Encore, the event-services company that supplies audiovisual and staging support to hotels, says artificial intelligence will reshape how hotel meetings and events get planned, priced and delivered. That's a claim worth unpacking, because meetings and events remain one of the highest-margin revenue streams a full-service hotel owns.

The company's outlook puts AI at the center of the group-business workflow rather than at the edges. For hotel operators, the practical question is simple: what does this change for the events bottom line?

Where AI fits in the meetings business

Meetings and events are labor-intensive. A single mid-size conference can require sales coordination, floor-plan design, AV setup, on-site technicians and post-event billing — much of it handled by people juggling spreadsheets and email threads.

AI tools promise to compress that workflow. In practice, that means automated RFP responses, faster room-diagram generation, demand forecasting for function space, and dynamic pricing on ballrooms and breakout rooms. Each of those touches a real cost line: sales labor, turnaround time on leads, and revenue per available square foot of meeting space.

For a hotel group, even a modest cut in response time matters. Corporate planners tend to award business to the first credible bid, so speed on RFPs converts directly into captured group revenue.

What Encore's position signals

Encore sits inside hundreds of hotels as an outsourced AV and events partner, which gives it a broad view of how group business actually runs. When a vendor at that scale says AI will reshape the category, it's usually because the company is building or buying the technology itself.

Hotel operators should read the signal two ways. First, expect Encore's own toolset — quoting, staging, crew scheduling — to get AI features that hotels will interact with at contract time. Second, expect the company's forecasts and staffing recommendations to lean on machine-generated demand models.

Who pays for it remains the open question. In outsourced AV models, technology investment typically gets recovered through package pricing, so operators will want clarity on how new AI capabilities show up on the invoice.

The margin logic

Group business has held up better than transient leisure in many markets since the pandemic, and hotels have leaned on it. Anything that raises banquet and AV attach rates, or trims the labor hours per event, flows almost straight to departmental profit.

AI-assisted menu engineering for banquet F&B, automated upsell prompts during the booking flow, and predictive staffing for event crews all point at the same three lines: cost of sales, labor percentage, and ancillary revenue per event.

What to watch

The next concrete markers will be product announcements — which tools ship, in which markets, and whether they're bundled into existing Encore contracts or sold separately. Operators with heavy group exposure should be asking their events partners those questions now, before the next RFP season prices them in.