AI's Impact on the Gift-Giving Process: Research Findings from UGA MMR Candidates

Hello. Hello. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining. I am excited to introduce our next set of speakers and I'm sharing my screen right now. So again, uh you've already probably heard these ground rules if you've been a part of our virtual insights conferences since the start earlier today. I'll just cover the ground rules quickly to remind you that we're at the mercy of tech. things may happen and if they do, bear with us. We will get them resolved and we'll be back up and running. Use this time to network, engage, and interact and also be kind and courteous and respectful with your comments. With that, I'm super excited to introduce Dr. Marcus Kuna. He is going to be joined by some awesome MMR candidates at UG. They're going to speak about AI's impact on gift giving. And shortly after they are done with their presentation, we'll field some questions. So if there is anything that piques your interest, you want to have further discussion about, please drop us a note and we'll make sure to feed those questions over to the group so that we can get some answers to you and just have some really rich discussion. Again, my name's Christa. I'm VP of operations at Accelerant. Thanks so much for joining us and thank you to our speakers. Thank you Christa. I'm going to go ahead and share um our uh our screen. Uh we um so my name is Marcus Kua and I am the director of the master of marketing research program at the University of Georgia. uh and this has now uh be um be becoming a tradition uh of our students presenting. So it's a great way for us to showcase the talent that we produce in the MMR program and it's also a great opportunity for our uh young professionals who will be entering the industry at the end of the academic year to get their feet wet in the uh conference secret. So uh we always appreciate the opportunity that bu and accelerant give it uh to us. So just to give you a little bit of the background of this presentation, this is a project that the students worked on in the fall semester in my course. So the the goal of the project it is to first they review secondary research uh based on syndicated reports of a topic of their interest and then they present uh those results and then based on this uh secondary research report then they think about like what are the next questions that we'd like to answer if we're going to follow up this uh secondary research report, right? So then based on that they develop a primary research uh based on a survey and then using a consumer panel that uh AYTM offers uh based on our agreement they collect data so they can answer uh those questions. So once again, I hope you guys enjoy seeing the uh young talent uh and the quality of the talent we're presenting here. And if you are in need of recruiting uh talent or if you know of a company that might need to recruit very talented students, uh please uh contact us. We are in the middle of a recurring season. So without f further ado, here's our students. Thank you. Hi everyone. Thank you, Marcus, for the introduction. Um, as Marcus just said, we are candidates for the Master of Marketing Research program at the University of Georgia, and we'll all be graduating in 2025. And today, we just kind of want to give you a taste into the work we've been doing in our program. And the topic of today's presentation will be the effect that AI has had on the giftgiving process. So, in terms of our agenda for the day, we're just going to start with a brief introduction. And I know Marcus kind of gave one, but just to kind of reiterate some things and then go into the key findings that we were able to uncover during our research and then we also came up with some recommendations that we have based on our insights. Um we had some limitations to our project as well and then future research that we feel our insights can um build upon. So first of all, what is gifting? I know we're all very aware with the process of gifting, but just to kind of have a baseline definition for the context of this project, we refer to gifting as the act of giving or exchanging gifts for special occasions such as holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, and other meaningful events. So, exactly what you're thinking, pretty straight to the point. Um, and so we actually, this project was built off of a previous study that our other classmates did as well. So they were kind of looking at the gifting industry as a whole. Um not specifically AI, but the the things that they were kind of able to uncover were first that inflation is continuing to loom over consumers in this area. That comes as no surprise as we've seen um some economic struggles over the last few years, especially during the time that we were making this presentation. It was around the holiday season. Um second, giftgivers are cautious towards spending on gifts. So whether that means cutting back on maybe giving themselves presents or combining occasions and just overall spending less that has had its effect on the entire market as a whole. Third um there's been kind of a new saying called a modern way to love. So pre-owned gifts are becoming um more popular. The negative perceptions maybe that were of that in the past are fading away especially as we move to a more sustainable economy. people are just having more to do with sustainable practices and leaning more towards that. And then finally, this is the point that our classmates uncovered that we really wanted to focus in and lean on, which was that technology, specifically AI, is enhancing the giftgiving journey. Um, so building off of that fourth AI point that our classmates were able to uncover, we wanted to kind of have three research questions that would guide our study and lead