When we wrote last year’s festive post about the various ways you could use AI to sleigh the holidays, generative AI still felt experimental: clever, occasionally delightful, and more than capable of going off-piste. Niche enough to still be cool. This year, the technology has settled into something more grounded. It hasn’t delivered a Christmas miracle — which is how you know this is still real life and not a movie — but it has become a steadier, more capable companion for the parts of December that tend to overwhelm us.
It’s fair to say that Santa’s little helper who supported the cool kids last year now behaves a bit more like Santa’s personal shopper for the mainstream party host and present-giver. Not one who should be given your credit card and left unattended, but one who is undeniably better at turning scattered ideas into something that resembles a plan.
AI really has improved — and you can see it in the little things
The biggest change over the past year isn’t just the steady stream of model upgrades. Although it’s hard to ignore that model names now read like the output of a particularly tired naming committee — GPT-4, then 3.5 (?!), then 4o; Claude 1, then 2, then 3 Opus (easy, Beethoven), Sonnet and Haiku; Gemini Ultra, Pro and Flash (not to be confused with The Flash) — a sequence that makes almost no narrative sense, even as the models themselves keep improving. What matters more is how those improvements are turning up in the tools people use every day.
Search is a good example. Services like Perplexity, and even the patchier AI-enhanced search features from Microsoft and Google, now offer clearer, more direct answers without the familiar dance through pages of adverts and outdated links. For the first time in a while, looking something up online feels more like a conversation and less like a boot-sale rummage.
Retailers have followed suit. Boots, John Lewis, Zara and others have strengthened their AI-driven product finders and stock alerts. Amazon, meanwhile, has doubled down on price tracking and back-in-stock notifications. These features aren’t glamorous, but they reduce friction — and that’s where AI has been most effective this year.
None of this is dramatic. But the combined effect is noticeable: everyday tasks, especially the tedious, time-sucking ones, take less effort.
What AI can help with this Christmas — and when to ask a grown-up for help
As it’s the holidays and we’re straying outside enterprise tech and into your home life, we have to admit that — after helping you finish work on time and get to the pub/go home — the most welcome improvement is probably in AI-powered gift-finding. AI is now surprisingly good at taking a vague description — “something for a teenager who loves comics, hates football… under £30” — and turning it into a practical shortlist from retailers you actually recognise. It might not pick the perfect present, but it can stop you staring at a wall of “Top 100 Gifts” articles that all recommend the same Bluetooth speaker.
It’s helpful in the kitchen too. If you’re navigating a plethora of dietary requirements — and, at this stage of first-world problems, who isn’t — AI can assemble a menu that keeps everyone fed without you resorting to a 70s-style nut roast. And if you’re travelling, the integration of timetables, traffic data and weather conditions into route-planning removes some of the guesswork from the annual Christmas migration. The power of an AI assistant as in-car navigation dispute moderator is not to be underestimated. Pop on some Chris Rea and relax.
The quieter win is of course the admin. Festive messages, apologies, thank-yous and the polite “we’re not going to make it this year” texts can now be drafted in just the right tone. It all gives you back odd pockets of time — which is exactly what your December needs. My personal favourite LLM genre right now is polite requests to parents for extra cash, whether it’s because your teen is coming home from school via the chicken shop or your eldest wants to get another round in before they come home from uni for the holidays. I’ve seen some absolute beauties.
Of course, the limits remain obvious. AI still doesn’t understand your family dynamics, however carefully you explain them. It might misinterpret your question and suggest a wildly unsuitable gift. It can still produce confident nonsense about stock levels. And it has no understanding of the sentiment behind your weird traditions. All that remains entirely in the human domain. Quite right too.
The holiday season is a helpful reminder that context is everything. AI doesn’t know what matters to your family (or your organisation) unless you spell it out — just as it can’t know the true meaning of Christmas*. It can’t follow rules it hasn’t been given. This is why retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become so important when you want AI output you can rely on: when tools are grounded in correct information, they stop guessing and start helping.
Felicity Cloake, perfect recipes and why AI sometimes feels familiar
One of my favourite Guardian-reading liberal-elite indulgences is reading Felicity Cloake’s “How to make the perfect…” series of recipes. In many ways, her approach was an early prototype for how AI can behave. She’ll test every well-known version of a dish — macaroni cheese, say — and then distil them into her perfect recipe. Crucially, she tells you where they differ and why she’s made certain choices, making it easier to figure out where you might want to adapt it yourself. You trust the result because she’s done the hard work, and you can personalise it because she’s shown you her working out.
AI is surprisingly similar — and completely different — at the same time.
Like Cloake, an AI model can synthesise hundreds of patterns and techniques quicker and better than you can, personalising the sh*t out of it. Ask it for a festive menu or gift ideas or a travel plan, and it will offer a neat, confident blend of approaches: a sort of meta-recipe drawn from everything it has access to. What it can’t yet do is give you Cloake’s level of reasoning, context or experience. It can’t taste the mac and cheese. It won’t tell you why certain choices matter**, or what trade-offs sit beneath them, or where you might deviate if your newest nephew refuses to eat anything that’s been mixed together.
That’s why prompts matter. You have to supply the nuance Felicity gives you for free.
A few festive prompts worth trying
If you want to see how far things have come — and how far your patience will stretch — try asking AI to help with:
- a Christmas Eve meal plan that takes 90 minutes, pleases vegans and non-vegans alike, and doesn’t involve cashew cream, aquafaba or anything that requires a Nutribullet you don’t own
- gift ideas for a colleague you like, but not quite £30-worth-of-like, avoiding mugs, novelty socks and anything “pumpkin spice” scented
- a tactful message declining an invitation, phrased so it still sounds like you, but a slightly more rested version of you
- a diplomatic text to your teenager, asking why their bus home appears to have passed through the chicken shop
- a December to-do list that acknowledges reality, i.e., that you will not be crafting handmade gifts this year, however easy Instagram makes it look
- a polite way to ask your eldest whether the reason they’re “skint” is less about the cost of living crisis and more about how a “quick drink with friends” escalated into a night out out
You’ll still need to apply judgement before you run with the output — but that’s half the fun.
As with Felicity Cloake’s recipes, personalisation still belongs to you. My own Christmas example is her nut roast, which is essentially nothing like a nut roast and everything like a stilton-stuffed terrine that works as a side dish for carnivores or as a main for veggies. It’s glorious and beautiful to look at — but it works because she explains the variations clearly enough that you understand when you’re breaking the rules and why it still holds together. AI can assemble a version of it; only you can decide whether this is the year your family accepts the version where you included an entire melting core of stilton instead of stirring in a grating of cheese.
* There is literally no way I’m going to write down what I think the true meaning of Christmas is here, because it’s impossible to do without annoying someone. But I will say that my festive traditions include filling my advent calendar exclusively with liqueur chocolates, replacing milk with Baileys in my coffee and some other things that I’ve forgotten about since having that coffee and opening the advent calendar at breakfast.
** Frying off some breadcrumbs in butter for a crunchier topping is completely worth it. Just FYI.
