Ondaro's booth at ServiceNow Knowledge 2026 was a surf simulator: guests picked a stage, and the AI put them on a board carrying Ondaro's own brand patterns. It ran on the expo floor by day and moved to a VIP party across the resort by night.
Client: Ondaro, an Elite ServiceNow Partner
Event: ServiceNow Knowledge 2026
Location: The Venetian Resort, Las Vegas, USA
Date: May 2026
The challenge: a 15x20 turnkey booth, and two venues
Ondaro's message is about guiding clients through enterprise transformation, which they frame as riding the wave. The activation had to carry that without becoming a gimmick, inside four constraints:
- A 15ft by 20ft turnkey exhibition space with strict rules and little layout freedom.
- Show regulations that meant live printing could not be counted on for the main floor.
- Two venues in one day: the daytime expo booth, then an evening VIP party at Wakuda in the Palazzo.
- Surfing poses that had to look different from each other, rather than one canvas repeated a thousand times.
The solution: three stages, and a second rig
We built a compact freestanding AI trading card kiosk sized for the booth footprint. To stop the outputs converging, guests chose one of three stages taken from Ondaro's own consultation framework: Getting Ready, Paddling Out and Going Big. We tested the prompt model to remove bias errors and to hold facial and hair mapping accurate across every guest, which is the part that decides whether someone keeps the card or bins it.
The surfboards carried patterns pulled from Ondaro's internal brand assets rather than stock graphics, so the guest ended up inside the brand rather than beside it. For the evening party we sent a second independent rig to Wakuda instead of breaking down the booth, and guests there got their cards in hard-shell protective cases.
The results
The Las Vegas crew set up on the afternoon of day one, ran the booth through peak expo traffic, and moved the second rig across to the after-party without interrupting either. Ondaro's leadership put the staging link on a global all-hands call before the show to get the wider team behind it. On the floor, attendees pulled their cards onto their phones and posted them under #CatchTheWave.
Why it worked
The theme came from Ondaro's own language, so the booth argued their case rather than decorating it. Giving guests three stages to choose from turned a single photo op into a small decision, which is what stopped a thousand near-identical cards. And running a second rig meant the evening event got a full experience rather than the leftovers of the daytime one.
The same format works across conference floors: Qlik's All-Star cards pulled live leaderboard scores at Qlik Connect, and Visit Pittsburgh's cards at IMEX worked a trade show stand.
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