Like so many businesses in the world, here at Douro Weddings, there is the fear that AI will take all of our jobs. So far, we have not been taken over by AI robots, but who knows what the future holds? Here are some thoughts on why you may want to use a flesh and bone wedding planner rather than an AI one, particularly with regard to a destination wedding.

Like all good enquiries these days, let’s start by asking ChatGPT. Here goes:

“Yes — for many weddings, AI can replace a traditional wedding planner, but there’s an important distinction:

AI can do most of the planning work. It can’t physically manage the wedding day.

AI can handle the “planner” work

[then follows a list of things that AI can do with regard to planning…]
The sweet spot: AI + a day-of coordinator

There’s also a really good middle ground:

AI for the months of planning → human coordinator for the wedding day.

That gives you the organizational and research benefits of AI while having an actual person there to deal with things like a vendor arriving late, guests not knowing where to go, weather changes, or the timeline slipping.”

So, there it is then, ChatGPT can plan a wedding just as well as a wedding planner can, but it begrudgingly accepts that when stuff goes wrong on the Big Day, then there may be a role for a human wedding planner to put things right.

Instinctively it feels like there is a lot of truth in this – rather like making a cake, AI can tell you what all the ingredients are and tell you where to order them from and then you just need someone to stir them together and stick it in the oven for half an hour. Is this a fair comparison though?

At the heart of what we do as wedding planners is the relationship that we have with the vendors – we rely on a small number of vendors that we integrate deep into the wedding planning process and we work with these same vendors again and again. This is not just because we know that they are reliable, trustworthy and good at their job, but also because we know how to work together. If we had to organize a wedding based on a random group of vendors chosen by our client (or by AI) it would be completely hit and miss what the final product actually looked like. When you bake a cake, you do not have to have a long-standing personal relationship with your ingredients, but to make a wedding really work, you have to have a large team drawn from lots of different backgrounds working in synchrony.

A better analogy for organising a wedding then is not baking a cake where it doesn’t really matter where the ingredients come from, but more like having a band come and play for a party. You could ask AI to suggest a good bass player, an inspirational drummer, a funky guitarist and banging lead singer and then have a conductor try and organise them to play on stage. If they are good enough musicians, you may get a good jam session going. But surely if you wanted some great music, you would want a band that know how to play together, be sure that the bass guitarist is going to turn up on time and that the lead singer is not going to have a blazing row with the drummer…

When you contract a decent wedding planner, they are taking responsibility for the contribution of every vendor; this is made even more critical when it is a destination wedding planner. There are so many moving parts with a destination wedding and furthermore, you are dealing with a completely different culture from your own, so the idea of letting ChatGPT put the ‘band’ together and then just asking your planner to ‘conduct’ it seems like an enormous leap of faith.

Probably the best advice is what you always hear with AI, which is that it can be your friend and help you with all sorts of aspects of your project. But when it comes to personal relationships and a team working together then a data centre full of NVIDIA chips running on algorithms might still not cut it!