Sarah Porter, CEO and founder of Inspired Minds tells Mike Fletcher her role in the evacuation of Kabul airport and what she’s doing to inspire women in technology

It’s 11 am and someone has handed Sarah Porter a glass of Bucks Fizz. She’s got a lot to celebrate.

Not only has her daughter just found out that her A-Level results were better than expected - offering her the chance to go through the UCAS Clearing system and gain a place at one of her two preferred UK universities specialising in Marine Science, Porter’s team at Inspired Minds have also discovered this morning that they’re shortlisted for two EN Indy Awards.

“It’s the first time we’ve ever entered any industry awards so the whole team is over the moon. I can’t see any of us getting any work done today now,” Porter says as she sips her drink.

Having worked in the exhibitions industry across a plethora of major technology shows for more than 25 years, Porter launched Inspired Minds from scratch in 2016.

Today, the company consists of 18 employees and 26 freelance staff in four countries.

One of its EN Indy Awards nominations is for World Summit AI - a two-day gathering of the global Artificial Intelligence ecosystem of enterprise, big tech, startups, investors, science and academia, during World AI Week in Amsterdam from 9-13 October. The other is for growing a powerful online community of more than 236,000 people from 160 countries interested in ensuring that AI’s evolution is a force for good in the world.

Unlike the traditional model of launching shows and developing communities around them, Porter decided to build a global AI community first and then bring it together through a series of events.

“The word ‘inspired’ is Latin for ‘breathe into’ so my company name represents the idea that I wanted to breathe new life into the way events can be the vehicle for communities to come together and work collaboratively,” Porter says. “I’d been studying the psychology of connectivity and what makes people want to connect. Concepts like ‘herd mentality,’ and ‘social proofing’ fascinated me so I wanted to apply my learnings to community building to see what would happen.”

In addition to World Summit AI and World AI Week, Inspired Minds organises Intelligent Health AI, a two-day September summit in Basel, Switzerland and Intelligent Health UK in London during May - bringing together clinicians, data scientists, startups, academics, and investors – to advance discussions on how to apply AI in healthcare.

Porter has also geo-cloned World Summit AI for the Americas. It takes place at the Palais des Congrès de Montréal, Canada each April.

From the outset, Porter wanted to mirror what she believed the events industry should look like from a gender equality perspective. So, despite the AI sector being male-dominated she has always achieved equal representation of speakers and participants.

It’s a mandate that has seen her seek out and partner with global organisations such as Women in Tech, become heavily involved in initiatives to encourage more women and young girls into STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) education, and strive for greater representation in the development of AI from low to middle-income countries.

One of these countries is Afghanistan, where Porter had been working on opening the first STEM school for girls in Kabul, after bringing the world’s attention to an all-female Afghan robotics team that had been denied visas to the US in 2017 to compete in the final of an international robotics competition.

Porter had brought the girls to Amsterdam instead to showcase their work on the main stage at the inaugural World Sumit AI. It had brought them global recognition and when the Taliban swept back into Afghanistan in 2021, it was the power of Porter’s AI community that resulted in their evacuation from Kabul airport.

“The girls called me to say they were stuck and the Taliban were at the gates,” Porter recalls. “They genuinely feared for their lives so we went out to the community and quickly got four influential WhatsApp groups up and running, all working on how to evacuate both them and their families. We used AI tracking beacons to locate them in the melee of Kabul airport and managed to rescue 54 people.”

The return to power of the Taliban may have put pay to Porter’s STEM school in Kabul but it hasn’t weakened her resolve to inspire women to succeed in both AI and the world of events.

“There were many dark days in the beginning. I was a mum to three young kids who had cashed it all in and gambled everything on an idea. We’d built a community of 30,000 people but only sold our first ticket to World Summit AI three weeks out. I was petrified but my advice to all women making their way through the events industry is something Apple’s ex-chief of staff once told me - ‘Be bold and be brave’. Have the courage of your convictions and bury your fear in the ground.”

This interview appears in the Autumn edition of Exhibition News.