When you have attended conferences or other professional events, you’ve probably received the feedback email with a link to some feedback form. These get a 20 to 30% response rate. And those who do complete it often give the answers that they believe the organizers want to hear, not what they really think.
So what if, instead, organizers could measure response in the moment?
Building Emotion AI for Better Conferences with Vanessa Williams Saleh – Women Disrupting Tech
Vanessa Williams Saleh is the founder of Attenlyx, an event technology company that uses Emotion AI to read audience response at conferences.
Before founding it, she spent around 12 years in global event strategy, including at Mars and at her own company Stratera. Her management kept asking what landed after an event, and the answer was not always clear.
In episode 174 of Women Disrupting Tech, we talk about
- Why event feedback surveys get low response,
- How that impacts event organizers’ ability to create better events and conferences, and
- What organizers changed once they had the data.
Plus, she shares why Attenlyx builds a separate emotion framework for each region, with West African and East African audiences as the example, even when skin tone is the same.
You can listen to the episode by pressing play below. Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
Vanessa Williams Saleh came into founding with deep industry expertise. But it required her to take herself out of the events industry to discover what was missing. These three lessons from how she built Attenlyx apply to any founder selling something new to leaders.
Creating a Category Means You Need to Educate Customers First
Emotion AI is still new, even within artificial intelligence. Vanessa Williams Saleh says Attenlyx has to educate the customer as well as offer a product. Her sales process runs in three steps: education, discovery and buy-in from the customer. When your product creates a category, how much of the sales conversation is teaching?
A Standard Dataset May Not Fit Your Market
Vanessa and her team build frameworks for each market they enter. Initially, they used a model that someone else developed. Because that model was based on posed expressions from a narrow group of people, it produced different outcomes than the human review by experts did. Founders should investigate if the data they use is fit for the purpose they use it for.
Sell the Result, Not the Features
Vanessa’s client wants to know what landed during the event. So with Attenlyx, she provides them with a report that helps them understand. That she uses cameras and AI to generate it is secondary. This made the report the center of the commercial model. For founders, the takeaway is that customers want to understand what they receive and the decision it helps them make.
Ultimately, these takeaways point to one conclusion: when you’re building something new, standard ways of doing things often do not work. So discovering a way that does is part of the work of a founder.
🤗 Know a founder who is creating a new category or building technology? Use the share buttons below to share the episode with them.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
| Time | Highlight |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | Introduction |
| 02:00 | How Attenlyx grew out of event strategy |
| 04:25 | Why leaders ask what landed after events |
| 06:28 | AI leadership and event strategy at Mars |
| 09:26 | Why event feedback surveys get low response |
| 14:57 | Why event organizers stay stuck on ROI |
| 17:39 | Event technology that measures audience response |
| 23:02 | Emotion AI across cultures and skin tones |
| 28:34 | Which conference formats Attenlyx serves best |
| 29:39 | Why entertainment events are a harder fit |
| 31:47 | How event engagement shifts across a day |
| 33:47 | Benchmarking conferences across multiple markets |
| 35:30 | How many speakers belong on a panel |
| 36:38 | Audience fatigue, lunch timing and room temperature |
| 38:05 | Why an event strategist became a founder |
| 40:21 | Why events need evidence to be funded |
| 44:04 | Accelerators for a non-technical founder |
| 47:52 | Positioning as an expert in the room |
| 53:42 | Giving Gen Z and girls access |
| 56:46 | AI funding coach for female founders |
The Episode in an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
Vanessa is a non-technical founder who was used to the female-dominated event space. It means she had to find her footing in an industry with a different gender split and different rules. In the last 15 minutes, this leads to 3 magical moments around trusting your expertise, being championed for it, and paying it forward.
Leading With Her Own Expertise
Asked how she gets to an equal footing when she walks into a room, Vanessa Williams Saleh starts with what she knows: 12 years in the industry, the pressure of delivery, the budgets and the questions people ask afterward. That experience is why she identified the opportunity and knew what to build, because she was building a solution for a problem that she experienced herself.
