When a young employee was given options for a gift by her employer, she didn’t choose a candle, a journal, or a day at the spa. Instead, she chose to donate the funds to pay for cancer patients’ rides to their treatment centers.

Her decision had a deeply personal connection: Her own mother was going through cancer treatment, and she knew how hard even simple logistics could become during an already difficult time.

Would an algorithm have predicted her choice, or the emotional significance behind it? Probably not.

AI can predict preferences, personalize communication, and automate interactions at a scale businesses couldn’t before. And in many cases, that’s incredibly useful. But as companies get better at anticipating what people might want, there’s a risk of confusing prediction with actually knowing someone.

As we embrace AI in an increasingly automated world, we should give just as much thought to the moments where human choice and attention still matter.

Showing appreciation for customers, employees, and partners has long been an important business practice. And as in most areas of business, companies have relied on standardization to create consistency at scale. But scaling appreciation can sometimes have the opposite effect.

Not every person feels seen, recognized, or valued in the same way. When a company gives identical gifts to every customer who signs a renewal, for example, the company may believe it’s delighting those customers. But the gift won’t necessarily land that way for everyone. In fact, 70% of people have reported receiving a corporate gift they did not want.

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