Rashel Hariri, a 38-year-old entrepreneur and host of the podcast “She’s Interesting,” has transformed her gift-giving approach by leveraging ChatGPT as a personalized gifting concierge. Over the past year, the AI tool has become her go-to solution for selecting meaningful, thoughtful presents that make recipients feel truly seen and understood.
Hariri developed a three-part framework based on conversations with women in her podcast community, focusing on gifts that are: luxurious, brain-expanding (like books or courses), and practical for daily life. She implemented this framework by creating a dedicated project in ChatGPT with custom instructions, allowing the AI to understand her gifting philosophy and apply it consistently.
The system works through ongoing conversations for each gift recipient within her ChatGPT project. Hariri inputs detailed information about each person, including demographics, personal goals, likes and dislikes, struggles, and even astrological signs and favorite colors. As she learns new information about friends and family throughout the year, she updates their profiles, creating a dynamic database that grows smarter over time.
When it’s time to purchase a gift, Hariri prompts ChatGPT to generate ideas within her framework and specified budget. The AI explains why each suggestion works for the recipient, creating an interactive brainstorming session. She can request more options within specific categories or provide additional context to refine suggestions further.
The results have been impressive. Hariri estimates the process is 60-70% faster than her previous manual brainstorming approach. While she still makes final gift decisions, ChatGPT often suggests items she wouldn’t have considered independently. One notable success was when the AI recommended “The Five-Minute Journal” for a friend struggling to find personal time while balancing career and parenting responsibilities—a gift that proved both thoughtful and practical.
Hariri emphasizes that AI effectiveness depends on human input quality. Users must pay attention to their friends and provide detailed information; otherwise, the AI generates generic suggestions. The tool serves as an enhanced notes app that actively responds and generates creative ideas, relieving the mental burden of remembering details while maintaining the personal touch that makes gift-giving meaningful.
Key Quotes
ChatGPT has become like a gifting concierge, helping me organize my brainstorming and land on presents that feel thoughtful, personal, and aligned with someone’s real life.
Rashel Hariri describes how she uses ChatGPT in her gift-giving process. This quote illustrates the shift from AI as a simple tool to AI as a personalized assistant that understands individual contexts and preferences.
You have to be someone who pays attention to your friends, because otherwise, AI will give you basic suggestions. I try to give ChatGPT everything I know about the person.
Hariri emphasizes the importance of human input quality in getting valuable AI outputs. This highlights a critical principle in AI usage: the technology amplifies human effort and attention rather than replacing it.
I used to brainstorm all of this myself, but AI has made the process 60 to 70% faster, and given me a tool I can return to for future gift ideas.
Hariri quantifies the efficiency gains from using ChatGPT for gift planning. This demonstrates measurable productivity improvements from AI integration in personal tasks, while she maintains that final decisions remain human-driven.
The best part of gift-giving is that moment when someone opens it and says, ‘Oh my God, you know me so well!’ We want to give the people we love something that makes them feel good, and this process has made it easier for me to do that.
Hariri explains her ultimate goal in using AI for gift-giving. This quote underscores that AI serves to enhance human connection and thoughtfulness rather than diminish it, addressing common concerns about technology’s impact on authentic relationships.
Our Take
Hariri’s approach represents a sophisticated use case for conversational AI that goes beyond simple queries. By creating a structured system with ongoing conversations and accumulated knowledge, she’s essentially built a personalized CRM for her personal relationships—something that would have required custom software just a few years ago.
What’s particularly noteworthy is her emphasis on AI as an augmentation tool rather than a replacement. She still provides the emotional intelligence, observational skills, and final decision-making, while ChatGPT handles information organization and creative brainstorming. This human-AI collaboration model may be the template for how these tools integrate into intimate aspects of our lives.
The 60-70% efficiency gain she reports is significant and suggests that AI’s impact on personal productivity extends far beyond workplace applications. As these tools develop better memory and context retention, we’ll likely see more people adopting similar frameworks for various aspects of personal life management.
Why This Matters
This story illustrates practical AI applications in everyday life, demonstrating how consumer-facing AI tools like ChatGPT are moving beyond professional use cases into personal relationship management. Hariri’s approach showcases AI’s potential as a cognitive enhancement tool that augments human thoughtfulness rather than replacing it—a crucial distinction as society grapples with AI’s role in maintaining authentic human connections.
The framework-based methodology highlights an important trend: users who provide structured guidance and detailed context get significantly better AI results. This “AI literacy” gap will likely become more pronounced as these tools become ubiquitous, potentially creating advantages for those who learn to leverage them effectively.
For the AI industry, this represents the democratization of personalization technology. What was once the domain of luxury concierge services is now accessible to anyone with a ChatGPT subscription. As AI tools become more sophisticated at understanding context and maintaining long-term memory, we’ll likely see expanded applications in personal life management, relationship maintenance, and emotional intelligence augmentation—areas traditionally considered uniquely human domains.
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Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-gift-guide-ai-to-plan-presents-holiday-season-2025-12