An AI-powered ‘carbon snap’ app has debuted at CES 2026, which is taking place in Las Vegas, USA.
The app allows exhibitors to discover their booths’ carbon footprint in seconds, simply by taking a photo with their smartphone.
The AI-powered measurement tool from the creators of tim (Trade Show Impact Manager), has been unveiled at the show today to tackle the chronic waste of B2B events.
Users at CES can snap their display (or upload images), and see an on-screeb estimate within around 20-30 seconds. They can also get a more detailed assessment by entering their email and completing additional data fields.
The app identifies around 120=140 materials that go into the booth, from this analysis it estimates overall carbon impact based on booth size (cubic metre edge). The underlying engine is built on 10+ years of tim’s trade show sustainability data and tens of thousands of booth photos.
The AI tool is being launched on-site at CES by innovation pioneer Nick Marks, whose company PIE Factory built tim, and his new CTO Zak Homuth. Together the pair will capture and test data across booths, with the goal of providing the most accurate estimate of CES’s overall footprint since the event began in 1967.
Marks and Homuth plan to photograph every booth (or a significant sample) to estimate both the total footprint of all exhibits and the percentage of exhibitors that are unsure as to whether their booth is being reused.
Trade shows are major contributors to the planet’s carbon emissions due to the ‘build and burn’ approach of many exhibitors. In fact, the average trade show emits around 40 times more carbon dioxide than a typical music festival.
tim is already the first corporate-facing platform to measure, report and improve the environmental, social and governance (ESG) impact of exhibitions, with clients including Amazon, Panasonic, Dolby, Pernod Ricard and CBRE.
Now, however, it is being transformed from expert-led manual analysis into an AI-based product that can analyse photos of trade show booths (single or multiple images).
Nick Marks, founder of tim, said: “There is currently nothing within a million miles of it in the market.”
He added: “Existing trade show tech still measures ROI in very old‑school ways, by scanning business cards and manually grading leads for example. tim is reframing ROI for trade shows in 2026 to put sustainability and social impact at the centre, not just leads and sales.”
Source: www.exhibitionworld.co.uk
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