The Future of Gifting Is Here: Introducing Snappy’s AI Gifting Assistant

At Snappy, our mission has always been to connect people through the power of gifting.
We believe that when gifting is done right, it’s more than a transaction - it’s a magical moment that strengthens relationships, inspires action, and celebrates what matters most. From day one, our product vision has been simple but ambitious: make those moments possible, at scale.

But gifting is hard. Choosing the right gift requires time, empathy, and context you often don’t have. You might not know what someone actually wants, what they already own, or even their shipping address. Gift cards are the default shortcut, but they shift the emotional effort from sender to recipient - and too often end up unused or forgotten. In the U.S. alone, an estimated $21 billion in gift card value remains unclaimed each year. We knew there had to be a better way.

Since 2015, Snappy has helped over 9,000 organizations, including more than half of the Fortune 100, deliver over 7 million gifts worldwide. Our success comes from solving three fundamental challenges of modern gifting:

1. Finding the right gift. Through access to our global marketplace of 250,000+ unique items, plus AI-powered branded swag and experiences.
   
2. Creating a ​​memorable experience. Delightful, on-brand gifting moments that inspire genuine emotion.
   
3. Doing it at scale. Enabling personal, high-quality gifting, whether you’re sending one gift or 10,000.
   
   

For years, we’ve used machine learning to enhance these moments - curating personalized gift collections, optimizing reveal experiences, and even branding gift videos in real-time. But the recent wave of generative AI has opened an entirely new frontier: a true assistant for gifting.

The Evolution of Gifting

The past few years have changed how we connect. Teams are distributed, customers are global, and relationships often start - and deepen - entirely online. Gifting has become one of the few remaining gestures that truly cuts through the noise.

Yet as gifting scaled, our customers told us the same thing: they wanted it to stay personal. Marketing and HR leaders were spending hours crafting messages, searching our catalog, and second-guessing tone. They didn’t want automation for its own sake - they wanted intelligent assistance that preserved warmth, creativity, and a human touch, all while saving time.

Generative AI made that possible. Large language models can now understand tone and intent; recommendation systems can detect subtle preferences. The convergence of these technologies means AI can finally play a meaningful role in gifting - not replacing the human touch, but amplifying it.

Built for Humans, Powered by AI

When we started designing Snappy’s AI Gifting Assistant, our Product, Engineering, and Design teams asked a simple question: What role should AI play in gifting?

Just as important, we asked what it shouldn’t be. For us, AI is not:

• A gimmick layered onto experiences that work fine without it.
  
• A shortcut that lowers quality or makes gifting feel impersonal.
  
• A black box that removes control from the sender.
  

Instead, AI should help people give better gifts - simplifying the hard parts while amplifying joy, creativity, and connection.

During early prototypes, we discovered something interesting: users were more engaged when the Assistant spoke with Snappy’s friendly tone and personality. That insight shaped everything - from the Assistant’s conversational phrasing to the warm tone that accompanies its suggestions.

Our goal wasn’t to build a chatbot. It was to create a gifting partner - one that feels like a co-worker rather than an algorithm.

Meet the AI Gifting Assistant

The Snappy AI Gifting Assistant helps customers create the perfect gift for any occasion. Within seconds, it can:

• Handpick items from our 250,000+ item marketplace, tuned to the recipient and occasion.
  
• Compose a personalized greeting card that strikes just the right tone - heartfelt, professional, funny, or anywhere in between.
  
• Wrap it all up in on-brand visuals, using your company’s colors, logo, and tone for a complete, cohesive experience.
  

All of this happens seamlessly inside the Snappy platform. As you type, the Assistant offers suggestions you can edit, refine, or replace entirely. It adapts based on interactions from millions of gift senders and recipients - but never trains on your personal data.

And this is just the start. Soon, the Assistant will help design larger gifting programs - guiding HR leaders, managers, and marketers to use gifting more strategically to build culture, celebrate milestones, and deepen customer loyalty.

How We Built It

We grounded our AI development in a few core principles - the same ones that have guided every major Snappy product launch.

