Executive Summary
The Mumbai AI Summit 2020 was India’s first thought leadership AI Summit charting the landscape of AI globally. It was presented by Startup Réseau, the ecosystem enabler, which brings together startups, enterprises, capital, markets, mentors, and services. Having earlier successfully built India’s top meta-accelerator, they now operate primarily in the technology innovation sector.
The AI Summit was planned on a massive scale, bringing together 50+ expert AI speakers across 23 sessions and 15 hours of content. The 2-day summit, held on 24th and 30th April, was attended by 350+ participants from 15 countries and 45 cities.
The Challenge (and the Solution)
While the Startup Réseau team was burning candles on both ends, to put the pieces of the event together, the COVID-19 lockdown hit us all. It meant either cancelling the whole event and letting over four months of effort go down the drain or evolve to online events. Being in the emerging technology space, they looked at this as an opportunity to test the waters with online events.
Ajay Ramasubramaniam, Founder, Startup Réseau along with Jagruti Bista, Project Lead – The Mumbai AI Summit, pointed out that they found Airmeet through recommendations. The team decided to take a demo while trying out other event technology platforms. Airmeet was a clear winner for them solving every challenge in the way and more.
Challenge: Transcending To a Virtual Event While Delighting and Scaling
One of the biggest challenges, apart from shifting the entire in-person event to a virtual event, was scaling the event to cater to a potential 1000+ audience from various countries seamlessly. Given that they were hosting the event for the AI sector, the technology partner had to be a powerful platform to delight the technically advanced audience.
The event plan had to be very strategic, too, since 50+ speaker sessions meant long hours before the screen, which could easily cause screen fatigue. Hosting policymakers, founders, industry leaders, investors, and international delegates and establishing themselves as an authority in the sector, the privacy and security of the event was a concern too.
Solution:
With a global attendance, virtual events give you the leverage of tapping into a wider audience. Airmeet was able to meet all the above criteria that they needed from the event technology platform:
- Airmeet allows you to create an event quickly. The summit had only a month to go for event creation and marketing. It meant that the event had to be created in a short span to start promoting it in-time. With just a few details, they could create numerous sessions in a single event, add speakers, and manage attendees.
- Given the number of sessions, the event was easily split across 2-days with more than 4 hours each day. It was easily managed on Airmeet, enabling them to pause the event midway and resume after a gap of 6 days.
- Security and privacy are among Airmeet’s strong features. Ensure that your event is safe from threats, end-to-end encryption, GDPR compliance for data protection, guest authentication, and chat moderation. No downloadable component and no installer ensures that the user’s data is safe.
- Glitch-free experience with HD, real-time and lag-free videos that work on all modern browsers.
- Airmeet events can support thousands of attendees parallelly, to be able to bring together a global audience without any constraints.
- Scaling in-terms of speakers was also unprecedented as the earlier unavailable speakers were now willing because the lockdown pushed everyone inside. Airmeet supports up to 16 speakers so that they could hold panel discussions and multi-speaker sessions.
“The ease-of-use and intuitive design made the adoption quick. Airmeet support and the technical team provided excellent support throughout our journey from setting up to rehearsal and made the transition effortless.”
– Ajay
“The ease-of-use and intuitive design made the adoption quick. Airmeet support and the technical team provided excellent support throughout our journey from setting up to rehearsal and made the transition effortless.”
Challenge: Product Showcase
The AI Summit also provided a platform for 10 product showcases that were disrupting the AI business application sector. In an in-person event, innovative products are exhibited to the various stakeholders. You get an opportunity to create awareness, promote, get leads, seek feedback, and hopefully catch the attention of investors. They needed to provide the same experience with the virtual event now.
Solution:
The plan was to dedicate two sessions entirely for the product showcase. Each product company would get to present its product to the wide audience, including investors and potential customers.
Airmeet events are a projection of the real world into the virtual. In each session, 5 product owners/speakers talked about, and showcased, their product through easy screen share and live video. They answered queries through the “raise hand” and “chat” feature. And they engaged with the investors in a mini-virtual conference in the social lounge during a networking break.
Challenge: Engagement and Networking Among All Stakeholders
The event aimed to focus on the use-cases leveraging AI and draft future growth involving different stakeholders, including consumers, enterprise, and government stakeholders of the ecosystem. When such a massive network of changemakers come together, the platform has to offer immersive engagement opportunities, enable unhindered communication, and promote networking.
Solution:
The Airmeet event provided plenty of opportunity through its features to keep the audience engaged throughout the epic two-day-long event. They incorporated different formats of sessions, including independent talks, presentations, fireside chats, panel discussions, and speaker-led sessions. They offered AI-startups to present their pitches rather than simple talks, to give a more in-depth perspective into the industry to the stakeholders and improve conversion. The audience could take a break anytime and hop into the social lounge to network. They could also ask questions to the speaker or chat to engage better.
Way Forward
Ajay told us, “This inaugural edition of the summit, leveraging Airmeet as our technology partner, was a huge success. The number of global attendees and speakers would not have been otherwise possible. It gives us the confidence to plan frequently and host the next edition of the summit again in a few months. The event planning that earlier involved roadshows and city tours is now unnecessary and its elimination lets us focus on the content of the event rather than logistics. Not just planning but putting together an amazing panel of speakers and sessions marketed itself and took away a lot of effort involved in promoting otherwise.“
