Automation Drives Sustainable Trade Shows Innovation

The brand-new AI-based automation system should be used to capture and minimize carbon footprints from trade shows on a large scale.

Zak Homuth, a well-known designer of collaborative AI and IoT systems, has unveiled a new project in the domain of sustainability with the primary focus on high-tech automation. Homuth has also come over to Pie Factory to create the future of TIM, an emissions-map tool that is already in use by some of the world's leading brands.

TIM is still a manual, expert-driven platform, but the improved version will be based on heavy automation and AI to produce fast and scalable sustainability data. The platform to be redesigned will be more than 120 interrelated components of AI, which will be capable of providing real-time emission analysis within the complexity of event settings.

One of the main developments in the new TIM platform is an impact tool that is camera-based. With a smartphone, exhibitors will be able to take pictures of their booths and instantly compute carbon footprints, compared to lengthy evaluations that would yield the results in a few seconds. The developers state that such a high degree of automation is to enable sustainability measurement of large-scale trade shows to be feasible.

Homuth will also contribute much experience to the project, having created a cloud-based engineering platform, Upverter, as well as worked as the VP of Innovation at Altium and as a system architect at Sheertex. In his opinion, the events industry has been backward in the use of software and responsibility.

Pie Factory provides an opportunity to respond to the increasing pressure on the regulatory spectrum and the need of the customer to act transparently by integrating automation into sustainability reporting. This would establish an industry standard for trade shows, making sustainability reporting measurable, optimized, and accountable rather than an exception.