AI Could Make Emotional Intelligence More Important, Not Less

Artificial intelligence can hold conversations, analyze information, offer advice, reproduce different tones of voice and generate responses that sound empathetic. For businesses, those capabilities raise questions about which tasks to delegate to technology and where human judgment is still needed.

Dr. Robin Hills, an emotional intelligence specialist and Director of Ei4Change, believes discussions about which human capabilities AI might replace can sometimes miss out on another consequence of its development. As businesses make greater use of AI, he sees a growing role for emotional intelligence in how people work with it.

“AI doesn’t have the neurology, the physiology, and the psychology to understand emotions because it doesn’t experience them,” Hills explains. An AI system can recognize patterns in language associated with distress, frustration, or uncertainty and formulate a response that appears empathetic. That does not mean it has experienced empathy or understood another person’s emotional state in the human sense.

For Hills—who was awarded an Honorary Doctorate, Doctor of Advanced Studies in Psychology from Mexico-based Universidad Azteca—this is one reason emotional intelligence could become more important as organizations start using AI in more parts of working life. Emotional intelligence is basically about combining thinking and feeling in a practical way so you can make effective decisions, steer behavior in a better direction and build fruitful relationships. Those skills matter in normal workplaces, but AI adds more questions too. Leaders have to figure out where the technology should actually be put to work and how far they should trust the outputs. Also, they need to weigh what happens to the people who are expected to work alongside it, day after day, in real routines.

Employees may be enthusiastic about using AI, suspicious of it, worried about displacement or inclined to trust its recommendations too readily. Different people can respond to the same technological change in considerably different ways, leaving leaders to manage questions of confidence, judgment, trust and uncertainty alongside the technology itself.

Self-awareness, empathy, adaptability, critical thinking and what Hills describes as “reality testing” all have a role to play. Reality testing is particularly relevant when AI produces confident answers based on information that may be incomplete or inappropriate to the situation. Dr. Hills describes it as being objective and applying critical thinking to the way people use their emotional intelligence when working with AI.

That relationship between human judgement and technology has become a practical focus for Hills at Ei4Change. Over the past year, he says he has created interactive personal development tools that complement the organization’s emotional intelligence courses. Where additional course materials might previously have been delivered through an interactive PDF, developments in AI and coding have allowed Hills to build tools that respond immediately to users and encourage them to examine their own behavior.

One of those tools explores workplace situations, including working with artificial intelligence. Instead of giving users an answer, it asks them to define the problem, consider the emotions they are experiencing, and examine how those emotions may be influencing their thinking and behavior. It also considers the other people involved before directing the user towards an area of emotional intelligence that may warrant further development.

For somebody working through an AI-related workplace issue, that process can lead back to reality testing and the need for objectivity and critical thinking. Other situations involving relationships, leadership or working with colleagues can lead toward areas such as empathy, stress tolerance, or self-esteem. The objective, Hills says, is to use technology to help people examine their own judgment more carefully.

“I want people to have a lot of fun with them and realize that developing emotional intelligence can be done,” he explains. “It takes a lot of effort, but it gives people a kind of personalized indication as to what it is that they themselves need to develop rather than thinking, ‘I need to develop my emotional intelligence.’ Here we have a pathway to look at specific aspects that can be learned.”

A manager communicating organizational change, for example, is dealing with more than the simple transfer of information; it also involves tone, intent, and little cues that people pick up on. Employees tend to read motivation as well as trust, and they gauge uncertainty and perceived fairness, even when nothing seems to be “said” explicitly. Sorting out disagreements between colleagues can involve backstories, temperaments, and ongoing connections that might not be obvious in the material provided, or rather the content that an AI system actually sees. And even choices that appear straightforward at first can bring emotional aftereffects that require judgment beyond generating something that sounds technically convincing, Hills says.

One practical step for managers is to review an AI-drafted message before sending it by asking three questions: What assumptions does it make? Whose concerns has it missed? What would be better discussed in person? For an announcement about changing responsibilities, that could mean checking whether the draft addresses workload, clarifying anything still undecided, and speaking directly to affected employees first. After the announcement, the questions employees raise can help the manager identify what was overlooked.

Treating AI and human capability as straightforward competitors can obscure these responsibilities. AI can assist with tasks involving information processing, pattern recognition and communication. Hills says he believes people should also give attention to knowing when to question an output, how to communicate a difficult decision, how to understand another person’s perspective and how to recognize when emotion is influencing judgment.

Artificial intelligence can help people examine capabilities that, in Hills’ view, the technology itself does not possess. It can present scenarios, prompt reflection, process responses and direct attention towards areas for development without experiencing the emotions involved in any of them.

For businesses using AI to assist with routine work, this raises questions about how employees assess its outputs. Emotional intelligence has often been categorized as a soft skill, but judgment, empathy, self-awareness and the ability to understand how people respond to change have practical consequences for leadership. Hills argues that people using the technology need to understand its limitations and remain clear about their own responsibilities.

Businesses may find uses for AI’s analytical capabilities while continuing to rely on people to determine how its outputs should be used. A manager who approves a recommendation or sends a message still needs to account for the decision and its effect on others.

“AI doesn’t have the neurology, the physiology and the psychology to understand emotions because it doesn’t experience them. Ultimately, the question is not simply what AI can do, but how effectively people use their emotional intelligence to question its outputs, exercise judgment and take responsibility for the decisions they make,” Hills concludes. For a manager who is using AI to help make a decision about people, that means checking more than whether the answer sounds convincing.

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