frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Launch HN: TeamOut (YC W22) – AI agent for planning company events

https://app.teamout.com/ai
8•vincentalbouy•2h ago
Hi HN, I’m Vincent, CTO of TeamOut (https://www.teamout.com/). We build an AI agent that plans company events from start to finish entirely through conversation. Similar to how Lovable helps build websites through chat, we apply that approach to event planning. Our system handles venue sourcing, vendor coordination, flight cost estimation, itinerary building, and overall project management.

Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVyc-x-isjI. The product is live at https://app.teamout.com/ai and does not require signup.

We went through YC in 2022 but did not launch on HN at the time. Back then, the product was more traditional, closer to an Airbnb-style search marketplace. Over the past two years, after helping organize more than 1,200 events, we rebuilt the core system around an agent architecture that directly manages the planning process. With this new version live, it felt like the right moment to share it here since it represents a fundamentally different approach to planning events.

The problem: Planning a company retreat usually means choosing between three imperfect options: (1) Hire an event planner and pay significant fees and venue markups; (2) Do it yourself and spend dozens of hours on research, emails, and negotiation; or (3) Use tools like Airbnb that are not designed for group logistics or meeting space.

The difficulty is not just finding a venue. Even for 30 to 50 people, planning turns into weeks of back-and-forth emails for quotes, comparing inconsistent pricing across PDFs, and tracking budgets in spreadsheets. It becomes an ongoing coordination problem with evolving constraints and slow, asynchronous vendor responses. Most existing software is form-driven, but the real workflow is conversational and stateful.

Offsites are expensive and high stakes. A single event can represent a significant chunk of a team’s annual budget, and mistakes show up directly as cost overruns or poor experiences. Founders and operators often end up spending time on event logistics instead of their actual work.

I ran into this while organizing retreats at a previous company. Before TeamOut, I worked as an AI researcher at IBM on NLP and machine learning systems. Sitting inside long email threads and cost spreadsheets, it did not look like a marketplace gap to me. It looked like a reasoning and state management problem. As large language models improved at multi-step reasoning and tool use, it became realistic to automate the coordination layer itself.

Our Solution: The core agent relies on a combination of models such as Gemini, Claude, and GPT. A central LLM-based agent maintains planning context across turns and decides which specialized tool to call next. Each tool has a specific responsibility: - Venue search and filtering - Cost estimations (accommodation + flights) - Budget comparisons - Quote and outreach flows - Communication tool with our team

For venue recommendations across more than 10,000 venues, we do not rely purely on the language model. We embed both user requirements and venues into vector representations and retrieve candidates using similarity search. Hard constraints such as capacity and dates are applied first, and results are ranked before being presented.

On the interface side, we use a split layout: conversation on the left and structured results on the right. As you refine the plan in chat, the event updates in real time, allowing an iterative workflow rather than a static search experience.

What is different is that we treat event planning as a stateful coordination problem rather than a one-shot search query. The agent orchestrates tools, manages evolving constraints, and surfaces trade-offs explicitly. It does not invent venues or fabricate pricing, and it is not designed to replace human planners for very large or highly customized events.

We make money from commissions on venue bookings. It is free for teams to explore options and plan. If you’ve organized an offsite or large meetup before, I’d genuinely value your perspective. Where would you expect this to fail? What edge cases are we underestimating? Where wouldn’t you trust an agent to handle the details?

My engineering team and I will be here all day to answer questions, happy to go deep on architecture, tradeoffs, and lessons learned. We’d really appreciate your candid feedback.

Comments

jondwillis•1h ago
I initially didn’t read this post, fixated on “company event”, and thought it could be used for a single-day, one-off “thing to do tonight given (location) and (preferred activities/venue type) after (work end time)” It presented hotels and then some potential activities, but didn’t look up the time. When I asked about what is open after the time, the agent seemed to realize my request was not in your typical use case flow and gave me a refusal.

