Just over a month ago, we released “Finch Assist” and Craig wrote a really nice article about what it is, why it’s different and the benefits it provides you.  The key to me is that we built something that could perform actions and tackle tangible use cases, not just give Top 10 tips like many AI travel demos you see. 

And now that it’s been in the wild for a bit, I wanted to share a few stories we’ve heard about how it’s being used.  This week I’ll start with one about scenario modelling for a team offsite.

One of my favourite use cases was from a leader at a small to medium sized company with employees spread across the world.  The reason I love this so much is that we are seeing more and more distributed companies and ‘remote’ working as normal.  We talked about this at length in the event we sponsored in June - Rethinking Business Travel.

They spent hours thinking about the logistics of getting his team together—

• Where are they all coming from?

• What's their availability?

• What venue(s) are available?

• How much does everything cost!?

There are so many factors to consider when booking a team offsite.  They built a spreadsheet where all of this was tracked, all of the scenarios were planned out, and budgeted and all of the attendees and their preferences mapped out.

Scenario modelling in Finch Assist

When building Finch Assist, we wanted to see what we could achieve with this scenario.  We’ve probably all been involved in planning an event with multiple people coming together, right?  It’s a pain.  But the critical aspect of this use case is the decision on WHERE to have the meeting. 

In the case above, it was down to three cities they had in mind based upon where they could get free office space (either their own or from a partner).

I personally ran through the same situation recently, planning an offsite for our Finch team. Two of the three cities I had free space and one I had to pay for the space - and that one ended up being cheapest in totality.

My initial prompt was:

“Help me plan a 3 day day offsite with my team.  I’m debating between Milan, Krakow and Dublin.  For Milan and Dublin I have free space and for Krakow I assume we would need to pay 300 EUR per day.  Based upon where everyone is coming from, can you estimate the budget for each scenario?  I’m thinking about the last week of March.”

In choosing ‘where’ to go, the leader asked Finch Assist to consider things like - direct flights, major events occurring in the cities, average hotel prices within a certain distance of the venue, etc.  In fact, what he found was that he didn’t need to specify all of these items.  Finch Assist already knows to consider estimates for transport, lodging, meals and other expenses as standard.  It was able to quickly provide price estimates and scenario summaries with pros and cons which helped him make a decision in record time.

The net net of this was that in a conversation that lasted a few minutes a determination was made as to where to have the trip.  This alone saved hours of effort, and we were told that the location chosen was not the obvious one or the one that they would have gone with on their own. That saved them over 20% of the trip cost.

Time and cost savings are a big deal when we’re talking over a dozen people for a week and international travel.  What’s more - the organiser didn’t have to do nearly as much work as before in communicating the schedule and prodding people to book their flights.  By asking Finch Assist to build the agenda and then invite all of his team, he went from decision to agenda to tasking his team to book in a matter of minutes.  Amazing!

Wanna share your story with us?  We’d love to hear it.  Got suggestions on use cases you want to see?  Please share. 

Send a note at feedback@finch.travel.  Also, we’d love to know what prompts you are using and what kind of results you’re seeing.

Happy planning!