Five conferences, one badge, and an attendee who cannot read the program.

The setup

FOST New York put five co-located conferences under one badge. The program was dense enough that nobody could read it end to end, and the registration form knew each attendee's name, company and title. It knew nothing about why they were coming.

The organizer added two things: an opt-in checkbox on the registration form, and a QR code on site. Sena did the rest on WhatsApp and web chat.

What attendees did

179 of 1,306 registered attendees opted in, 13.7%. 173 of them had a phone number on file. Here is what happened to those 173 messages.

85% of sent messages reached a phone. 78% of those were read, and 23% came back with a reply. Every one of those replies is somebody who chose to start a conversation with an agent they had never used before.

Counting web chat and the people who messaged Sena without being asked, 194 unique attendees used it, 14.9% of everyone registered. 25 of them started the conversation themselves. Another 117 arrived through the on-site QR code and used web chat anonymously.

The ones who engaged were not browsing. Of 67 identified conversations, 40 ran three messages or more and 26 ran five or more. The longest ran 24.

"I'm a senior staff engineer working to become principal engineer in fintech. Is there anything I should prioritize for getting more knowledge on AI agents, on MCPs, agentic governance and enterprise-scale AI?"

Staff engineer, fintech · 24-message conversation

"Build me a schedule so I can make the most of my time on both days."

Engineering manager

"I am not a technical person but an AI startup founder on the business side, looking to understand how to form our API strategy. What sessions do you suggest I attend?"

CEO, generative AI startup

What the organizer learned

None of this was in the registration data.

• 1

  The audience came for one converged topic, not five conferences.

  API strategy and AI agents as a single surface dominated conversation frequency, with agentic governance and MCP right behind. Three of the four most-recommended sessions were about governing or building for agents.

• 2

  A quarter of active conversations were one job: filter this program for me.

  17 of 66 active conversations, 26%, asked Sena to cut the agenda down to their profile and their clock. Not the agenda. The agenda filtered.

• 3

  The audience specified next year's programme, unprompted.

  Three asks came back again and again: session recordings, calendar reminders for the talks they had picked, and a way to filter other attendees by role. That is a roadmap with demand already attached to it, gathered while people were still in the building.

What sponsors got

Sena made 38 sponsor recommendations, each routed to an attendee whose stated agenda matched what that sponsor sells. They did not land evenly. Five sponsors took 20 of the 38, 53%, and the attendees carrying an agentic or API-governance agenda were the ones most likely to act on a recommendation.

Attendees also looked sponsors up by name, unprompted. Brand lookups were a distinct job Sena handled around a dozen times over the two days.

For the renewal conversation, that is qualified interest with a reason attached, per attendee, in writing. Not a badge scan.

Which sponsor got what is the organizer's data, not ours. It sits in the FOST New York client report and is not reproduced here. Your event's numbers would be handled the same way.

The numbers

What this took to run

From the organizer: an opt-in checkbox on the registration form, one link in a pre-event email, a QR code on site, and the program shared with us. Sena handled the rest.

How many attendees you reach is set by how hard the opt-in is pushed, not by the agent. Put it on the registration form and name it in a pre-event email and it climbs: at Les Entrepreneurs Haute-Garonne, a 462-attendee forum that did exactly that, 76% of participants opted in and 92% of delivered messages got a reply. That push is the one thing we need from you, and we will tell you so before the event rather than after.