Artificial intelligence has been making its way into meetings
technology for years, but the latest generation of platforms is taking a
fundamentally different approach. Rather than layering AI onto legacy sourcing
and registration tools, newer entrants – and increasingly, established travel
technology providers – are rebuilding meetings platforms with AI at the center
of how work gets done.
The distinction has significant implications for corporate meeting
planners, procurement teams and travel managers. Instead of simply helping
users search faster or summarize information, AI is beginning to execute many
of the time-consuming tasks that have traditionally defined meeting planning,
from sourcing venues and negotiating contracts to organizing proposals and
surfacing spend data. As a result, organizations are rethinking what strategic
meetings management technology should actually deliver.
Architecture Matters
For vendors building these new platforms, the difference starts
with the underlying technology.
“There is a fundamental difference between adding AI features to
existing software and building a company around AI from day one,” said Bryan
Kulka, head of content marketing and communications at Naboo. Traditional
meetings software was designed to manage workflows, he explained, and simply
bolting on a chatbot “does not fundamentally change the way the platform
operates.”
Anna Sun, CEO and co-founder of Nowadays, agrees.
“AI-native means the AI is the operator, not a feature,” she said.
Rather than simply summarizing sourcing data, the AI actually contacts venues,
negotiates rates and structures proposals automatically. “That’s only possible
if you build the data model and the workflows around AI actions from day one.
You can’t retrofit that onto a platform built for humans to click through.”
Users are beginning to notice the difference. A travel and meetings
lead at a global agriculture company using Nowadays said, “The difference is
obvious once you’ve used both. You can feel that in how it actually works, not
just how it’s marketed.”
Faster
Sourcing, Better Comparisons?
Venue sourcing is one of the first areas where AI is delivering
measurable business value.
Kulka said Naboo’s network of more than 120,000 partners enables AI
to identify appropriate venues at a scale that would be impossible manually.
Similarly, Nowadays transforms a planner’s meeting brief into a structured RFP,
contacts hundreds of venues simultaneously, compares proposals and negotiates
rates using benchmarks drawn from thousands of previous events.
The biggest benefit may be speed. A corporate events manager at an
enterprise technology company told Nowadays that a previous sourcing platform
returned only one proposal during a two-day decision window. Using Nowadays,
the company received 30 to 40 proposals in the same timeframe.
AI is also reducing geographic barriers. Sun noted that the
platform negotiates with venues in more than 22 languages during local business
hours, eliminating the need for planners to coordinate conversations across
multiple time zones.
Building Trust
As AI capabilities expand, trust remains one of the biggest
barriers to adoption.
“The biggest mistake is to evaluate an AI meetings platform based
on the quality of its chatbot,” Kulka said. Instead, buyers should examine the
depth of the supplier network, whether pricing is live and bookable, and how
contracts, compliance and enterprise controls are handled.
Sun said many organizations are still hesitant to let AI negotiate
directly with suppliers.
“Handing negotiation to an algorithm is a leap for a lot of
planners and stakeholders,” she said. Companies should ask vendors how their AI
is trained, whether it draws on real negotiation outcomes rather than public
rate data and whether the platform has sufficient historical benchmarking data
to negotiate effectively. She also recommends piloting AI tools before
expanding them across an enterprise program.
Marc-Antoine Bonin, co-founder of Planned, agrees that trust and
change management remain major hurdles. While AI has made sourcing and
negotiation dramatically more efficient, organizations still need confidence
that the technology is making sound decisions before fully embracing it.
Working With Existing
Programs
Ironically, integrating AI into an organization’s existing
technology ecosystem may be a bigger challenge than the AI itself
“The real challenge is the company’s existing ecosystem,” Kulka
said, pointing to procurement platforms, ERP systems, payment processes and
security requirements. Companies are increasingly looking for AI platforms that
integrate with existing technology rather than adding another standalone
application.
Nowadays has taken that approach by integrating with collaboration
platforms such as Slack and existing travel management systems instead of
replacing them. Most enterprise clients begin by using AI to manage
historically unmanaged meeting spend while allowing their travel management
company to continue overseeing broader travel policy and traveler services.
