Behind every successful business are the people who give their everything to ensure it. While technology plays a major role in this journey, driving a delicate balance between it and what makes us human—our emotions—is the key to creating a cohesive, more empathetic team.
Empowering your employees to deeply understand their own emotional intelligence (EI) through self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills allows workers to inform their choices based on their own feelings and how their emotions and behaviors impact others. It’s true that we can’t control others’ emotions, but we can put ourselves in their shoes to gain their perspective.
Understanding Emotional Intelligence
People with higher EI tend to have stronger interpersonal skills—especially when it comes to conflict management and communication. These employees are also able to think more
objectively before they act and gain a firmer grasp on their strengths and weaknesses—leading
to greater productivity.
Behind every successful business are the people who give their everything to ensure it. While technology plays a major role in this journey, driving a delicate balance between it and what makes us human—our emotions—is the key to creating a cohesive, more empathetic team.
Empowering your employees to deeply understand their own emotional intelligence (EI) through self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills allows workers to inform their choices based on their own feelings and how their emotions and behaviors impact others. It’s true that we can’t control others’ emotions, but we can put ourselves in their shoes to gain their perspective.
Understanding Emotional Intelligence
People with higher EI tend to have stronger interpersonal skills—especially when it comes to conflict management and communication. These employees are also able to think more objectively before they act and gain a firmer grasp on their strengths and weaknesses—leading to greater productivity.
But, with the business world increasingly relying on advanced technology to drive operational successes, how can your company seamlessly marry this approach with the important sentiment of emotional intelligence?
As enterprises look to humanize their technological interactions, teams strive to power AI to communicate in a way that not only relays data but also elevates brand reputation by making audiences feel seen. To do so, it’s essential to train AI to practice active listening to ensure systems recognize and authenticate user needs before offering solutions.
Additionally, the importance goes both ways, with AI being used to further guide workers toward more empathetic engagements. Jillyn Dillon, founder and executive director at Technology Aloha LLC, leverages AI to tailor emails according to a recipient’s personality type—effectively personalizing communication across her company. As a leader with a more direct style, Dillon finds AI advantageous in adjusting her emails to eliminate friction and ensure comprehension.
Analyzing Emotion Through The Eyes of AI
As artificial intelligence learns to analyze, interpret, and respond to human emotion, enterprises need to be equipped to adapt to operational shifts. This is why more business leaders are embracing emotion AI tools to allow for a more natural engagement between humans and machines.
Today’s technology allows machines to analyze large volumes of behavioral data—from listening to voice inflections—to then correlating those vocal changes with specific emotions. They can also scan images to pick up subtle micro-expressions that happen too quickly for a person to process. Facial expressions are a visual roadmap to emotions—with even the most minute of gestures providing critical clues. To do so, this technology collects and labels emotional data, trains machine learning models to identify facial cues, and then consolidates this information into systems, such as chatbots and virtual assistants.
Above and beyond this, AI plays a critical role in the mental health industry by elevating emotional state detection. This technology can analyze speech patterns and physiological indicators to signify distress or emergency. These signs can then help healthcare professionals detect emotional distress and strategize support and intervention effectively.
Combining AI Insight with Human Oversight
While such developments promise optimistic outcomes for organizations, there is still a concern that humans may become obsolete—but this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Humans play a pivotal part in overseeing and managing AI systems, ensuring ethics are upheld through decision-making, accountability, and risk mitigation processes. AI technologies also rely on people adding a personal touch when training data to make predictions, as this allows these technologies to experience continuous learning, critical thinking capabilities, and creativity.
According to the AI Act, high-risk AI systems must have appropriate human oversight throughout their lifecycle—from inception to operation. For balance, the level of human oversight has to be proportional to the harm risk severity the AI system possesses. Not just anyone can man the machines; only highly skilled and knowledgeable authorities can oversee this technology.
Through human oversight, it is easier to evaluate and act on AI models’ shortcomings, biases, and unintended consequences. In turn, organizations can then rely on human intervention to evolve AI systems to become more accurate, reliable, and in tune with expectations.
Emotion AI in Action
For example, MetLife—a US-based insurance company—leverages Cognito’s emotion AI coaching solution in every one of its centers to deliver real-time agent support while interacting with customers. This technology enables the corporation to deeply understand emotional states through Signal-Based Machine Learning and, in turn, provide conversation points and resolutions. By doing so, MetLife is able to increase NPS scores by 14 points and improve issue resolution by 6.3%. MetLife also utilizes emotion AI to personalize customer experiences.
By analyzing an image of a customer’s facial expressions, this company is better positioned to offer tailor-made recommendations that boost user satisfaction.
Disney has also embraced the innovations of emotion AI by pioneering early works using image analysis to detect audience responses during screenings. By outfitting a 400-seat theater with four infrared cameras while showing classic titles, like Zootopia and Star Wars, this movie magic-maker was able to confidently gauge emotional perception, intensity, and consistency. This information translated into a dataset of 16 million facial indicators across over 3,000 audiences. Above and beyond this, Disney was able to accurately predict emotions by training a machine learning algorithm to detect joy, humor, sadness, and surprise.
Final Thoughts
The gap between emotion and machine has been bridged through the innovations of advanced artificial intelligence. By training AI to develop systems capable of recognizing, analyzing, and simulating human emotions, organizations of all kinds can better support their staff in a more personal way. All while boosting team dynamics and propelling productivity.
Continuous learning also enables AI systems to become more intuitive and empathetic—empowering employees to offer tailor-made solutions that cater to individual customer needs. This makes the audience feel more seen—leading to strengthened brand trust and, in turn, a greater brand reputation.
To keep companies compliant with AI regulations, enterprises need to embrace and retain the importance of the human element. By doing so, teams can leverage AI with confidence—and continue making data-driven decisions without bias.
Human empathy cannot be replaced, but it can be enhanced. Empowering emotionally intelligent employees and adopting emotion-backed technology is the first step toward a workforce future that truly prioritizes people.
