"AI-enabled" covers everything from a scheduling tool to a fully autonomous booking engine, and that vagueness carries a real cost for hotel venue sales teams. Teams that wait lose proposals to competitors who respond faster. Teams that jump in without a clear problem to solve burn budget on tools that don't fit.
Felix Undeutsch, CEO of hivr.ai and iVvy's partner in AI for venue sales, argues the technology's actual job is to remove manual work, not replace people. "I think the main aim is to actually get people back with other people and in touch," he said.
The admin problem in convention sales
Sales reps in reactive convention roles spend most of their time on repetitive admin: data entry, CRM updates, internal process work. Research across sectors shows reps spend only 28-40% of their time on selling and relationship building. Undeutsch puts it bluntly: "I'm being provocative, but I think we should call convention sales managers convention admin managers instead."
The gap between job title and daily reality is where AI fits. Automating pricing checks, availability lookups, and proposal drafting gives teams back the customer-facing hours that got them hired.
AI assistant vs. AI agent
Many venues believe they're using AI because they deployed a chatbot. Undeutsch draws a sharper line. An AI assistant produces content in response to a prompt. An agent reads context and decides what to do next.
He points to hivr.ai's Instant Proposal - Email as an example. The agent reads an inbound enquiry email, classifies it as a meeting request, invoice question, or spam, then works out what the request involves and which steps it triggers. The process is "guarded and steered by humans based on rules and settings," he said.
What waiting costs venues
Speed converts. 80% of RFPs are won by the first three properties to reply, while the average hotel RFP response rate sits around 40-50%. More than half of inbound requests go unanswered. A faster response loop, automated at the proposal stage, changes those numbers.
The second loss is harder to measure. Venues with AI can shift staff toward customer experience, the differentiator competitors without AI can't match. Undeutsch rejects the cost-cutting framing: "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 teams tracking AI implementation, he recommends leading indicators: percentage of proposals drafted by AI, proposal turnaround time, response rate. One metric will look wrong at first. The number of leads that end up booking drops after teams adopt AI, because they start logging every lead, not just the likely winners. "That's counterintuitive, and that's good," he said. Better visibility, not worse performance.
For venue sales teams evaluating where they stand, AI for Hospitality & Events training covers the same assistant-versus-agent distinction Undeutsch describes. Teams in AI for Sales roles can apply the leading-indicator approach to their own response metrics.
Why this matters for hospitality and events professionals
If your team answers inbound RFPs, the math is simple: the first three properties to respond win 80% of the business, and most hotels leave half their enquiries unanswered. An AI agent that reads, classifies, and drafts responses to inbound emails attacks that gap directly. The job doesn't disappear. The admin layer does, and the time shifts to the conversations that close deals.
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