CEO of GiftEase | Transformation Executive | Business Transformation Consultant | Communication Specialist | Project Manager | Change Manager | Advisor
For eight years, Rose Arendarczyk led the governance and delivery of a national employee benefits company’s highest-priority initiatives. Multi-year programs. New products. Risk reduction across a portfolio representing more than $40 million in investment. Every item on that list had an owner, a business case, and a date. The things that mattered in her own life had none of that. Birthdays and milestones, yes, but also the smaller disclosures that never announce themselves as important: something a friend has been meaning to try, a place someone hopes to visit, a passing mention of what is going on in a colleague’s life. Those details arrive scattered across texts, conversations, calendars, and memory, and most are gone well before the moment they would have mattered.
The Idea She Carried Until She Could Not Carry It Anymore
Rose Arendarczyk is the founder and CEO of GiftEase, an AI-powered platform now in open beta that is built to help people keep hold of what they know about the people in their lives and act on it, starting with gifting. She is also a transformation executive with more than two decades spent converting corporate strategy into delivered results. What defines her is not the size of what she managed but the length of time she sat with a problem before acting on it. “I carried it for years, until one day I decided to stop thinking about it and start building it.”
From Telecom Billing and Collections Systems to the Room Where Priorities Get Cut
She started in 1997 at American Management Systems, first as a programmer analyst and then as a business analyst, implementing systems for telecommunications clients including AT&T Wireless, SBC, and Telstra. The work was unglamorous and useful. It taught her how large systems behave once real people begin using them, which turned out to be the question at the center of everything she did afterward.
In 2001 she joined Labrynth Consulting as a senior consultant and founding partner of a start-up firm. She stood up the company website, selected the HR and benefits plans, developed the service offerings, and led sales and delivery for clients including Verizon, T-Mobile, Chicago Public Schools, and AmSouth Bank. It was her first experience building a company from the ground up rather than working inside an established one.
Slalom Consulting followed in 2006. Arendarczyk joined the firm’s young Chicago office, then its second market nationally, and stayed more than eight years as Slalom expanded rapidly across the U.S. and ultimately internationally. She carried accountability for client delivery alongside utilization, revenue, and profitability targets, the point at which a consultant learns that excellent work and a healthy business are two separate problems.
Trustmark Companies, a national employee benefits business, brought her in during 2014 to lead enterprise project delivery inside a newly centralized Enterprise Project Management Office. Her teams delivered more than 70 projects in that role, at or better than PMI industry benchmarks. The scope widened from there. By 2018 she was Vice President and leader of the Enterprise PMO, accountable for the governance and delivery of a portfolio representing more than $40 million in investment and for the department responsible for delivering it.
What she considers the real output of those years was not the delivery record. “I built and developed a team of project and transformation leaders who understood they were not simply managing projects and checking boxes.” They were there to move the organization’s highest priorities, and she measured them that way.
She then spent two years as SVP, Transformation at HALO Branded Solutions, where she was recruited to build and lead a new centralized Business Transformation Office spanning the enterprise PMO, organizational change management, business process optimization, master data management, and data and analytics. She holds a B.S. in Operations Management and International Business from Penn State and an executive certificate in Digital Transformation in Operations from Kellogg.
Open Beta, No Subscription, and the Adoption Problem She Already Understood
GiftEase launched in open beta in November 2025 and is live at thegiftease.com. The problem it addresses is both narrower and larger than gifting. What people know about each other accumulates in fragments, spread across conversations, texts, notes, calendars, and ordinary memory, and those fragments can scatter before we have an opportunity to act on them. GiftEase is built to hold that context, build on it over time, and help people turn it into something they actually do. Gifting is where that begins rather than where it ends.
The most revealing decision of the beta was one of sequence. With a working product and users on it, she put the core user experience, and the learning that comes with it, ahead of both the partner ecosystem and the paid subscription model.
“We intentionally delayed building our partner ecosystem and introducing a paid subscription model because we believed solving the core user problem had to come before scaling the business.” In her own summary, “we deliberately chose value creation before value capture.”
The reasoning comes straight out of the transformation work. Building a technology and deploying it does not, on its own, produce adoption or any lasting change in behavior. People have to understand what it is worth to them, trust it, and develop new habits around it, and none of that arrives with the launch. She has watched that hold true throughout her career, which is why the beta is pointed at learning and at the core user problem before it is pointed at revenue.
“The biggest misconception is that implementing technology creates transformation.” Technology deployment, she argues, is only the starting point. “Lasting business results come from helping people understand the value, build trust, and develop new behaviors that lead to sustainable adoption.” It is the same lesson she applied across more than two decades of large-scale transformation work, now turned on her own company.
Her current priorities are market awareness, values-aligned strategic partnerships, and the groundwork for future investment. Alongside GiftEase she runs Averos Consulting, providing selective fractional executive leadership and advisory work to mid-sized companies moving through transformation and AI adoption. She is a founding member of Pionyr, a member of Chief, and a mother of three. GiftEase came out of the overlap between that life and the work: what she kept noticing in her own life, and what more than two decades spent on systems, human behavior, and adoption had taught her to do about it.
What Gets Remembered When Nobody Is Assigned to Remember It
In Rose Arendarczyk’s professional world, priorities did not simply live in someone’s head. They were given structure. Someone sponsored the work, someone funded it, someone was accountable for whether it landed. The remembering GiftEase is built to support has never had any of that. No sponsor, no budget line, no reporting cadence, and yet it can shape whether the people in your life feel considered or forgotten. She spent a career making sure the important things did not fall off the list, then noticed which list nobody was keeping.
For more than two decades she made sure the right things got done, and now she is making sure the right things get remembered.
Rose Arendarczyk is the founder and CEO of GiftEase, an AI-powered relationship platform designed to help people remember what matters about the people in their lives and show up more thoughtfully, beginning with gifting. She also provides selective fractional executive leadership and advisory through Averos Consulting. Based in the Greater Chicago Area, Rose can be found on her LinkedIn Profile and thegiftease.com.
