Meetings and event technology provider Aventri has appointed Jim Sharpe as CEO. He succeeds Oni Chukwu, who will serve as executive chairman after six years leading Aventri's transformation into a meetings tech platform, scaling the business and guiding it through a major private equity investment. Sharpe brings executive experience in high-growth, technology-enabled businesses. Prior to joining Aventri, he spent six years as general manager and managing director at Gerson Lehrman Group, a platform for top professionals to connect and share expertise. Prior to GLG, Sharpe served as CEO of manufacturing firm Standard Purification. Sharpe's GLG background informs his vision for Aventri and for the overall value of meetings. He spoke with BTN editor-in-chief Elizabeth West on the eve of his appointment.
Your experience at GLG offers key insights into the value of meetings. Tell us about that.
I've spent a good part of my career focused on making meaningful business connections for people. At [GLG], we reinvented the way business professionals connected with one another to share expertise and do business together. As a result, I came to understand the value of these connections and what happens when you are able to speak to the right person. That has inspired me, as has the role of technology and data in facilitating that.
How is technology, and particularly data intelligence, enhancing the face-to-face experience for meeting goers?
The event management space is going through significant technology change right now, and that's exciting to me. Data and AI are playing a more central role, as well as personalization. What excited me about Aventri is that the company offers a fully integrated solution and provides a seamless platform across all its modules, which makes it uniquely powerful, particularly when it comes to data. We want to focus on the ability to take the data layer beneath the platform and leverage machine learning to create recommendation engines that drive a better experience for attendees. We also want the customer to be able to take that data and understand the intent of their attendee as well as the ROI. This year, we will have innovations coming out that make those capabilities more powerful.
What's your vision for that recommendation engine?
We have some of the attributes of this today but if you look ahead a few years, [it involves] having a fully integrated mobile app so attendees can walk around the floor with an app that is aware of their interests and needs in real time. In the future we should have perfect recommendations of sessions to attend in real time or, if you are running late, a suggestion for a relevant session that is near to you. [Recommendation engines also should] identify meaningful networking connections and facilitate ad hoc meetings you can arrange on the fly through the technology. I'm passionate about recommendation engines, and I think Aventri is in a position with our data to make them more powerful than any other provider.
What about advances in strategic meetings management?
We have areas of innovation for SMM clients to create seamless capability for calendaring, planning and budgeting around their strategy. In the next several weeks, we'll have a couple things to talk about in terms of our venue inventory and sourcing tools. There's also a data and real-time reporting piece that we are attacking.
How does Aventri stack up, both to the active meetings technology startup community and to the established leader, Cvent? You must feel pressure on both ends of the spectrum.
From our perspective, Aventri can go toe to toe with any provider out there right now. The startups often focus on one, two or three steps in the puzzle, and I think we can go head-to-head [with] startups on any feature. If a company is adopting numerous startups, they have to worry about adopting several user experiences as well. We've done a great job of integrating features into our platform, rather than bolting them on, which is a hallmark of other suppliers. On the larger end of the spectrum, maybe the pressure is on them. We have a best-in-class integrated platform, but also we are nimble. It's an exciting time in our industry and we are looking forward to competing.
What are your leadership priorities?
I believe in investing in talent in the organization and making sure our team is getting the investment they need to succeed. My approach to leadership favors communication, accountability and alignment throughout the company. As we set the strategic vision, I want to be heavily communicative to achieve clear alignment and focus on providing a great customer experience.