The floor was unwalkable. Every delegate who asked got one they could walk.

The setup

A guided tour ends and the executive is standing in a hall with 2,996 indexed exhibitors and 260 sessions. The tour answered two hours of it. The rest of the floor is still there, and so is the reason they flew in.

Hub Institute put a QR code at the end of each tour. That was the whole distribution: no registration import, no opt-in checkbox, no outbound message. Every conversation on this page started because somebody chose to scan and type.

What delegates did

411 conversations started. Here is how far they went.

Bar widths are proportional to the counts. No percentage here is a share of anybody's registered list, because there was no list. 411 people opened Sena on their own initiative and 290 of them typed something. That is pull, not reach, and it is a different quality of signal from an opened template.

107 delegates came out of it identified with a phone on file, plus 23 of the client's own guides. 30 voice notes arrived across 19 conversations. The longest conversation ran 119 messages.

"Je souhaite que tu me fasses un parcours de stand innovant et interessant a voir en 2h (5/6 stands) en tenant compte que je suis responsable IT dans l'entreprise"

Build me a route of innovative stands worth seeing in two hours, five or six of them, bearing in mind I am the IT lead.

IT lead, consumer electronics · 12-message conversation

"I'm a data manager in fashion industry, what do you recommand for me at vivatech?"

Data manager, fashion · 11-message conversation

"Prends des notes pour moi"

Take notes for me.

Delegate, 20-message conversation

What the organizer learned

None of this came from a registration form. There was not one.

• 1

  Three out of four delegate conversations were one job: find me the right companies.

  173 of 238, 73%. Not the agenda, not the map, not the speakers. Executives on a scouting mission wanted a 2,996-exhibitor floor compressed into a shortlist they could actually walk, filtered by their sector and their role.

• 2

  The guides adopted it harder than the delegates did.

  23 of Hub Institute's own tour experts used Sena while preparing and running tours, 52 conversations, and they went deeper than delegates on every measure. Their recommendations reach the delegations a second time, through the guide. That is the clearest signal that this was a working tool and not a novelty.

• 3

  They used it as a working tool, not a lookup.

  Delegates asked Sena to build a themed two-hour route, to profile a company on the spot, and in one case to take notes for them. 15 conversations ran past ten messages and 30 voice notes came in from the floor. That is an executive treating an agent as staff, mid-event, with their hands full.

What the discovery actually produced

1,569 of the 1,672 recommendations were exhibitor and startup routing, 94%. Session and speaker routing was the remaining 103. Peer introductions were not part of this deployment and none were made.

The demand concentrated hard by theme rather than spreading evenly: humanoid and physical robotics led, followed by applied and agentic AI, then retail and luxury technology, data and CRM, fintech, and mobility. An organizer can read that ranking as next year's floor plan and next year's sponsor pitch, because it is what buyers asked for in their own words rather than what a survey offered them.

Delegates worked in two languages, roughly 51% French and 38% English, with the guides almost entirely in French.

Which exhibitors were recommended, and how often, is Hub Institute's data, not ours. It sits in their 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 Hub Institute: the exhibitor and session data, a QR code at the end of each tour, and their analyst phone list so their team's usage could be reported separately from their customers'. Sena handled the rest.

Everything on this page came from a code on a card. There was no attendee list, no opt-in on registration and no outbound message, so every conversation here is pure pull. Add the push and the numbers move: at Les Entrepreneurs Haute-Garonne, a 462-attendee forum that put the opt-in on the registration form and named it in a pre-event email, 76% of participants opted in and 92% of delivered messages got a reply. That push is the one thing we need from you.