What's the most painful part of your post-event lead follow-up?

A few months ago, someone on our team came back from a 3-day GITEX event - literally - full of business cards. 300+ of them.

By the time they'd gotten through the first 40, typing details into a spreadsheet one card at a time, it was day two of "we'll follow up soon." By the time actual follow-up emails went out, it had been almost a week since the show ended. When we asked a few of those prospects later if they remembered the conversation, more than half didn't.

That stuck with us. The leads weren't bad - the booth conversations were genuinely good, people were interested. The problem was entirely about speed. Every hour between a booth conversation and the first follow-up is an hour the prospect's memory of you fades a little more.

So we started wondering: what if the follow-up happened before the prospect even walked to the next booth?

We ended up building an AI agent that scans the card, quietly researches the person and company in the background, and sends a personalized message on WhatsApp or email within 20 seconds - then handles the qualifying conversation itself, escalating to a human only when it actually needs one.

But I'm curious how universal this problem actually is outside our own experience:

How does your team currently handle post-event follow-up?

Is "the lead goes cold before we reach out" a real pain point for you, or have you already solved it some other way?

If you've tried automating any part of this, what broke or didn't hold up?

Genuinely want to hear how this plays out for other people before assuming our GITEX event story is universal.