us to the insights that we were hoping to uncover. So the first of that being what are the current trends and behaviors of shoppers in the gifting process as a whole. So seeing what kind of use AI has in it now or could potentially have in the future. Second, what are the current perceptions and attitudes of shoppers when it comes to AI? Obviously AI is a hot topic right now as there's a lot of new developments happening at a rapid pace which obviously opens the door for skepticism but also people wanting to lean into it even more. So we wanted to uncover those attitudes and then third what is AI's role in the gifting process for shoppers. Um that was pretty much our main focus. We wanted to see how AI is um materializing in the overall process as a whole. Um, Marcus also kind of leaned into this, but just to reiterate it a bit, our data collection process, we obviously used the insights that our classmates found about the overall gifting process and we looked at a Mintel report called gifting gifting in the US 2024. This was able to give us just some context and background before we were able to create our survey. And when we did this, this was an AYTM quantitative survey. Our respondent pool was 400 participants and the only criteria that we had for these respondents were that they've given a gift in the last six months and then obviously 18 plus to just capture more of the market that's that has the money to spend on gifts. Um and then in terms of data analysis, we utilize SPSS and AYTM for the results that we uncovered. Okay, now on to the key findings. Um, we're going to talk about current trends and behaviors from shoppers in the gift shopping process, followed by general perceptions of AI and then AI and the gift processing, gift shopping process together. So, starting with with current trends and behaviors, about 60% of shoppers use a combination of online shopping and instore shopping when it comes to gift selections. About 50% of shoppers are inspired by friends and family suggestions, website searches and um in storere um displays or or suggestions when it comes to selecting a gift. Uh some of the typical challenges they face is a limited um budget uh lack of knowledge of recipient and difficulties finding um unique items for the gift the gifter. Um, one would say that AI would be very beneficial in closing the gap on some of those challenges. But what do shoppers uh think about think of? What do shoppers well what do shoppers think of AI in general? So when we asked um participants to when we asked participants what they think about AI in general um there were about a neutral majority of the comments were neutral describing AI as a definition as artificial intelligence um information computer followed up by positive comments which described AI as a tool helpful um it boosts what we already know creative innovative and then we had negative comments about um AI which described AI is scary, unknown, untrustworthy. These sentiments continue to show up when we ask about the potential of AI. Um, 55 to 60% of shoppers think AI can it has the potential to be innovative, creative, and make tasks more convenient, but um about 55% of shoppers describe privacy risk with um AI. So with that being said, about 63% of shoppers use AI in their daily lives. Of those 63% about 50% use it occasionally and daily. Um the top three AI tools were voice assistance which is Siri uh chat box which is like co-pilot or um chat GBT and then customer service chat boxes which is when you go on a website and you talk to a virtual AI assistant on the side for help. Um, with these mixed views on AI, um, Aaron is now going to talk about how consumers think about AI in the gift shopping process. Yeah. So, do a little switch of the presenters and the camera. Um but now that we have a better understanding of shopping habits that exist as well as general perceptions of AI, we can explore that intersection between the two and um really dive into AI's role in gifting specifically. So starting broad and kind of taking a funnel approach to our survey, we started with just asking people how frequently they're using these tools during their gifting process. Um, not super surprisingly to us, that never category did have the highest majority of respondents, not majority, but about 41% said that they never use these tools during the the gifting process. Those middle sections though of rarely, sometimes, and often make up over 50% of our respondents. And so it really illustrates the point that AI's integration is still developing. It's still in its early adoption kind of phase, but it is slowly becoming more widespread and more utilized in daily life as well as in the gifting process. Diving into those people who did use AI, um, recommendation algorithms were the most utilized tool with 50% followed by those chat bots that Jasmine was talking about as well as AI visual image search. So being able to take a p picture of something and plugging it in and finding the exact website to to buy it. Um and for the reasonings for using these tools, consumers really point to the convenience that it adds to their lives. Um being able to easily compare products, uh relying on this tool to do it. So that takes the kind of the grunt work out of the consumer's lives of having to pull up both and really dive into the details of products and then make their ultimate decision. It also um consumers found felt that it helped them to find unique or novel gift ideas that maybe they wouldn't have considered um on their own accord. Overall, it seems that AI is creating a more positive experience for those who do choose to use it when selecting a gift. 74% indicated that utilizing AI tools made the gift selection process faster for them. They also found that it was helpful um to them in choosing a gift. And both of