1. Designed to Delight

The Assistant embodies Snappy’s mascot and ethos: playful, colorful, and positive. We wanted the experience to feel like a conversation with a creative “little elf.” Every interaction - from its greeting to its gift recommendations - is designed to make you smile.

2. Truly Personal

No one wants to receive the same gift twice. Our algorithms ensure every moment feels unique and tailored to the user’s prompt. The more detail the sender gives, the better the recommendations get. The Assistant cross-checks gift history, analyzes category diversity, and proposes fresh ideas tailored to the occasion and recipient type.

3. Machine Brain, Human Expertise

Behind the models are years of human insight. Our team of curators, merchandisers, and program managers has spent nearly a decade studying what makes people feel valued. Their expertise informs everything from tone guidance to gift suitability scoring.

4. Opt-In, Opt-Out

We believe great AI is choice-driven. You can use the Assistant as much or as little as you like. Organizations can enable it for select teams or departments, or disable it entirely. The customer remains in full control.

5. Safety & Security

Protecting personal data is non-negotiable. We never train our AI on customer data, and we’ve built privacy and safety guardrails at every layer. All processing happens securely within Snappy’s infrastructure, aligned with enterprise-grade compliance standards.

Inside the Build: Collaboration Meets Creativity

Building the AI Gifting Assistant was a true cross-functional effort. Our product managers worked hand-in-hand with designers, data scientists, and engineers to bring the concept to life.

The core challenge wasn’t technical - it was emotional. How do you make a machine understand thoughtfulness?

We solved this by combining structured data (gift metadata, sentiment scores, event context) with natural language generation models tuned for tone and intent. Our design team ran dozens of micro-experiments to refine how the Assistant “speaks” - friendly, concise, and never over-familiar.

Internally, we built a “gift quality feedback loop” where Snappy employees rated hundreds of AI-suggested gifts and messages. This human-in-the-loop process trained the Assistant to reflect real emotional nuance.

We’re also integrating generative imagery pipelines that automatically style greeting cards and visuals based on brand color palettes, making every output cohesive with minimal user effort.

Lessons from the Pilot

When we first introduced the Assistant to a small group of pilot users, we weren’t sure how people would respond. Would they trust AI to help with something as personal as gifting?

The results surprised us.

Our analytics showed our users are moving from idea to finished gift experience quicker than ever, and we are already seeing increased conversion. But more importantly, we were inspired by the breadth and depth of gifting occasions and requests from our customers. These insights helped us rapidly iterate and fine-tune the Assistant - enabling it to handle new types of requests, deliver more on-point recommendations, and act as a trusted partner for our customers who are trying to make someone else happy.

The Road Ahead

Today’s AI Gifting Assistant helps you craft an individual gift send that feels seamless and personal. But this is only the beginning.

Looking ahead, we’re exploring ways for the Assistant to help companies design entire gifting strategies - suggesting when, why, and how to gift across employee journeys and customer lifecycles. Imagine:

• Proactive reminders for anniversaries, birthdays, and milestones.
  
• AI-assisted campaign planning that measures emotional impact, not just delivery metrics.
  
• Insights into how gifting affects engagement, retention, and brand sentiment.
  

As AI becomes woven into every business workflow, we believe gifting will remain a fundamentally human interaction - a way to express empathy in a digital world.

Our mission remains the same as ever: to make those moments of joy easier to create and impossible to forget.

Available Today

The AI Gifting Assistant is available now for all Snappy customers at no additional cost.

• Essential tier: 20 Assistant messages per week.
  
• Elevated and Enterprise tiers: Unlimited use.
  

You can try it today at snappy.com/.

Feedback from our pilot users has already been inspiring - gifts that surprised, delighted, and deepened connections. We can’t wait to see what you create with it.

The Future of Gifting Starts Now

AI will continue to transform the way we work, but connection will always be human. The Snappy AI Gifting Assistant is our way of ensuring those connections stay warm, thoughtful, and full of surprise - at scale.

Because the best gifts don’t just arrive.

They connect.

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