The gifting giant’s new Smart Text tool is a writing assistant that allows users to enter prompts that will generate a suggested response.

Moonpig vice president for product and design James Huppler said that AI in the greetings industry “should enhance the customer experience and provide something completely new, which wasn’t previously possible”.

“At Moonpig, we recently launched a new feature that uses generative AI to help customers with the common problem of not knowing what to write on the inside of a card.

“Resolving this issue is a great advancement for both us and our customers, and so we are excited to see how people interact with this new feature whether it’s writing a poem to a loved one or even reading out a funny joke for your friend's birthday, and how we can learn from their behaviours to develop this further.”

Moonpig analysis of Google search trends showed a big increase – 300% – in searches for ‘AI birthday card’ over the last 12 months.  

Video message card searches were also up, by 150%. Moonpig allows customers to add a digital video or audio message to a physical card via a QR code link.

Huppler added: “Product personalisation in the greeting card industry has quickly advanced further than just adding photos to the front of a card, now expanding into adding video and audio messages too.

“As a nation of content creators with millions of reels & TikTok videos being created every day, we anticipate this trend continuing and in some cases becoming the norm when sending a card to friends and family.”

Immersive greetings cards featuring virtual reality technology were also tipped as a future growth area.

However, growth in e-cards and e-gifting is also anticipated, as customers turn to on-demand and last minute options for special occasions.