The Allyship Best Practice: “It’s Best She Answers This”
When pitching to potential customers in the African market, Vanessa is often the only woman in the room. As a result, questions that could, or should, have been directed to Vanessa are asked to other members of her team. They champion her by saying that ‘it’s best she answers this’. It’s a best practice that other allies can easily follow: even if you know the answer, give space to the person who is in the best position to answer.
Putting Ten Girls In A Room They Wouldn’t Otherwise Be In
Vanessa Williams Saleh brought 10 girls from a high school in Upper Manhattan to the Finnish Consulate in New York. They met the Consul General and the Deputy Consul General and asked questions they had not been able to ask before. It taught Vanessa that people can make one hour out of their day, and that hour gives an experience to people who would not otherwise get it.
These three moments matter because they show how Vanessa earns her place in the room, how her team keeps her there, and how she uses her position to bring other women into it.
🗣 What was your magic moment of the episode? Was it how she leads with her own expertise, her allyship best practice, or how she puts young girls in rooms they never imagined being in? Or was it perhaps another moment in the episode? Let me know by sharing your favorite moment in the comments.
Or scroll down for my favorite quote from the episode.
The Quote from the Episode
Vanessa Williams Saleh explains why she creates experiences for girls and Gen Z in one sentence.
“My strategy is to give access to those who don’t have access.”
— Vanessa Williams Saleh, CEO and co-founder of Attenlyx
She applies it inside Attenlyx too. Hiring starts with undergrads and graduates who don’t need a particular background, just curiosity. She sees entry-level jobs that have disappeared or been reduced and asks what enterprise companies, small businesses and startups are doing to replace them. Her own answer is a framework in her company that prioritizes Gen Z hires and women in tech, and she is happy to have Attenlyx used as an example.
💡 Feeling inspired to give other people access to Vanessa’s story? Tell them, and share what you found the most powerful moment in it.
Or learn about 3 trends I noticed across episodes below.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
Even though Vanessa is not targeting events in entertainment and sports, recording and editing this episode took me back to my conversation with Elise Mol. When talking about building BASH and how event organizers can convert early ticket sales into a marketing machine, she shares that organizers still have to create a great event. This is where the feedback becomes critical and why measuring what people really experience matters.
Using Claude, I surfaced three more themes from earlier episodes of Women Disrupting Tech that return in this one:
Humans In The Loop With AI
At Attenlyx, people review what the AI produces at several points. The report reaches the client with human review and recommendations. Vanessa Williams Saleh says the model they started with did not align with their human-reviewed layer, which led them to build their own technology. A psychologist helps the team examine what can be concluded from the signals, and regional specialists help with the settings and the assumptions the team may have. In her words: “we don’t simply just agree with the technology.”
Guests from other fields describe a similar layer. In episode 173, Dr. Ashley Blackington explains that as a clinician and founder, she can tell when clinical-sounding text is fabricated, and that team members read the output and flag text no one would write. This check matters because the summaries can be used as input for doctor-patient conversations. In episode 166, Dr. Hannah Allen explains that the scribe at Heidi is not meant to replace clinical judgment. Clinicians (and sometimes patients) read the whole note before it goes into the record, and Heidi Verify highlights the areas of low certainty so they can double-check them. In episode 168, Karianne Kraaijenstein describes a scientific validation board that checks the advice from the Adaptive coaching engine. She calls it the biggest de-risking factor for investors for a product built on trust.
Rolling Out One Market At A Time With Local Partners
Attenlyx treats each market as a separate rollout. The data from an enterprise client’s events in Nigeria is the benchmark for the next two deployments, South Africa and Angola, where the sessions and the conference architecture changed based on where engagement dropped. Each market also gets its own framework, built with regional specialists and local psychologists.
Earlier guests describe the same logic from the go-to-market side. In episode 127, Marieke van Iperen of Settly had the same go-to-market plan for different countries. She gradually found out that a more localized approach was necessary to account for differences between how countries and even regions approach immigration and relocation. She says tech scales a lot, together with a local vendor network in every market. In episode 98, Sara Okhuijsen and Nima Salami of Oasis Now may ultimately aim for a worldwide rollout, but they take it step by step. They start in Europe because they are based in the Netherlands, and they say meeting the strictest European data privacy rules makes it a lot easier to enter other markets.
