If it takes more time to review and approve a simple email than it would for me to write it myself, the whole promise of agentic AI falls flat.

Most people revel in milestones. Turning the yearly page on birthdays, holidays and anniversaries is an opportunity for big parties, exchanging nice gifts and celebrating the ones we love. It can also be a minefield of missed connections and hurt feelings if you forget the dates.

If you’re ever sent a “happy belated birthday” message, neglected to recall your own anniversary or simply struggle to keep in touch with people, this guide might be for you. Granted, you’ll have to put your trust in an AI agent to do the heavy lifting, but you might never need to remember to send a card again.

While AI may not understand human connection and happiness, what it does well with is rote tasks. I tried to use ChatGPT and a few other AI tools to automate the upkeep of my personal and professional relationships — but here’s where it all went wrong.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

The penalties for being terrible at remembering birthdays increase as one gets older. Soon it’s not just your friend’s birthdays that slip your mind, but also their kids’ birthdays and your grandkids’ birthdays and on and on as the wheel of reproduction turns. 

I used ChatGPT — which appeared to be the only AI tool among the three I tested that could automate this entire process for me — to identify key birthdays of friends and family and develop an automation system to make sure I never miss another important date.

Source link