Surely if venue finding is just about searching and researching, a robot could do this better than a human?
In theory, yes. AI can scour the internet in seconds and use all the online data available to compile a selection of relevant venues based on the specific criteria given to it.
And so we tried it…
As a test we used AI for our previous blog post: 8 incentive hotels inspired by the World Cup finalists. And the original list it provided was good, but it wasn’t perfect. Some hotels weren’t quite relevant for the fictitious brief, some weren’t great for corporate groups and some didn’t feel luxurious enough.
But this was just the first try. The beauty of AI is that you can follow-up your original prompt with further tweaks and suggestions to really hone-in on the final list of options.
However, you don’t know what you don’t know. We knew the original list wasn’t right because we had the expertise and experience to eliminate certain properties. We had seen some of them first-hand and knew they wouldn’t be something we’d put forward for our clients. But only a real, human, venue finder would know this.
After some back and forth we finally landed on the final selection. A list of hotels we confirmed because someone on the team had either stayed at, or had done a site visit, at each property. AI can scrape data from numerous review sites, but can never know what it’s really like to be a human and experience the venue. What’s more, most review sites are for holidaymakers and not relevant for corporate group bookings.
Finally, we published the blog, listing the hotels - including their room numbers, event spaces, location and standout features. But we made a mistake…
We thought we could at least trust AI to get the binary facts correct - ie. room numbers - without having to double-check they were correct. But we were wrong. Fortunately, Black Book has strong relationships, far and wide, and so one of the hoteliers that we know personally reached out with a correction on the room capacity for their property.
And relationships go one step further. With the final list that we compiled we knew the people behind the properties. This is important because bricks and mortar aren’t enough when it comes to venue finding, you need to know the team behind the venue are reliable, efficient and are going to deliver.
Relationships also mean you can secure the venue and get the best price based on the trust you have built. Furthermore, venue finders with numerous clients have a much larger buying power than an individual using AI.
So all in all our takeaways are this: No matter how advanced and sophisticated AI gets, as it learns to eliminate existing errors and gains better insights, robots will never form meaningful relationships or be able to truly have human experiences.
This means venue finding, while it may be supported by AI, will never be fully replaced by 0s and 1s.
Black Book’s name comes from our relationships and expertise. We have decades of first-hand experience on the team, and an extensive list of contacts all over the world to help ensure you don’t just get the right venue, but you get the right team too.
Get in touch if you’d like to find out more.