Today, we’re thrilled to welcome Muhammad Younas, the founder and CEO of vFairs.
Muhammad is a true North American tech entrepreneur. He developed the award-winning event technology platform, vFairs, which has powered over 50,000 and reached more than 100 million attendees worldwide.
Stay tuned to hear about Muhammad’s entrepreneurial journey and the invaluable insights he shares today.
Mohammad’s Journey
Mohammad started at IBM before moving into a role involving virtual events. Frustrated by the limited technology and support available, he built his own platform and used it to run more than 100 events. When an exhibitor asked to use his technology, he saw the opportunity to license it, and vFairs was born.
COVID
COVID created hockey stick growth for vFairs because the company already had hundreds of customers, case studies, testimonials, and references. Customers also helped shape what came next, asking for tools such as a mobile app, badge printing, exhibitor management, and a speaker portal as they prepared to return to in-person events.
Event Technology
Event technology can do far more than support an event. Sponsor banners, sponsored notifications, different booth tiers, enhanced profiles, and meetings can create new revenue opportunities while giving sponsors and exhibitors more value.
Using AI
Mohammad sees AI as a way to remove repetitive tasks from the event process so that people can focus on what technology cannot replace. That includes designing the event experience and creating meaningful connections between attendees, exhibitors, and speakers. The aim is not to automate the human side of events, but to give people more time to focus on it.
Automation
Before introducing automation, Mohammad recommends mapping out the workflow and deciding which parts genuinely need human involvement. AI can handle repetitive, time-consuming tasks, freeing event professionals to focus on decisions, relationships, and experiences where their involvement adds the most value.
Keep the Customer at the Center
For Mohammad, building a sustainable business starts with making customers genuinely happy. He sees events as part of the hospitality industry, where the quality of the experience matters because satisfied clients become advocates, generate word of mouth, and create opportunities for future business. The goal is not simply to deliver an event, but to build a company that can continue serving customers well over the long term.
An Opportunity for Small Businesses
Mohammad believes smaller companies can use AI to rethink problems that were traditionally solved with complex, established software. AI-native technology creates opportunities to build new approaches from the ground up rather than simply adding AI to existing systems. But because events involve so many different use cases and edge cases, that opportunity depends on first understanding how the industry actually works.
Perfect It Manually First
Mohammad’s advice is to understand a process before trying to automate it. That means going through the entire customer journey manually, identifying the real pain points, and learning what prospects and customers actually need. Once the process works and you’ve built trust with customers, you can use AI to automate the parts that it will genuinely benefit.
The Event Planner’s Role Is Changing
Mohammad expects events to claim a larger share of marketing budgets, but that will come with greater pressure to demonstrate results. Event planners therefore need to move beyond simply executing events and become more involved in the strategic side of the business. Their role is increasingly about showing how an event supports broader business goals and delivers measurable value.
Bio:
Muhammad Younas is the Founder and CEO of vFairs, an award-winning event technology platform that has powered more than 50,000 events and reached over 100 million attendees worldwide.
Over the past decade, Muhammad has helped grow vFairs into a global, all-in-one platform for in-person, hybrid, and virtual events, serving organizations across 50+ countries.
Through his work with thousands of event organizers worldwide, he has developed a unique perspective on how technology is reshaping attendee expectations, event engagement, personalization, and the way event teams operate.
Under his leadership, vFairs has grown to more than 270 team members and has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Event Technology Platforms, while earning a 4.9/5 rating on G2.
Muhammad regularly shares practical insights on event technology, AI, attendee experience, and the future of the events industry, drawing on lessons learned from building event technology at global scale.
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