage. Was he describing events? What’s your take on it? 

Nick Borelli (17:40) I do think he’s describing events.

Ankush Gupta (17:42) Even though he didn’t say events or conferences. 

Nik Borelli (17:47) It’s our domain. 

Ankush Gupta (17:48) Will the rise of AI make us value these person to person experiences even more? Are we heading into the golden age of events because of AI? 

Nick Borelli (17:56) So my hypothesis as I’ve been travelling all over the world presenting on AI is just that. That we are going in the events world, we are going to be an oasis of truth. Everything else is going to be optimised. It is going to be the best of scrapings. But the messy business of coming together is going to be in high demand, in my opinion, simply because nature abhors a vacuum. If everything is coming out and sort of polished and clean, what you’re going to want more so is authentic, vulnerable opportunities for some risk, opportunities for growth. All of those things happen in in-person experiences because it’s the nature of bringing people together. Like a colleague of mine, Freeman, her name is Megan Finnell. She calls like, you know, experience design. It’s like designing for human collision, which I really love because it’s just like, that’s it. Like we’re smashing people together, so to speak. And you will get something unpredictable out of it. There’s an element of serendipity that runs through that AI doesn’t do well. And AI is very good at telling you the best of what was, but it’s not as good at creating something that never was. And I think that’s going to be the human domain is true creativity. 

Nick Borelli (19:17) And what’s going to make it interesting is as you are creative and creating new things, then AI is able to scrape that. So you can’t do the same thing twice in order to be creative. So it’s going to make creativity and creating new things a requisite. Because otherwise, as soon as you birthed it, it’s democratised and available to everyone on demand. So you have to be on to the next thing. You can’t just figure out your little niche and then just do that forever. You’ve got to create something new and then trash it and then do something new again. And it’s more of a leadership mentality. But events lend themselves to that just because every event, I think, is an experiment.

Every event is a hypothesis. It’s design, thinking and action. And AI is more of a sort of best of album. It’s not the new album that changes your life. It’s the sort of collection of hits and events are, even content is going to be like that. 

Like historically, content, they told the content developers to take yourself out of it and make it all objective. AI does that at scale. So if you want to stand out, you should not do that because AI, I think, does it better. And you should bring yourself and your story into everything. And that makes vulnerability an asset and it makes risk-taking an asset. And if we change the way that we design and incorporate that more into it, we’re going to be providing everything that AI doesn’t.

Ankush Gupta (20:47) Absolutely. I love that. And I especially love that one line where you said nature abhors a vacuum. That deserves to be on a T-shirt somewhere. It’s like that Jurassic Park line.

Nick Borelli (20:59) That’s it. Life finds a way. 

Ankush Gupta (21:01) Life finds a way, right? 

Nick Borelli (21:02) That’s it. That’s it.

Ankush Gupta (21:03) Nick, what drives your passion for marketing and event strategy? How do you stay inspired and innovative in such a rapidly changing field? And what is the advice that you’d really give to younger event professionals to stay on top of their game? 

Nick Borelli (21:16) Yeah. I mean, ultimately, I think that I like people. I like people coming together. I like ideas born of two different perspectives that wouldn’t have come together otherwise. That’s what drives me. I think that the world is algorithmically separating people and, I think there needs to be an opposing force that is as powerful, bringing people together. I think that’s needed now more than ever. 

And my advice to anyone is probably one of immersion. Go in the deep end. One of the beautiful things about this industry is, maybe just in my experience, but I’ve had it validated. Anyone who is seen as the leader in this or the top mind in this, anyone pretty much could knock on their door and ask if they have 30 minutes to talk to them and they’ll say yes. That’s not all industries. We really have a giving nature and people who are passionate want to be passionate with another person that’s passionate. 

So I would say cultivate your own passion and then engage with people. Don’t be fearful. If you think the biggest person in our industry wouldn’t return your call, you’re probably wrong. They would. And if you bring something to the table for them, give them a fresh perspective and engage them, they’ll give you a lot as well.

So, that’s broad, very specific. Like I follow – I am a huge proponent of social media, but of social media of absorption more so than pushing out. When it was new, I was like, oh, I understand this. It’s a storytelling medium, etc. I dove into that and built my network that way. Now, in the last like five or six years, I’m on it all the time and I very rarely contribute. I’m just incredibly curious. So following lots of people who are extremely passionate and being curious and absorbing is what I would – get into an association, get your hands dirty, immerse yourself, and you’ll absorb a lot because everyone gives a ton here. 

Ankush Gupta (23:13) Wonderful. I think that’s a really positive note to end our conversation, our little chat today, Nick. It’s been a real pleasure having you with us. I look forward especially to learning a little more about what Zenus does and this whole field of facial analysis and sentiment recognition. I think it’s very interesting. It’s going to play a huge part as we go down our journey over the next five and ten years.

Thanks a lot, Nick.

Nick Borelli (23:36) Yeah, I appreciate it.