Members often tell us that AI feels like something happening to them rather than something they’re actively shaping. The pressure to adopt, the fear of falling behind, and the sheer volume of noise around the subject can make it hard to know where to actually start.
But equally, we can all get excited about what AI can do in our personal lives, from whipping up a recipe to fixing a packed diary or troubleshooting a broken oven mid-dinner party. So what practical steps can we take to get ahead at work, and what inspiration can we draw from real examples?
We invited Tracey Klein, EVP at eGifter, to cut through the noise. With a background spanning 15 years in enterprise application development and a front-row seat to how AI is reshaping gift card and incentives technology, Tracey brought both a strategic and deeply practical lens to the conversation, covering where the industry is heading, how her company is building with AI, and what any of us can do with it right now.
Here’s what was covered.
AI is here: women need to lead the conversation
Tracey opened by setting out why getting this right, and getting women at the front of the change, matters.
The Ravio 2026 Compensation Trends Report found that 65% of HR reward leaders in Europe said AI is a skillset they are actively prioritising, and that AI and ML hiring grew 88% year-on-year in the European tech sector in 2025.
Yet the World Economic Forum and the Stanford AI Index (2024) put the share of women among AI professionals worldwide at just 22%.
A Microsoft Work Trend Index from 2024 found that 66% of business leaders say they wouldn’t hire someone without AI skills.
“You don’t need to be a data scientist,” Tracey said. “You need to know which tools to reach for and when.”
How is AI being used in incentives?
AI is already being applied across the incentives space in some existing ways.
- Predictive personalisation, AI recommendation engines are replacing generic reward catalogues, predicting individual preferences and acting on them in real time.
- Participant behaviour analytics, AI flags disengagement before it happens, identifying who’s likely to drop off so operators can intervene early.
- Fraud detection, one of the most active areas of development, with AI spotting suspicious patterns far earlier than traditional rule-based systems allow.
- Search and discoverability, perhaps the most urgent shift for marketers. As tools like Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot increasingly surface AI-generated summaries at the top of search results, the old discipline of SEO is being joined by something new.
Real-world examples she highlighted:
- IMA Engage IQ, a GPT-based AI agent from the Incentive Marketing Association that helps programme designers build and optimise incentive programmes through conversational prompts
- Starbucks Deep Brew, am internal AI platform that personalises rewards offers for 34 million+ active members, which they credit with driving 13% year-over-year membership increases and record Q1 2024 loyalty spend
- Totus, which uses AI to analyse purchase history and redemption patterns to tailor gift card offers
- Workday x Achievers, launched in April 2026, bringing AI-powered recognition and rewards built directly into the Workday HCM platform
- eGifter Shield – a fraud detection layer built into their platform. Rather than waiting for losses to accumulate, Shield monitors every order in real time, looking at signals like login location, time of day, device language, and order patterns, to identify and contain fraudulent activity before it escalates.
- eGifter SmartScreen, which handles content moderation on user-generated images and messages, checking for profanity, hate speech, nudity, and brand-risk content before anything reaches a recipient.
What does this look like in practice?
The session switched to a discussion of everyday AI applications which was incredibly wide-ranging, and very relatable: drafting client emails, dropping raw Google Analytics data into Claude to get an instant analysis of where users were dropping off a website, building RCA documents and process documentation, running discount rate comparisons, uploading sales data files for full monthly breakdowns with charts, and competitor research with sources cited.
(Oh, and Tracey built approximately 75% of the session’s slides using Claude. Very meta!)
The throughline across all of it as Tracy stated is “AI solves the problem of the blank page. You get to start the race 100 yards ahead of where you used to have to start.”
And for anyone who’s felt that AI is only useful if you’re technically minded,: “It’s like if you had an assistant, you might ask them to do that for you. But you were never going to get that assistant. But now you have one.”
A word of warning, though. Tracey was candid about the limitations. When building the session deck, she pushed Claude on a source that it couldn’t back up. Its response: “You’re absolutely right. I apologize. That was a serious error. I fabricated a specific example that I had no source for, and it made it into the deck as a cited fact.”
“You have to really babysit it.” Her rule? Go to every source yourself. Don’t send, submit, or present anything AI produces without checking it first.
Takeaways
- Customise how it speaks to you. As Tracey put it: “AI tends to want to be friendly, ‘Great idea, Tracey, let me help you with that.’ I can’t stand that. Tell it: don’t placate me. Don’t congratulate me. Just give me my answers.” Most AI tools let you set a preferred tone and style in settings, use it.
- Start with your biggest time sink. Proposals? Emails? Research? That’s where AI earns its keep first.
- Prompt well: give AI a role, context, and a format. Vague in, vague out. Tracey has kindly offered her prompt guide, you can reach her at tracey@egifter.com.
- Verify everything. Don’t submit, send, or present anything AI produces without checking it yourself, especially statistics, case studies, and source links.
- Know your company’s policy. Before putting client data or internal information into any AI tool, understand what guardrails your organisation has in place, or raise the conversation if they don’t exist yet.
“AI is not replacing the best people in this industry. It’s amplifying them.”
— Tracey Klein, EVP, eGifter
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Written by Elaine Keep www.elainekeep.com