Not trying to be snarky but just train your eye and trust your intuition. I shoot events and concerts and can cull 3000 photos down to 100 around 70-90 minutes.
You already know what a good photo looks like. It presents itself in your viewfinder and you immediately take the photo. If it takes me a quarter second to recognize a photo and take it, it shouldn’t take me more than 2 seconds to inspect and cull it. I personally would never let AI choose which one of my shots is a keeper or not.

Nope. After final delivery all photos that are not rated for my keeping or client delivery is deleted from disk. Long term backup are only the chosen raw and capture one session file.

when in doubt make a new adobe account and do a free lightroom trial