The meetings technology sector is turning to artificial intelligence to automate how group requests get routed to hotels and venues, Business Travel News Europe reports — a shift that could quietly reshape who wins commissions in the meetings and events channel.

The change sits at the heart of meetings distribution: today, a request for proposal (RFP, the standard mechanism by which planners ask venues to bid for group business) still depends heavily on manual handling, both by planners writing requirements and by hotel sales teams deciding which leads to chase.

What does AI routing actually change?

Instead of a planner — or an agency acting for them — manually matching a request to a longlist of properties, AI-driven systems promise to score and route leads based on fit, availability and likely conversion. Vendors pitch faster response times and better-matched inventory.

For sellers of travel, the mechanism matters more than the marketing. If platforms start deciding which hotels see which requests, placement in those rankings becomes a distribution asset in its own right — much like search ranking in transient (individual traveler) booking channels already is.

The open question is commercial: whether routing decisions stay neutral, or whether hotel groups gain influence over them through preferred-supplier relationships and commercial incentives.

Why suppliers are watching closely

Meetings and events remain a high-margin business for hotel groups, and intermediaries — from agencies to sourcing platforms — earn meaningful fees on placed group business. Any technology that compresses the sourcing funnel changes where those fees settle.

Automation could cut agency handling time per RFP, which pressure on service fees makes attractive. But it could also concentrate demand through fewer platforms, strengthening those platforms' hand in commission negotiations.

For now, this is direction rather than measured result. The report describes an industry trend, not published data on adoption rates, booking shifts or revenue impact — so any vendor claims of transformation should be read as positioning until buyers publish outcomes.

The forward view

Expect the routing question to become a commercial negotiation, not just a product feature: whichever platforms control AI-driven lead distribution will likely try to monetize that control, and hotel groups and agencies will push back. Watch for the first public adoption numbers — they will show whether this is a real distribution shift or another round of meetings-tech buzz.