Automating session guidance and visitor support at Germany’s largest surgical congress

Large medical congresses are operationally complex. The German Congress of Surgery runs four days with hundreds of sessions in parallel — lectures, workshops, symposia, and live demonstrations spread across multiple halls. Thousands of attendees need to find the right session at the right time, check for schedule changes, locate exhibitor booths, and get information about the organizing institution.

Traditionally, this falls on information desks staffed by event personnel who need to know the full schedule, venue layout, and exhibitor details. During peak hours – especially at session changeovers – these desks get overwhelmed. Printed programs are outdated by the time the first schedule change happens. Event apps help but require downloads and typing. The result: attendees waste time, miss relevant sessions, and organizers spend money on staffing that still can’t cover the demand.

We deployed an AI-powered assistant that attendees could simply walk up to and ask questions – by speaking naturally, the way they’d ask a colleague. No app to download, no interface to learn, no typing on a phone.

Personalized session recommendations. With hundreds of sessions running in parallel, the most valuable feature was helping attendees find the right ones. The system knew the full congress schedule and could answer questions like “What’s happening right now on colorectal surgery?” or “Which workshops still have availability this afternoon?” – something an information desk staffer would need to flip through a binder to answer.

Full event knowledge. Beyond session scheduling, the assistant could answer questions about exhibitors, the organizing institution, venue navigation, and general congress information. All of this was powered by a retrieval system connected to the complete event database, ensuring answers were always current and accurate.

Voice-first interaction in a noisy environment. Congress floors are acoustically hostile – hundreds of simultaneous conversations, PA announcements, foot traffic. We combined professional microphone hardware with software-level noise reduction to maintain reliable speech recognition even in the loudest areas. Response times were optimized through parallelized processing to keep conversations feeling natural rather than stilted.

Two access modes. The assistant was available on a large screen kiosk for quick walk-up interactions, and also as an immersive VR experience through Meta Quest 3 headsets – giving attendees a choice between fast utility and a more engaging, exploratory interaction.

The assistant operated across all four congress days, giving booth visitors immediate, personalized answers about which sessions to attend, where to find exhibitors, and how to navigate the venue – the kind of guidance that would otherwise require someone manually checking the printed program.

For event organizers and exhibitors, this demonstrates a practical model for enhancing visitor experience at large conferences. The same system can be reconfigured for any event with structured schedule data – trade fairs, corporate conferences, medical congresses – making it a repeatable solution, not a one-off installation.