AI at your wedding: what is actually worth doing

Every wedding supplier on earth has added the word AI to their homepage in the last two years. Most of it is noise. Some of it is genuinely useful. Here is an honest sort through, from someone who builds one of these tools and will tell you where it does not help.

Worth doing: the seating chart

Seating is a constraint satisfaction problem dressed up as a social one, and that is exactly what computers are good at. Give a model your guest list, who must not sit together, who barely knows anyone, and which tables seat eight, and it will produce a decent first draft in seconds.

You will still move a third of it by hand, because it does not know that your aunt has views. But starting from a draft beats starting from a blank floor plan, and this is the single most tedious job in wedding planning.

Worth doing: first drafts of the writing

Not the speech itself. The scaffolding around it: the thank-you list, the running order, the polite way to phrase the bit about the venue changing hands, the wording on the website about dietary requirements.

A best man's speech written by an AI is obvious within two sentences and lands badly in a room of people who know the person. But an AI that helps someone who is terrified of public speaking to get the structure down, so they can then put their own stories in it, is doing real work.

Worth doing: entertainment that produces something

This is the category our own product lives in, so weigh accordingly. Guests describe a wedding photo you should have had, an image model paints the two of you into it, and the results go up on the projector.

It works for a specific reason: image generation is now fast enough and good enough at holding a likeness that a guest gets a recognisable picture of you in about fifteen seconds. Two years ago the faces came out as generic strangers and the whole thing fell flat. That changed, and it changed recently.

See what it does with a photo of you — one free try. Try it free →

Probably not worth it: AI wedding planners

The chatbots that promise to plan your whole wedding produce a generic checklist you could have found free in about four minutes. They do not know your venue's rules, your family's politics, or that the florist you want books eighteen months out. Planning is mostly local knowledge, and local knowledge is exactly what a general model does not have.

Probably not worth it: AI photo editing of your real photos

Leave this to your photographer. They have a style, you hired them for it, and running their work through an AI enhancer usually produces something glossier and worse. The exception is fixing a genuine accident — a bin in the background, someone blinking in the only good group shot — and most photographers will do that anyway if you ask.

A real warning: AI video and voice of people who are not there

There are tools that will generate a video message from a relative who has died, or who could not travel. Some couples find this beautiful. Many guests find it deeply unsettling, and you cannot know in advance which room you have.

If you are considering it, ask the people closest to that person first, privately, and be genuinely willing to hear no.

The questions to ask any AI wedding supplier

1. What happens to our photos? Are they stored, and are they used to train anything?
2. What happens if it fails on the day? Is there a person who answers an email on a Saturday?
3. Does it need the venue's wifi? Venue wifi is famously bad — check whether it works on mobile data.
4. Can we see it working before we pay? Anything that will not show you a real output with your own faces is asking for a lot of trust.

The test is not whether it uses AI. It is whether it would still be worth doing if it did not.

The useful tools all have that property. A good seating chart is useful because it saves you four hours, not because of how it was generated. A photo game is fun because guests laugh at the results, not because there is a model behind it. If the AI is the selling point rather than the mechanism, be suspicious.