It’d be cool to offer one-off event suggestions, but I understand that’s probably not as easily monetizable.

esafak•54m ago
Looks nice. I'd speed up queries and add a filtering UI to the results; don't make me type everything.
vincentalbouy•22m ago
Latency is something we’re actively working on. Because the agent sometimes calls multiple tools (venue retrieval, cost estimation, ranking, etc.), it can feel slower than a traditional search UI. We’re optimizing tool chaining and caching right now, but it’s definitely an area where we need to improve. If it ever feels sluggish, that’s on us.

Filtering UI: Also agree. We leaned heavily into conversation because planning is iterative and constraint-driven, but that doesn’t mean everything should require typing. A hybrid approach (chat + explicit filters/sliders/toggles) probably makes more sense for power users. We already have structured results on the right adding faster, direct manipulation controls there is a logical next step.

Appreciate you calling it out. If you were using this for real, what filters would you expect to be immediately clickable instead of typed?

esafak•20m ago
Price, location, time, event type, group size, for starters.
agenticfish•32m ago
Maybe I misunderstood the use case this is for, but I asked it to search for a "venue for team outing for 8 people in the City of London" and it just came up with random hotels in London. I clarified that I'm looking for venues for a team activity and that it needs to be limited to the City, but it just returned hotels again.
vincentalbouy•11m ago
You are right, for now, on the AI product, we only support events where people have to stay for at least one nigh: offsite, retreats, conferences etc.

We do support day event and day activities and we plug this supply in the AI in the coming weeks to make the supply stronger and cover more usecases

vonneumannstan•28m ago
Who needs this? TAM is like pennies... Garry Tan is mentally unwell...
vincentalbouy•18m ago
Fair enough, I promise Garry is doing fine.

On TAM, corporate retreats and offsites in the US alone represent roughly a 500M+ venue booking market by our estimates, and that is just one slice, not counting flights, activities, or international events. Since COVID, distributed teams have made in-person gatherings more important, not less. Almost every company does some form of corporate event, whether it is an annual retreat, sales kickoff, leadership offsite, or team meetup.

Almost all US company do corporate event and retreats, every year.

The bigger bet for us is not just that events are a sizable market. It is that this is exactly the kind of messy, coordination-heavy workflow that AI can now handle. Two years ago this would not have worked. With current multi-step reasoning and tool use, it finally does.

amelius•21m ago
> Where would you expect this to fail?

Booking.com and similar moving into this space with their own generic AI tool.

Or even Gemini improving their UI so it presents search results more neatly.

vincentalbouy•3m ago
Fair question.

Important distinction: we are not in the same segment as Booking.com. Most hotel platforms support small group bookings, usually up to around 10 rooms. We operate in MICE, where you are negotiating room blocks, meeting space, F&B minimums, contracts, and attrition clauses. That is a very different workflow from self-serve booking.

LLMs can make search look nicer, but getting an actual group quote still requires going through property sales teams and contracts. That is operational and relationship-driven, not just a UI problem.

Over 1,200+ events, we have also built proprietary data around pricing patterns, responsiveness, and contract structures. That is not publicly accessible today.

Also our proprietary data is unique to us for now.

How would you make it more defensive? I take any idea

philipp-gayret•2m ago
I'm on the technical end but to me this looks like just another ChatGPT wrapper with a Booking.com & flight planner API key. Nothing more. Expedia was on the list of ChatGPT plugin developers in 2023. What's stopping you? What keeps you in business the moment any travel agency decides gets into Gemini, ChatGPT or the like? I'm sure you make a lot of money per commission, but I don't see what is unique about you as company. What stops anyone else from vibecoding what you'e built in an afternoon?

