Field Notes
I'm Building Software Live at CHS Manchester. I Don't Know What It Is Yet.
On 30 September I'm doing three sessions on the show floor at CHS Manchester. By the end of the day I'll have built a piece of working software, live, and the room decides what it is.
On the 30th of September I'm doing three sessions on the show floor at CHS Manchester. By the end of the day I'll have built a piece of working software, live, in front of whoever's in the room.
Here's the part that keeps me up: I don't get to choose what it is. You do.
If you want to be part of that, the single most useful thing you can do before the day is fill in The Event AI Behaviour Study. It takes a few minutes and it feeds directly into session one.
How it works
Session one. You tell me what's broken.
Not in a workshop-y way. There's a QR code, you scan it, and you type in the thing that slows you down. The task you rebuild from scratch every week. The system that doesn't talk to the other system. The bit of Tuesday afternoon you'd pay someone else to do.
It goes up on screen, anonymously, and groups itself into themes as it comes in. Then the room votes.
Somewhere in the middle of that I'll share early findings from The Event AI Behaviour Study, which we've been running to work out how event professionals are actually using AI rather than how conference panels say they are. Some of it is not what I expected.
Whatever wins the vote, I start building in the break.
Session two. I come back with something rough.
It won't be finished and it won't be pretty. That's deliberate. Everyone shows you the polished end result and nobody shows you the middle, which is where all the useful information is.
You get to pull it apart. What's missing, what's wrong, whether it solves the thing you actually asked for.
Then I'll give you the method. There's a prompt I use with clients that I'm giving away in that session, because the questions were never the valuable part. It flips the usual thing on its head: instead of you interrogating AI, it interviews you. About your week, your repeated work, the parts of the job you avoid. Fifteen minutes later you've got a map of where your time is genuinely going, which is almost never where you think.
Session three. The finished thing, and how it was made.
I'll build a piece of it again from scratch, on screen, so you can see there's no sleight of hand. Plain English in, working software out. No code, no setup, nothing you can't open tonight.
Then we're launching the CHS Innovation Hub with the team at CHS. A free place for the industry to get practical AI tools, learn to build their own, and put forward the problems worth solving next. What gets built on it starts with what the room decides on the day.
Why I'm doing it this way
I've sat through a lot of AI talks in this industry. Most of them are the same talk. Someone shows you what's theoretically possible, everyone nods, and precisely nothing changes on Monday.
The gap isn't knowledge. Almost everyone in events has used ChatGPT by now. The gap is that people don't know which of their problems is worth solving, and they don't know how to describe it once they've found it.
That's it. That's the whole bottleneck.
The tools have got extraordinarily good at building things. They're still completely dependent on someone being able to say clearly what's wrong. Which is why session one is people typing problems into their phones rather than me talking at them, and why the prompt I'm giving away is about finding problems rather than solving them.
Nobody in that room needs to become a developer. They need to get better at describing what's broken.
Before the day
Two things that would genuinely help.
- Fill in the study. It takes a few minutes and the more responses we get before the 30th, the more I've actually got to say. It's at research.zoby.ai.
- Come with something. Not a polished problem statement. Just the thing that irritates you at your desk. Bring the frustration and we'll find the problem underneath it.
And if you can only make one session, make it the first. That's where the room decides what gets built, and it's the one that makes the other two make sense.
The details
CHS Manchester, AO Arena, 30 September 2026. Three sessions, twenty minutes each, on the show floor. Times to be confirmed, check the CHS programme on the day.
I'm Ed Richards. I run Zoby, where we work out where event businesses are losing time and then build the things that give it back. Before that I spent years in the industry doing the repetitive work I now automate, which is the only qualification that's ever mattered.
Come and give me a problem.