Where AI actually earns its keep: six takeaways from our September Roundtable

“We’ll be the last thing AI replaces. It can’t create the experience, or run it.”

For our September Roundtable we put one topic to the room: AI. The same invite-only format applied, with senior operators from competitive socialising and immersive venues, no slides and no pitches. Opinions ranged from optimistic to cautious, with one operator settling on “microwave”. Useful, but not the revolution it was sold as. These were the six points the room kept returning to.

Backstage AI, not on stage

Almost everything we heard was behind the scenes: admin, data and pricing. Very little touches guests directly, because human interaction is the product.

Operator utility versus guest utility

The most useful test of the morning was to sort every AI idea into one of the two. Lost property calls are a good example. They take up time, so AI can triage them, staff stay on the floor and the customer isn’t left waiting.

Script first, AI second

Several of the “AI use cases” discussed turned out to be rules in disguise. If it’s a decision tree, you don’t need AI for it. Save it for what’s genuinely open-ended.

The new search battle: ChatGPT

Operators are starting to write content for AI overviews and chat prompts, not just search rankings. Discoverability increasingly means what the AI recommends when someone asks what to do this weekend.

Fringe cases, now findable

Enquiries arrive across eight or nine channels, so patterns hide in plain sight. One venue found that 70% of its enquiries were about children, but only once AI aggregated them.

Revisitation beats acquisition

Acquisition is well served already. The opportunity is using scores and visit history to bring people back. One operator’s repeat rate hit 11% just from asking people at the point of booking.

What it adds up to

The venues getting value from AI aren’t using it to replace the human experience. They’re using it to clear the admin and surface the patterns that let their people spend more time on the floor.

The full takeaways are in a one-page PDF below. Request a seat at our next Roundtable on Thursday 19 November here.

Download the key takeaways