How to use ChatGPT to plan your wedding

While agreeing to marry someone is (presumably) a pleasant experience, planning a wedding can be a minefield – with 40% of couples describing wedding-planning as “extremely stressful”, while 70% said they found it more stress-inducing than job-hunting.

And while many of might love to hand over the leg work to a wedding planner (think, Jennifer Lopez’s character, Mary Fiore, in the 2001 film called, er, The Wedding Planner), budgets already have to stretch pretty far, with the average cost of a UK wedding coming in at around £18,400 (gulp).

A possible solution? ChatGPT. While many of us are still getting used to how this AI chatbot technology might function within our lives, it actually has several different applications that can be used across all aspects of wedding planning in order to lighten the load on the bride and groom to be, leaving you to enjoy the process a little more without being dragged down by the admin. In order to research this, we used ChatGPT to do some hypothetical wedding planning. Here’s what we came up with…

Generating a list of actions

Don’t know where to start? When it comes to planning a wedding for the first time, you’d be forgiven for feeling totally at a loss of how to get going. After all, it’s not like you’ve done it before. That’s where AI technology can be really helpful, providing a step-by-step list of action points that you can then use to make a digital checklist or convert into a paper list. This could be as simple as, “1) What steps do I need to take to plan a wedding for 100 people in a barnyard venue, in a year’s time?

You could then ask it to break this down into a time-blocked series of stages, for instance using the command, “2) Can you write me a schedule of how to plan my time?”

Create a running order for the day of the wedding

Your Big Day tends to be made up of a number of different elements, from the ceremony itself to traditions like the first dance, cake cutting, and the various speeches. ChatGPT can help you plan a running order to have on hand during your special day, to ensure you’re not missing out a vital step from your timeline. Simply identify everything that needs to happen during the day, plus basic information like the ceremony start time, the number of guests and any special considerations (like wanting to leave at least three hours for dancing).

Then you would write something like: “Can you write me a running order for my wedding ceremony and reception which has 100 guests and takes place in the same a barnyard venue, starts at 3pm and needs to include time for the service itself, four speeches (from the bride & groom, best man, bridesmaids, and father of the bride), three hours of dancing, cake-cutting and a first dance.”

Gathering your wedding planning resources

You might want to lean into the process of wedding planning through physical resources for inspiration, and ChatGPT can help curate a recommendations list for this. Try asking it, “Got any useful resources to get started wedding planning? I particularly like magazines, books and podcasts.”

Writing emails for special requests

…For instance, say you need to block-book a series of hotel rooms at a special rate on-site or nearby your wedding venue, so that guests can book to stay there (as in the tweet example before). Or, you need to contact a series of bands to see if they meet the criteria you’re looking for to be your entertainment.