Choosing One Segment And Saying No To The Rest
Attenlyx works best at conferences with keynotes, panels and sessions, where budgets are high, and feedback is low. Vanessa describes it as a sweet spot of who cares the most about the data. She has left entertainment and music alone because the buying process is different, fans choose to attend, and movement, sound and lighting make the signals harder to read confidently.
In episode 154, Andjela Bozinac describes her first company as a software-as-a-service business in ESG compliance. The team was very ambitious and tried to tackle a broad part of the ecosystem. Technically, a lot of what they built made sense, and her lesson is that even the best solution struggles if you don’t enter the market in the right way. At Renovo, she validates earlier and starts with solar installers. In episode 116, Marili ‘t Hooft-Bolle explains that Trengo targets mid-market consumer services on purpose, because you can’t serve all segments at once. In episode 90, Victoria Lawson describes a marketplace that split its two sides and served the supplier side first.
Together, these three show how founders in a new technology business limit risk: they check the output, learn one market before the next and serve the customer where the product fits.
🗣️ Noticed another trend while listening? Let me know your answer in the comments, or slide into the DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram.
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Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
What would happen if a random group of people who want to be entrepreneurs each got the same amount of money? And what would the failure rates look like ten years later for women and for men? Cristina Flaschen, founder and CEO of Pandium, has an answer in the next episode. The conversation starts elsewhere: with how she tested her market through more than 200 company conversations, why she chose revenue over users and how Pandium develops junior engineers.
In the last part of our conversation, we also talk about funding of female founder. That is where this thought experiment arrives.
Curious how customer conversations beat tech hype and where this question fits in? Leave your email address below and episode 175 lands in your feed on 5 November at 8:00 CEST.
Until then, as always, keep being awesome,
Dirkjan
What I Want to Leave You With
Even though organizing conferences is big business, asking for event feedback sounds like something really simple. You send an email with a request for feedback via a form, follow up a few times, and you get the feedback you need to improve your event or conference.
Except, it isn’t. Not only are response rates low, but visitors are also inclined to give the answer that they think will please the recipient.
As a result, many event organizers don’t get the answer to three critical questions:
- What landed with the audience?
- Did the investment we did pay off?
- Should we invest money in this conference next year?
It’s these questions that, time and again, Vanessa Williams Saleh could not answer. It was only when she took herself out of the industry that she started to discover what she had missed. That started her journey to building something that would give her the answer: Attenlyx.
What you’ll discover in this episode is the immense complexity behind the answers. There are skin tones, regional differences in facial expressions of audiences, local habits, room temperatures and the length of the sessions as some of the inputs. No wonder AI is needed to analyze it all. In that sense, her technology is truly disruptive.
What I enjoyed the most about the episode is that Vanessa is a woman who truly owns the room. She has groundbreaking tech, the knowledge and conviction to sell it and a great way to pay it forward. That combination makes her a true woman disrupting tech.
Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Ashley Blackington on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Vanessa Williams Saleh
Vanessa Williams Saleh is the founder and CEO of Attenlyx, an event technology company that uses Emotion AI to read audience response at conferences and delivers a report within 48 hours. Attenlyx grew out of Stratera, her event strategy company. She has spent around 12 years in global event strategy, including at Mars, where she led global event strategy for Mars Science and Diagnostics across 36 countries.
Vanessa came into founding as a non-technical founder with industry expertise.
You can connect with Vanessa Williams Saleh on LinkedIn
About Attenlyx
Attenlyx is an AI-powered audience intelligence platform and event technology company that helps organizations understand how people respond in live environments. It grew out of firsthand experience in global events and uses attention, sentiment and qualitative signals to turn audience response into insight. Leaders use it to evaluate effectiveness, improve future design and make stronger decisions across events, education, media and beyond.
At conferences, Attenlyx uses PTZ cameras and Emotion AI to read facial movements and micro-expressions anonymously, in near real time, and matches them against what the speaker is saying. Organizers, sponsors and enterprise event teams receive a report within 48 hours with human review and recommendations. Each market gets its own framework, built with local psychologists and regional specialists, and Attenlyx works in the US, European and African markets. It is supported by NVIDIA and the HBS AI Native Bootcamp.
You can learn more about Attenlyx on the website and by following the company on LinkedIn.
Listen to Episode 174 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
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