those points really illustrate the bigger narrative that AI presents an opportunity to make the shopping experience um easier as well as improve the shopping experience as a whole. However, um let me move that mouse. However, with every discussion of AI, obviously there are barriers. Um privacy is the biggest concern. Obviously, I think everyone probably could have guessed that. Um it remains the largest challenge for consumers when deciding whether or not to use these tools. Um for that reason, people are still seeking assurance on what their data is being used for, what the information that they plug into these tools, where it's being stored, um how it's being stored, how long is it being stored. And so um by addressing those questions and providing that assurance and more transparency, it could help to um speed up that adoption process. Um, and then on the other hand, personalization, while some found earlier that I was talking about, some found that novel and unique gift ideas were being able to be found in AI, some people feel the opposite and feel that sometimes recommendations aren't always super relevant for what they're looking for. Um, 34% also say that more creative or unique suggestions would encourage them to use AI tools. So, kind of this perception that AI, you plug um you plug in what you want to AI. Say, I'm shopping for a gift for so and so who's 10 years old, and then um being given a recommendation that's very broad and very generalized to 10-year-old little boys, for example. Um, instead consumers would like the option to plug in information about the context of the people that they're trying to shop for so that AI can recommend um options that are really nuanced and specified to that person and really put the meaningfulness of gifts back in to the the gifts that they select despite coming from AI. Yeah. So, kind of moving into the final recommendations that we're going to come up with based on the insights that we had gathered. Um, our first one is just an AI tool that would be able to look at upcoming trends by, for example, age group or but you could use other demographics whether it's by age group or by gender or by geographic region or something of that sort. Um, and that would help to make more gift recommendations kind of slightly more broad as what Erin was saying we wanted to avoid, but it would kind of be able to give you a general idea of what these people in this age group would be looking for if for happens you were shopping for someone and you didn't know what to get this general age group. If you were a firsttime mom buying friends or buying presents for your kids' friends, something like that. Um, and then our second one, our second recommendation would be an AI chatbot that this one would be able to integrate with websites. So it'd be similar to uh Rufus on Amazon, for example. Um something that would integrate on a website, so it's only used by that one website. Um and then it would be able to consider your budget, preferences, uh other context. You can kind of get more of a personality uh of the person you're shopping for and put it into that uh chatbot. and the chatbot would be able to recommend items specifically from that website uh that would be beneficial for or something that that company or that consumer would probably want to buy for that person. So, for example, get something like on the Legos website, if you knew that you were shopping for a 10-year-old boy, as Aaron had said earlier, and you wanted to get them Legos that you think that they would think would be interesting or fun, it would kind of be able to be like, oh, 10-year-old boys nowadays are kind of really into these different Lego sets just because they're relevant to things that are showing up on TV and on other things they're looking at. Whereas, if you were gonna buy Legos for a say like a 25-year-old boy and a 25-year-old guy just because they really like Legos, they're probably not going to want the same thing. So, it would be able to look at their different personality traits and what they would be looking at and be able to get something that'd be a little bit different, maybe more advanced than what you would buy for a 10-year-old boy, and it would kind of help with things like that. Our third recommendation is an AI tool that can analyze inspiration pictures uh or like Pinterest boards and be able to re recommendations for gifts that would meet those recipients wants. So this would be something similar to re reverse Google image search. Um or you could put someone's social media on there. You could put um someone that they really like, an influencer or a you could put their Pinterest boards, stuff that they think is really interesting or clothes that they really like or things that they really like to do and you can kind of get chatbot that would be able to give you recommendations that would meet all of those different personality needs and it would give you different recommendations based on a large variety of places on the internet with the reverse Google image search type of uh AI. And then kind of moving into our limitations. Our first limitation was respondent ages. Um we kind of assumed that the younger you are, um it's been kind of been shown through our research that the younger you are, uh the more likely you are to be using AI and be incorporating AI kind of into your daily life and into different things you're doing. And so our goal with our survey was aimed more towards a younger audience, probably the Gen Z to millennial cut off at around 45. Um but with um AYTM we were struggling to meet our 400 person respondent limit with um our parameters of in that age group. So we had to expand our age group to 65 I believe. So, we did get a little bit more of a slightly more Gen X and older view for some of our AI information, which we