Are AI-Written RFP Responses Quietly Killing Hotel Group Sales Differentiation?

Doug Kennedy of Kennedy Training Network is publicly questioning the industry’s rush toward fully automated AI RFP responses in hotel group sales, arguing that full automation risks commoditizing the sales process it’s meant to speed up. His concern: when multiple properties send AI-generated proposals in response to the same RFP, the responses read and look homogeneous, which pushes the buyer’s decision toward price as the only remaining point of comparison. His framing is blunt — “at best, a level playing field resulting in each getting only its fair share. At worst, there is a race to the bottom, where hotels sacrifice rate to gain occupancy.” He also flags a real capability gap: AI still struggles with judgment calls a human coordinator handles by phone, like inventory holds close to a group’s cutoff date, ambiguous buyer information, and detailed bed-type breakdowns.

Kennedy’s recommendations aren’t anti-AI — pair any automated proposal with a personalized video message, keep humans central to the process, and use AI for prospect research to sharpen first-touch outreach rather than to generate the final proposal itself.

The speed case for automation is real, though, which is what makes this a genuine tradeoff rather than an easy call. Infor’s Alan Young cites research that 72% of RFP first-responders win the bid, and that AI group-quotation agents — which parse unstructured RFP data from emails and PDFs and run displacement calculations against existing transient business — have cut average time-to-contract-finalization from 45 days to 14 while lifting supplier response rates 32%. Those numbers argue for speed being the whole game; Kennedy’s argument is that speed without differentiation just gets every property to the same finish line at the same price. The practical read for group sales leaders: the RFP-automation question isn’t whether to use AI, it’s where in the process — research and speed versus the final, differentiating pitch — the human has to stay in the loop.