BEA: Online experience with artificial intelligence

Bernexpo Groupe is responding to the current situation with an innovative alternative: visitors can discover the exhibitors' offerings online and experience them in a surprising way thanks to artificial intelligence. For the exhibiting companies, the cancellation meant the loss of an important sales and contact channel and thus a marked drop in sales.

AI online portal

The BEA organizer provides all exhibitors free of charge with the online portal Portal.bea-messe.ch on which the products and offers can be staged in a novel way. "We want to stand by our customers as a reliable partner and support them even in the coronavirus crisis," says Jennifer Somm (pictured), CEO of Bernexpo Groupe. After waiving all stand fees for 2020, the company is offering an exciting extension to the real BEA with its online portal built on artificial intelligence.

Novel experience for visitors 

On the online portal, visitors can type their product wish into a text field: Which products do they want to see? Which service would they like advice on? Based on the text entered, each visitor receives an offer tailored to their wishes, including links to the websites or online stores of the BEA exhibitors. A sophisticated algorithm ensures that the results are continuously determined on the basis of new text entries.

Support from Innosuisse

Bernexpo Groupe is the first provider ever to use the "Text-based Recommender System" from Jaywalker Digital in Lucerne for the new BEA online portal. The "Recommender System" is a software that determines the interest of users in real time and recommends to them from a set of available offers or objects exactly those in which they are most likely to be interested.

The algorithm, which is based on free text input, was developed by the Algorithmic Business Research Team ABIZ of the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts together with Jaywalker Digital and financially supported by the Swiss Agency for Innovation Promotion Innosuisse.