stampede at Hospitality Tech Expo, ExCeL London

Stand HT 112 at ExCeL London, and a conference talk that took the mystique out of AI.

Stampede exhibited at Hospitality Tech Expo at ExCeL London on 30 September and 1 October 2025, on stand HT 112. The show ran alongside six other industry events and billed itself as the largest B2B event for hospitality industry growth in the UK.

Alongside the stand, founder Patrick Clover spoke at the conference about artificial intelligence in hospitality. His talk, 'AI. It's not what you think', challenged common misconceptions: AI is not a conscious oracle or a villain, but a pattern recognition tool that predicts from data, sometimes brilliantly and sometimes badly. The talk covered why calling it 'intelligent' is misleading, how it is more about statistics than sentience, what it could actually do at the time, and how assumptions about AI were shaping policy, ethics and innovation.

The through-line was practical rather than philosophical: so-called AI is a smarter way to spot patterns in your own venue data and turn them into decisions, from who is likely to book to when to run a promotion and when to hold back.

This post is kept as a record of the event. The ideas from the talk live on in AI: it's not what you think.