How Giftada uses AI to automate the work behind thoughtful gifting
Rie Nakasone, founder of Giftada, runs a service that helps people manage gift giving for their household, from choosing gifts to tracking delivery. The conversation looks at how AI helps automate administrative work while human curators select gifts, and where Nakasone still prefers a human first draft.
Use AI to take on repetitive administration, but keep human judgment where it shapes the service. For Giftada, curators still handpick gifts, while AI helps build automations and refine writing.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
I started building Giftada after my husband forgot our anniversary one year. Initially, I wanted to help people whose busy lives made it easy to forget important dates. But I realized the people most eager for help were already remembering those dates and doing all the gift shopping for their household.
That became our focus. Remembering a birthday is only the beginning. You still have to find something thoughtful, order it, and make sure it arrives on time.
We make that help affordable by automating the administrative work while curating the gifts ourselves. A gift curator handpicks three options based on the recipient’s personality, values, and preferences, so clients can choose without spending hours searching. Then we handle the rest.
Try the service free for 90 days, with no card required.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Most of our new business currently comes from Giftada membership vouchers distributed at events. I’d like more people to discover us through AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude.
Someone might ask how to manage their holiday tasks. I’d like Giftada to be a service they discover through that chat.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
I’ve handed over the technical work of building our automations. AI either writes the code for me or builds the automation directly. That helps me turn ideas for reducing our administrative workload into working processes.
I tried using it to draft our public relations pitches, but I went back to writing the first drafts myself. I want the starting point to reflect what I actually think and have experienced. I still use AI during revision to help make my writing clearer.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
I haven’t noticed a clear change in what people know before they reach out. Our website traffic does show some visitors arriving through AI assistants.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Look for repetitive work you can automate, especially the administration that takes time away from serving clients. Start with a specific task, check the results, and expand when it works reliably.
Ignore the pressure to use AI in everything. For Giftada, automation helps make personal service affordable, while a human gift curator still handpicks every gift. Choose where the technology earns its place by how it improves the service.
Thank you to Rie Nakasone and the team at Giftada for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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