think was a limitation a little bit on our study, and we wanted to be able to do that again potentially with a bigger time frame so that we could have more of a specific narrowed age limit. Uh, and then our second limitation was survey timing. We did this survey, I believe, in the beginning of November, which is some people have already shoed for Christmas, but I feel like a lot of people, which we kind of observed in our secondary research, people tend to start shopping for Christmas um around Black Friday. That's when a lot of people start to really get into the Christmas shopping. And so, people hadn't really, at least we believe that some people hadn't really thought about buying gifts yet for this season. And we feel like AI's had such a rapid exponential growth um just from all of 2024 and even like in 2023 that we feel like had we waited the month and done it in the beginning of December um we might have had different results just on the incorporating of AI into that. And then our third limitation was just kind of contradicting attitudes on the perception of AI and personalization. Um, we just had kind of noticed that a lot of our data for that specific segment was kind of contradictory as Jasmine had said earlier with like some people having really negative views and then other people having more neutral views and then some having positive views. It was kind of a big kind of a broad mix and we do think age of the respondents had something to do with that. So that's why doing it with a more narrowed audience with age might be beneficial. And then lastly, just ideas for future research based on this study. Um, just kind of doing a study to identify what the ideal AI gift process gifting process tool would look like and what it would be able to do. Um, because we have general ideas, but again, some people might want something that'll need less inputs from them and it'll be able to give them more output. So, just kind of what kind of things do people want to be able to give the chatbot or the AI tool to use? What information do they feel safe and secure giving them? And what do they need from the chatbot to make them feel safe and secure? And then again, what do they want on the outside? Do they want a specific link to an item or do they want general ideas? Do they want what's trendy or what's popular for this age group? Um, just kind of seeing what they would want the chatbot to be able to do. Um, and then second study would be to potentially conduct qualitative research. um just like observational or even just doing focus groups or interviews just to learn more about people's opinions on AI and their perceptions of it and like what they would want security-wise, personalization wise, um contradictions to get more of a full uh contextual story for how they feel about AI and how it could be applied. And then lastly, doing potentially a longitudinal study to observe the adoption of AI in the gift giving process and kind of see if you started it with people that were younger and then had people that were younger and then at different age groups potentially seeing how as it grows. Um they feel that they're adopting AI into their daily routine, their gift giving routine and just seeing how it kind of changes. Um, you could do it just across one generation or potentially doing one where you see how it compares at different time periods uh in the future with different generations. And yes, that's it. So, thank you. Do you guys have any questions? Yeah, hang on. See if we can get more. Thank you so much for your presentation. I do not see any questions in the chat or on our YouTube or social media channels. I'm just doing one more check to make sure. Um, one thing that I did really enjoy hearing about was the constraint of budget and how that has implications on gift giving. Gift giving. Did you do any research or have any questions tied to the specific types of gifts that were being given to people? So, like birthdays versus holidays versus a thank you. Yeah, I don't think we got to it was kind of a shortened time period that we got to work on this, but that would definitely be something we'd be interested in doing because I feel like in terms of financial constraints, there's certain things that maybe certain holidays you're willing to kind of give and take a little bit with that financial budget. Like if your daughter's getting married, you're going to spend a lot of money getting her a really good present, but maybe if it's just like some other holiday that maybe doesn't hold as much importance, it would be interesting to see how that materializes as well. Awesome. And that touches on what you said earlier with future research doing qualitative deep dives and that could be something that you're looking into or the correlation between age and budget as well. So I thought that was really interesting and a really good point to consider down the road if you're doing more research on this topic. Any parting words or final thoughts about what you shared with us? Um, I think we all I think I speak for all of us that we're just really thankful that we were able to be given this opportunity, especially just as students about to enter the workforce here soon just to be able to present to a group of professionals like yourself. It was an awesome opportunity. So, we thank you all for your time. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for Thank you. Thank you so much for your time and for your presentation. And we're all set with our one o'clock feature. So, we'll gear up now for our 1:30 speaker. Thanks again to Dr. Kuna and all of the amazing MMR students at UG. Thank you. Thanks. All right, everyone. If you just hang tight with us, we'll get ready for our next speaker. Um they'll come on at 1:30 and we'll get started with that presentation. Thank you.