Bonin said Planned is seeing the same trend. Rather than replacing
TMCs, organizations are using AI-native meetings technology alongside them. The
AI layer handles meetings sourcing, contracting and visibility into meeting
spend, while the TMC continues managing the broader travel program.
Increasingly, he added, TMCs themselves are adopting AI-native technology to
help their own teams work more efficiently.
“If it takes training to onboard, it’s not really AI-native,” Sun
said. “It’s just AI added to something that was already complicated.”
Better Visibility Into
Meeting Spend
For many organizations, one of the biggest benefits of AI-native
meetings technology extends well beyond faster venue sourcing.
Meeting spend has long been scattered across expense reports,
purchasing cards, agencies and departmental budgets, making it difficult to
understand the true size of the category.
“Before measuring event performance, you need to understand the
category,” Kulka said. At some mature organizations, meetings, incentives,
conferences and exhibitions spending can account for 30 to 40 percent of total
business travel expenditures.
AI-native platforms are helping companies connect those
once-isolated data points. Instead of producing standalone event reports, they
can automatically track negotiated savings, compliance, cost per event and
other performance metrics across an organization’s meetings portfolio.
Bonin said one of the biggest advances has been bringing unmanaged
meetings into view. Smaller, ad hoc events have traditionally fallen outside
centralized meetings programs, leaving organizations with limited visibility
into a significant portion of their spend. Capturing that activity often
reveals substantial meeting expenditures that companies didn’t know existed.
A global travel and events director at a Fortune Global 500 company
using Nowadays described the impact this way: “We’d never been able to track
savings from start to finish before. It’s the kind of visibility we’ve wanted
for a long time and just didn’t have the tooling for.”
Planned is pursuing similar goals through its proprietary AI
platform, which includes integrations with providers such as HRS and
International SOS. The company recently introduced a natural-language reporting
capability that allows users to ask questions about their meetings data instead
of navigating traditional dashboards.
Making SMM Easier to Use
Ease of use has become a common thread among the newest generation
of meetings platforms.
Bonin believes adoption is the first principle of strategic
meetings management.
“SMM is all about adoption, making it easy,” he said. Planned
combines AI with consulting expertise to help organizations strengthen meeting
policies while integrating with existing booking tools, payment systems and
duty-of-care providers. Rather than replacing established technology, the goal
is to enhance it.
Navan Events is taking a similar approach. The company’s rebranded
meetings offering embeds Boompop’s AI-powered venue search and room-block
capabilities directly into the broader Navan platform.
“Boompop is providing a lot of the room-block bookings and some of
the AI search capabilities,” said Galan Grady, senior vice president and
general manager of Navan Events. “But we’ve really embedded it natively into
Navan, so you can democratize this to any user, and it looks like Navan, feels
like Navan.”
That simplicity is especially important for what Grady calls
“accidental planners” – executive assistants, chiefs of staff and other
employees who organize meetings but don’t consider event planning their primary
responsibility. Collectively, he estimates, those users account for roughly
half of many organizations’ meeting spend.
“If it’s not easy to use,” he said, “people will go off platform.”
As AI increasingly handles repetitive work—from negotiating with
multiple hotels to managing routine communications—meeting professionals can
devote more time to strategy, stakeholder relationships and designing memorable
attendee experiences.
The Next Evolution of SMM
While AI won’t replace meeting professionals, it is rapidly
changing how they work.
Across the industry, technology providers are moving beyond AI as a
recommendation engine toward AI as an execution layer capable of carrying out
many of the operational tasks that once consumed planners’ days. At the same
time, organizations are gaining greater visibility into meeting spend,
improving policy compliance and making SMM programs easier for occasional users
to adopt
The next frontier, however, extends beyond sourcing and
contracting. Bonin said those functions are becoming increasingly automated,
while onsite attendee management, real-time support and resolving the
inevitable disruptions that arise during live events remain opportunities for
innovation. Making the onsite experience as seamless as venue sourcing is where
AI-native technology is headed next.