There’s a career-ending risk lurking in every venue sourcing professional’s workflow today, and most don’t even know it.
That risk comes when you upload PII, “Personally Identifiable Information,” to AI. Event planners and venue sourcing professionals may be unaware of the risk, since AI is such an amazingly efficient tool to flag issues in the contract before negotiations with the hotel that its use has quickly become essential.
However, VIPs’ travel itineraries, top-secret product launches, and a wide range of private data can be implied from, or is explicitly contained in, a hotel event contract. Uploading that contract to AI, which “trains” on every piece of uploaded data, means that private information doesn’t stay private.
Industry standards are still being developed for how to deal with this conundrum. Some corporations flag sensitive documents and don’t allow them to touch AI at all. Others use systems custom-designed to wall off private data before document analysis. Still others do enough business in AI tokens, or have special use-cases like health care, that AI providers will offer “zero data retention” (ZDR) for free as a professional courtesy to those customers.
Most venue sourcing professionals don’t have the volume or the use case to justify these approaches. One startup, EventNation, has arisen to address event professionals’ concerns. Its hotel contract review strips out private data from hotel event contracts before analyzing with AI.
As a bonus, it instantly returns a marked-up PDF to the user, ready to send back to the hotel for negotiations. Founder Faith Keiser says “At first, I developed the hotel contract scan as a way to relieve some of the burden from overworked event planners and venue sourcing professionals. I knew that AI had some “good” uses that could give event planners—who were named in 2019 by CareerCast as having among the top 10 most stressful jobs in the U.S.—a few hours back in their intense workdays. But then I realized that in order to do that, these professionals were unwittingly risking their entire reputations. That’s when we added the privacy feature.”
Zach Rattner, co-founder of Yembo, a company that redacts the location information from videos of a residence before analyzing them for insurance or moving purposes, says “It’s not really a new concept when a big company buys a new vendor’s software, that they negotiate privacy terms with the vendor.
However, getting privacy wrong with an AI tool has a fairly high risk compared to getting privacy wrong with some earlier IT tools, since the AI tools are so much more powerful than a lot of the earlier tools. But I think we’ve all been guilty of scrolling a privacy policy really quickly and just clicking ‘I Agree’”.
The good news? Awareness is the whole game. So before you or your co-workers upload a hotel event contract into an AI tool, ask if your organization has a policy to deal safely with the private data being handled by AI. Answer that, and you keep AI’s speed and accuracy to flag issues in the contract, without gambling your reputation to get it.
—
Faith Keiser is the Founder of eventnation.com, a privacy-forward hotel contract review tool. Keiser is passionate about reducing the workload and stress on overextended event planners with easy-to-use technology that gives hours back to an event planner’s day.
Keiser lives in Philadelphia with her husband, daughter and two rescue dogs who are eager to play, and so don’t want Faith to be overextended at work, either.
