Can 'artificial' intelligence (AI) become emotional intelligence (EI) also?

Image source : changeboard.com

AI is now becoming more prevalent in our lives both at work and at home. According to a recent report from the Capgemini Research Institute,  EI will be a must-have skill in the future, with demand likely to rise six-fold within the next five years. The report offers a country-based analysis regarding executives’ beliefs on EI in the workplace with 74% of executives believing that EI will become a “must-have” skill. The report also focusses on the current statistics regarding EI in employee assessment process and the potential benefits for promoting EI skills during staff recruitment and training.

We think AI will change the job profile of companies, many of the traditional roles have already been automated and with more sophisticated AI, more roles will be done by machines that are supplementing human intelligence and helping humans to evolve their job skills.

Challenges

Whenever we step into anything new, there always are challenges to understand and meet. Let us examine these in EI.

1.   Can we adequately and efficiently reskill our workforce?

2.   What are the new areas of opportunity for employment that do not currently exist?

3.   Can we cope with the change in attitudes in our workplaces with more creative and innovative staff?

Help with these challenges could be provided by AI and these could then be used to make workforces more emotionally aware. Some of the potential applications would be, what is the best new role for an individual based on their experience? How can we ensure the most efficient and slick retraining programs? This would not made the workplace EI enabled but also a happier place to be in. So, let us be AI and EI enabled now.

AI and EI enabled workplace

One should never be afraid of change for change can bring a lot of benefits too. There are universal benefits AI brings such as consistency, repeatability and scale but also, we begin to understand empirically the role of emotions in customer interactions. We then can very quickly change the offer to the customer if they change their emotion mid correspondence and we can try completely novel solutions and observe the emotional response to this. One can build a flexible and stable agent that can handle complex customers and understand how they feel. 

The most important question one needs to address is what does our previous human agent do when replaced by a non-human agent. They can either be trained to manage the AI, spend more time innovating solutions for the business or be available if the customer wishes to speak to a human agent. Perhaps then the most important part of an AI agent would be the ability to know when to revert to a human intervension, based on how the correspondence is progressing.

A win-win situation

When we use any kind of intelligence as it is supposed to be used, it can indeed transform all our lives making it a win-win situation for all of us. Let us then become AI and EI enabled.

Reference :capgemini.com