Can technology actually enhance our relationships?

Yes, absolutely!

 Life and business are all about relationships. In fact, I fundamentally believe that the world works (or doesn’t work) on the foundational strength of relationships. It’s incumbent on each of us, especially as business leaders, to seek and foster meaningful relationships — cultivated over time, person by person, with trust, interest, effort, and energy.

Yet, as a member of today’s digitally enabled workplace culture, I’m also sensitive to the reality that tech can make doing business seem less personal than ever. And with global crises like the one we’re living in right now with COVID-19, life as we know it is changing. And this change is introducing new facets into how we communicate and collaborate – such as “social distancing”. In actuality, this should be called “physical distancing” and I’d argue that now more than ever, it’s time for us to double down on relationships and our social connection to each other. The reality is that without technology and the tools which are available to us today, life would come to a grinding halt – whether you’re a consumer or a business.

Here are some ways that technology solutions are helping businesses deepen human relationships.

 More personal customer experiences

 With customer consent, data-driven insights are leading businesses to understand each customer on a more personal level. And businesses that are using these insights well are giving their customers better service than ever, through omnichannel personalization.

Imagine a shoe company sending you a calendar reminder for the date your favorite new shoe (in the right colorway) will drop. Or a meal delivery service that sends a chef to your home to help you gain confidence in the kitchen. Or a tech expert who arrives at your door to help you set up your new phone.

Thanks to hyper-personalization, the future of customer service is more relationship-driven than ever.

 Trusting one another to oversee AI

One of Gartner’s Top 10 strategic technology trends for 2020 is transparency and traceability—specifically around artificial intelligence and machine learning. “AI and ML are increasingly used to make decisions in place of humans, evolving the trust crisis and driving the need for ideas like explainable AI and AI governance. This trend requires a focus on six key elements of trust: Ethics, integrity, openness, accountability, competence and consistency.”

Long story short, as our technology advances, it will need humans who trust one another in order to guide it. Advanced computing will need the world’s CEOs, CTOs, and CIOs to work together, in long-term, genuine relationships to manage the future of technology.

Using technology to understand each other

In her book “The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World,” Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips relates the following observation: “Social technology is ostensibly about connecting people, but it doesn’t often foster the empathy that’s needed for real human connection.” It’s a modern paradox that some technologies designed to bring us together don’t always have the focus and energy at a person-by-person level—to empathize with another human to better understand them. But other technologies may ultimately be able to help us here.

Imagine not only seeing but experiencing what the world looks like through someone else’s eyes.  Well, new technology is fostering empathy for people with different backgrounds and ethnicities. For example, Dr. Courtney Cogburn of Columbia University, in cooperation with Stanford University, is using virtual reality to let people walk a mile in the shoes of a young black man. In this immersive reality, racism is directed at the user in order to examine how “virtual reality can induce empathy for people different from oneself.” Which may even help us begin to reduce some of our unconscious biases. At least, that’s the hope.

Despite ominous speculation of a tech-saturated world pulling us away from one another, I believe that lasting, real human relationships will always win the day. In fact, can you imagine what our current world would be like without the digital enablement of our connections and relationships?

 In the end, it’s the responsibility of businesses to harness the technology that can foster, redefine, enhance—not weaken—and deepen our social connection and personal relationships with each other. Because the power of us all – when connected, aligned, and focused – can accomplish anything together.