CHERIoT Rust: Status update #0

https://rust.cheriot.org/2026/02/15/status-update.html
1•remexre•1m ago•0 comments

The CHIPS Act Spends $52.7B on Fabs but $0 on Defending Them from Ransomware

https://thehgtech.com/articles/semiconductor-ransomware-chips-act-2026.html
1•thehgtech•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Dance of Tal V2 – Dependency injection and lockfiles for AI agents

https://github.com/dance-of-tal/dance-of-tal
1•monarchjuno•2m ago•0 comments

Trump made tax day more complicated. ChatGPT and Claude can make it easier

https://www.vox.com/life/480317/trump-taxes-chatgpt-claude-turbotax
1•speckx•2m ago•0 comments

Turning a 2 ton robot into a 3D printer [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peY_KK_nGc8
1•rmast•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Nosh – Fast native shell with built-in AI (natural language commands)

https://github.com/TryNosh/nosh
1•pouya-eghbali•3m ago•0 comments

"A file is an app" – Selfware, a unified file format for the Agent eramory)

https://github.com/floatboatai/selfware.md
2•floatboat•4m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Read the Room, a FOSS human bioindicator

1•soudk•4m ago•0 comments

Who will regulate Elon Musk and China's data centers in space?

https://restofworld.org/2026/orbital-data-centers-ai-sovereignty/
1•vinhnx•4m ago•0 comments

AncestorTree – Open-source genealogy for Vietnamese families

1•dttai•4m ago•0 comments

Retool silently removes self-hosted plans

https://community.retool.com/t/self-hosted-docs-now-state-enterprise-only/64586
2•assumptions•5m ago•0 comments

Was software a scarce commodity all along?

https://harmonique.one/posts/was-software-a-scarce-commodity-all-along
1•futurecat•5m ago•0 comments

Online Accusations in Guthrie Abduction Leave One Family 'Scared Numb'

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/us/nancy-guthrie-true-crime-accusations.html
1•duxup•7m ago•0 comments

AI Dev Tool Stack for 2026

https://qa.tech/blog/ai-dev-tool-stack-for-2026
2•Liriel•8m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Memograph CLI- A tool to diagnose 'memory failures' in AI agents

1•memograph•8m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Dola Seed 2.0 – AI video generator with multi-shot narrative control

https://dolaseed.site
1•yuni_aigc•8m ago•1 comments

Show HN: SeeVideo – Access Seedance 2.0 and Kling 3.0 without a subscription

https://seevideo.dance/
1•naxtsass•8m ago•0 comments

Jesse Jackson Paved the Way for a New US Left

https://jacobin.com/2026/02/jesse-jackson-death-left-sanders/
2•PaulHoule•9m ago•0 comments

We run 20M models in parallel on Ray

https://mixpeek.com/blog/ray-distributed-ml-pipeline-architecture
1•Beefin•9m ago•1 comments

HTP

1•MiachelC•9m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What if your LLM violates a patent?

1•VikingCoder•9m ago•0 comments

When access to knowledge is no longer the limitation

https://idiallo.com/blog/access-to-knowledge-is-no-longer-a-limitation
1•Brajeshwar•10m ago•0 comments

The Absolute Insider Mess of Prediction Markets

https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-absolute-insider-mess-of-prediction-markets/
1•Brajeshwar•10m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Tracking my bin (trash can)

https://timang.us/2026-02-16-bin-tracker/
1•tim_angus•10m ago•0 comments

Where We Should Discuss Only Computing Research

https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/where-we-should-discuss-only-computing-research/
1•bikenaga•10m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Who Is Using XMPP?

2•nunobrito•10m ago•0 comments

People 18-60 are not concerned "education vs. AI" But it affects them personally

1•kokhanserhii•11m ago•0 comments

Style and Politics: On "The National Security Strategy of the United States "

https://www.publicbooks.org/style-and-politics-on-the-national-security-strategy-of-the-united-st...
1•treetalker•11m ago•0 comments

Jefferson Lab Tapped to Lead Development for Exploring Nuclear Waste Treatment

https://www.jlab.org/news/releases/jefferson-lab-tapped-lead-technology-development-exploring-nuc...
1•rbanffy•11m ago•0 comments

Will Americans Get over Their Fear of Eating Animal Blood?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/t-magazine/animal-blood-food-restaurants.html
2•carride•12m ago•0 comments