What "AI enabled" really means for hotel venue teams

"AI-enabled" is used to describe all kinds of things, from a scheduling tool to a fully autonomous booking engine, and that's exactly why the term is confusing. For sales teams working with venues and hotels, the confusion comes at a cost. Teams that wait are losing out on proposals to competitors who are faster to respond. On the other hand, the teams that jump in often don't have a clear understanding of the problem they're trying to solve.   

Felix Undeutsch, CEO of hivr.ai, iVvy's partner in AI for venue sales, shared his take on where the myths end and reality begins. 

The fear that AI will replace event & venue teams 

Felix often hears that people are worried about AI taking over their jobs. He sees it differently: "I think the main aim is to actually get people back with other people and in touch." His goal is to automate the manual layer of data entry, pricing, and availability checks, so sales teams spend less time on system contact and more on customer contact.   

He's pretty blunt about where that time currently goes. People in reactive convention sales roles, the ones dealing with inbound RFPs and proposals, spend most of their time on the relationship work that got them the job in the first place. Most of the time is spent on repetitive admin tasks. Research in the industry shows that sales reps in different sectors say they spend only 28-40% of their time on the main things they're supposed to be doing, like selling and building relationships. The rest of their time is spent on data entry, updating the CRM and doing internal process work. Felix's take on the job title is clear:

“I’m being provocative, but I think we should call convention sales managers 'convention admin managers' instead”.

The difference between an AI assistant and an AI agent 

A lot of venues think they're "doing AI" just because they've deployed a chatbot. Felix draws a clear line between the two categories.  

An AI assistant can produce content in response to a prompt, like text or imagery. An AI agent goes one step further by reading the context and deciding what to do next.  

Felix gives a concrete example from hivr.ai's own product suite, iVvyAI Instant Proposal - Email: an agent that reads an inbound venue enquiry emails, classifies it as a new meeting request versus an invoice question versus spam, then works out what the request is actually about and what steps it triggers. He says that the agent model is a multi-step process that's triggered by a certain objective, and that it's still "guarded and steered by humans based on rules and settings".  

What waiting to adopt AI can cost venues 

Felix talks about two specific losses for venues that delay. First off, the quicker you can reply to an RFP, the more likely you are to convert a lead. 80% of RFPs are won by the first three properties to reply. Meanwhile, the average hotel RFP response rate is around 40-50%, meaning more than half of inbound requests go unanswered. 

Second, places that use AI can free up staff to focus on what really makes them stand out from competitors that don't have AI: the customer experience. Felix isn't seeing this as a cost play:

"I don't think this is about cutting costs. It's about making the most of the people you've already got who know what they're doing and giving them some interesting tasks to do."

For measuring AI implementation success, Felix steers venues towards leading indicators over lagging ones, like the percentage of proposals drafted by AI versus manually, proposal turnaround time, and response rate. He says there's one metric that might seem a bit strange, but it's true: the number of leads that end up booking drops after teams start using AI. The reason is that they start logging every lead that comes in, not just the ones they thought were probably going to win. "That's counterintuitive, and that's good," he says. It's a sign of better visibility, not worse performance. 

Want to see how your team stacks up? iVvy's venue enquiry response time calculator shows you exactly where your response times sit, and how much time and money you can save with AI. 

Try it here