When a young employee was given options for a gift by her employer, she didn’t choose a candle, a journal, or a day at the spa. Instead, she chose to donate the funds to pay for cancer patients’ rides to their treatment centers.
Her decision had a deeply personal connection: Her own mother was going through cancer treatment, and she knew how hard even simple logistics could become during an already difficult time.
Would an algorithm have predicted her choice, or the emotional significance behind it? Probably not.
AI can predict preferences, personalize communication, and automate interactions at a scale businesses couldn’t before. And in many cases, that’s incredibly useful. But as companies get better at anticipating what people might want, there’s a risk of confusing prediction with actually knowing someone.
As we embrace AI in an increasingly automated world, we should give just as much thought to the moments where human choice and attention still matter.
DON’T ASSUME YOU KNOW WHAT PEOPLE VALUE
Showing appreciation for customers, employees, and partners has long been an important business practice. And as in most areas of business, companies have relied on standardization to create consistency at scale. But scaling appreciation can sometimes have the opposite effect.
Not every person feels seen, recognized, or valued in the same way. When a company gives identical gifts to every customer who signs a renewal, for example, the company may believe it’s delighting those customers. But the gift won’t necessarily land that way for everyone. In fact, 70% of people have reported receiving a corporate gift they did not want.
The same is true for employees and partners. Recognizing everyone the same way isn’t necessarily the same as making everyone feel seen. Sometimes the more personal thing a company can do is ask.
PERSONALIZATION CAN MEAN PARTICIPATION
There’s no question that AI algorithms are becoming increasingly powerful. With more information, technology can get remarkably good at predicting what someone may want based on what it already knows about them.
But predictions aren’t always right. More importantly, there’s more to personalization than feeding someone’s past purchases or stated preferences into an algorithm.
There’s also participation: giving people a say in the experience itself. That might mean asking an employee what kind of recognition matters to them, letting a customer choose how they engage with a company, or giving someone options for how they’d like to be appreciated.
The next evolution of personalization may be more about knowing when to let people participate. The employee whose mother was going through cancer is a good example. Her company didn’t need to know that personal detail about her life to give her a meaningful gift. It just needed to give her a choice.
By allowing her to select something she would personally enjoy or direct those funds toward a cause she cared about, the company created room for her to bring her own meaning to the gesture.
GIFTING SHOWS THE DIFFERENCE
Corporate gifting is a particularly clear example because companies are constantly trying to make employees, customers, and partners feel appreciated through recognition programs, rewards, milestones, and gifts.
Instead of asking what to give them, the company might ask how to let them choose what feels meaningful.
We’ve seen firsthand that when people are given that agency, their choices can be surprising. Our research found that 81% prefer choosing their own gift, and in one campaign, roughly half chose a charitable gift rather than a physical item.
Someone may choose a traditional gift. Someone else may choose an experience. Another person may decide they’d rather turn that gift into support for a cause that matters to them. None of those choices is more correct than another, and that’s the point.
A business doesn’t always need to know enough about a person to predict the perfect gesture. Sometimes it needs to create enough flexibility for that person to make the gesture meaningful for themselves.
DON’T OPTIMIZE AWAY THE HUMAN PART
AI will continue making business faster, easier, and more personalized. But efficiency shouldn’t become the only measure of a good interaction.
A personal conversation or a thoughtful recognition, which might mean asking someone what they want and what they care about, can require more effort than an automated interaction. That extra effort is sometimes the cost of paying attention to another human being.
Even with more technology for predicting what people might want, the companies that make people feel most valued may be the ones that also know when not to guess.
Laura Hertz is CEO of Gifts for Good .
