I was standing in a long queue at the café at the Marina Bay Sands Convention Centre and wondering why it doesn’t have a robotic barista because the human ones were looking rather frazzled when I spotted the man next to me, wearing a delegate badge that says “Black Hat Asia”.
Intrigued because I associate Black Hat with hackers – and Google does tell me that “the term black hat has been used to differentiate criminal hackers from white hat and gray hat hackers” – and I’ve always wanted to meet a real-life hacker, I asked him what he does.
Without missing a beat, he says, “My company does security upskilling training in penetration testing.”
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So usually I am pretty good at the follow-up question but I have to confess, he had me at penetration.
I was torn between asking, what kind of penetration are you talking about? And what about it needs to be tested? But I thought that kind of talk is probably better over beer than coffee and anyway, fortunately or unfortunately, my queue number was called and I had to rush for my soy decaf latte, which I am sure Black Hats do not drink.
Other than thinking this man needs upskilling training in conversational skills, it made me curious enough to check out the conference which apparently is held at Marina Bay Sands, Singapore, every year. Last year, the same event attracted around 3,000 delegates. (I am clearly in the wrong business.)
Its website says, “Black Hat provides attendees with the latest in research, development, and trends in Information Security. Here the brightest professionals and researchers in the industry come together for a total of four days—two or four days of deeply technical hands-on Trainings, followed by two days of the latest research and vulnerability disclosures in the Briefings.”
It was started by one Jeff Moss (born January 1, 1975), also known as Dark Tangent, an American hacker, computer and internet security expert who founded the Black Hat and DEF CON computer security conferences.
Looking around at the attendees gathered for the conference, I didn’t see a lot of networking or socialising going on, just a lot of mainly men-and-some-women-in-black, all sitting down and staring, typing, bashing, swiping at their screens.
It’s a very different crowd from the one gathered one floor below at The Meetings Show Asia Pacific, where humans gather together to buy and sell services in the business events and meetings sector.
A launch of the Northstar Travel Group, it’s the largest gathering of MICE professionals in Singapore to date and the trade show format includes business appointments at big, beautiful booths, lots of social and networking spaces for humans to interact with each other and a couple of small spaces for conference sessions.
At this show, it’s more about human interaction than penetration testing which, I have since learnt, means they test how vulnerable your company’s IT system is and how deeply hackers can penetrate. It all made sense when someone explained it to me that way.
Anyway, I happened to be running a couple of panels at The Meetings Show on how AI could revolutionise business events and travel and honestly, the relevation is that we don’t need AI or any other tech to do that, rather human imagination is what’s needed and technology is but the means to achieve the outcomes desired by humans.
The three panellists in the first panel – Ong Wee Min, Vice President of Sales & MICE, Marina Bay Sands; Veemal Gungadin, CEO, GevMe and Panos Moutafis, CEO, Zenus – are at the frontline of the events business, and I asked them to imagine what they’d like events to do for them, with or without tech.
Marina Bay Sands hosts more conferences and trade shows than anyone else in Singapore, and Ong is trying to get his clients to think about event design, a rethink of how they use spaces and to create “safe spaces of no-sell zones, where people are free to share openly”.
He said there was an opportunity for AI tools to provide better qualitative metrics for event success, moving beyond traditional measures like sales or foot traffic to focus on sentiment and the quality of interactions.
The most important metric, he said, is “What is the exit behaviour you want when the customer exits from the show floor”, and use that to shape event design.
Gungadin, whose company has developed SnapSight, an AI-powered tool that provides summaries of conference sessions, spoke about “wanting to make friends”. At one event he attended, he said organisers had scraped profiles and “sat us next to people we didn’t know but should know”. At another, “instead of talking about sustainability, we were taken to the garden to plant a tree. It was a good bonding experience, I made friends.”
Moutafis’ company runs a facial sentiment analysis software so organisers can tell if customers are unhappy or delighted, and how to deliver better customer experiences. “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist,” he said.
Addressing a common complaint of exhibitors that the second or third day of a show tends to slow down with fewer appointments, he shared this insight. “When you look at the qualitative metrics like dwell time, which represents how long people stayed and talked to each other, and facial expressions to tell if they have a good or bad experience – when you look at these metrics, you will see that the second and third day of the show usually has higher scores.”
Having said all that, they agreed that “event technology should be used responsibly to enhance experiences without leading to over-reliance on screens, ensuring that it adds value rather than detracts from human connections.”
“If there’s an opportunity to not use technology, it shouldn’t be used,” said Gungadin.
I wonder what my new-found friend from Black Hat would think of these ideas.