Scaling event support with AI customer service: Helsinki City Run’s race weekend experience
Results at a glance
Customer: Finnish Athletics Federation / Valio Helsinki City Run
Objectives: Improve participant service, reduce email workload for the event team, create more engaging marketing experiences, and gain deeper insights into website visitor behavior.
Results:
- 254,000 website sessions during race weekend
- Nearly 5,000 AI conversations during the weekend
- An estimated 40 hours of time saved during race weekend*
- Multilingual service in Finnish, English, Swedish, and German
- The “What Kind of Runner Are You?” quiz engaged visitors and generated newsletter subscribers before the event
* Time savings are calculated as 80% of the time visitors spent in AI conversations.
When more than 22,000 participants prepare for the same event at the same time, the number of questions grows rapidly.
At Valio Helsinki City Run, this is especially visible on the event website, which serves as the digital hub for participants before and during the event. Registration, event instructions, schedules, routes, start groups, and results are all available through the same website.
Finland’s largest running event breaks another participation record
Helsinki City Running Day is Finland’s largest running event and plays an important role in Finnish athletics. The event generates significant revenue for the Finnish Athletics Federation, the owning clubs, and the sports clubs that contribute through volunteer work.
In 2026, the event attracted more than 22,300 participants from 110 countries, once again setting a new participation record.
“The event went really well and the feedback has been positive. Participation numbers were excellent – once again, we were Finland’s largest running event,” says Event Manager Annamari Ahonen.
At this scale, the role of the website becomes much larger than that of a typical company website. Visitors are constantly looking for information, often in a hurry and just before the event begins.
The challenge was not a lack of information. It was helping people find the right information at the right moment.
“The information is available on the website, but people don’t always find it when they need it.”
Thousands of questions answered – without an email bottleneck
The primary goal of the Groweo® implementation was to improve customer service for participants and prospective participants.
“Customer service was our number one priority. We receive an enormous amount of email because the event is so large,” Ahonen explains.
A conversational AI assistant was introduced to answer participant questions directly on the website through both the Home application and a large AI Wall interface.
Participants and visitors can ask virtually anything related to the event, from start groups and practical arrangements to schedules and event-day information.
The goal was not to automate everything. Cases requiring individual attention still remained with the event team. However, a large share of repetitive questions no longer needed to be handled by email.
“The most common and straightforward questions, both before and during the event, were handled by AI. That freed up time for other tasks.”
Race weekend became a real stress test for the AI assistant
During race weekend, the website recorded more than 254,000 sessions, while the AI assistant handled nearly 5,000 questions.
“During the event, a huge number of people visit the website because the results are also published there.”
For the event team, the impact of AI-powered customer service became visible in a very practical way: thousands of questions no longer ended up in their inboxes.
“When participants received thousands of answers from AI during race weekend, all of those questions were no longer arriving in our email.”
Based on conversation data, the AI service saved nearly 40 hours of work during the event weekend alone.
With participation numbers continuing to grow, the need for scalable customer service is unlikely to decrease.
“As the event grows, the number of questions grows as well. AI has helped us tremendously with that.”
Making the website more engaging
Valio Helsinki City Run wanted the website to serve not only as an information hub but also as an active part of the event experience and marketing.
One objective was to make the website more interactive and engaging before the event itself.
The most visible – and most popular – interactive feature was the “What Kind of Runner Are You?” quiz, which generated newsletter subscriptions while providing visitors with a lighter and more entertaining experience.
“We wanted something more playful on the website as well. The quiz is a fun way to engage visitors, and surprisingly many people have completed it.”
At the same time, the event organization gained a much clearer understanding of what visitors were looking for and what topics interested them most.
“Previously, we had a general idea of what people were doing on the website and what they were looking for. Now we have much more detailed data.”
International participants require multilingual service
With runners from more than one hundred countries attending the event, questions naturally arrive in multiple languages.
The applications were used most frequently in Finnish and English, but AI conversations were also conducted in Swedish and German through Groweo® AI Language.
“Finnish and English are our primary languages, but it was really valuable to have Swedish and German available as well.”
Digital service becomes more important as the event grows
One of the biggest surprises for the event team was how smoothly the implementation process went. The AI was able to use information already available on the website, eliminating the need for a separate training project.
“We didn’t need to train the AI separately because it reads the information directly from our website.”
Before launch, the team also tested the service extensively with more challenging questions.
“Many people assume AI will give incorrect answers. That hasn’t been our experience at all – as long as we keep our website information up to date.”
Valio Helsinki City Run aims to maintain a high-quality participant experience even as the event continues to grow year after year.
“For us, using tools like this is also a matter of quality. We want to be a frontrunner, and that should be visible and tangible on our website.”
As participation numbers increase, the importance of digital service grows alongside them. One observation stood out clearly after race weekend:
Thousands of participant questions can be answered quickly and efficiently without transferring the entire workload to the event team.