Emotional Intelligence in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

It was lunch time on a Monday afternoon at World Financial Center (WFC) in New York. I was speaking to one of my colleagues and telling him that my next article will have something to do with Artificial Intelligence (AI). He was surprised – how can I, who write on leadership, can divert on to something so very different such as AI?

He was right – Artificial Intelligence is not my forte, agreed! Emotional Intelligence possibly is, to some extent. So the idea of this article is to talk about what role Emotional Intelligence can play in the era of AI – when robots are expected to do almost everything that human beings are engaged today. I was surprised by an article in Independent that AI is able to tell whether a person is criminal just by looking at their facial features. Yes, it did – and erred in only 6% cases where it mistakenly categorized innocents as criminals. It’s a staggering success rate under any possible imagination!

When every single leader from the sphere of technology to the sphere of politics is talking about AI, is Emotional Intelligence or EI no longer an important skill and losing its relevance now? When every leader is engrossed in understanding the machine language, natural language processing, deep learning, to remain relevant and become successful, is Emotional Intelligence just a fabled concept – may be ‘nice-to-have’ at best?

Virtually every single organization – at least those in the technology and manufacturing space – is embarking vigorously in the digital journey, spearheaded by Big Data, Analytics, machine-learning & AI. If we just look around, we can see perceptible change where AI and automation/robots are taking up jobs that were yesterday considered as impossible to be done by anyone other than a highly trained human being. More importantly (shall I say, frighteningly?), robots are doing it better than human beings. Industrial revolution, through automation, took away many “labor” jobs, targeting the time and effort. Now, with the access to gazillions of data and ever increasing processing power of computers, aided by the advent and wide invasion of AI, it’s the “think” jobs, that are going to get distinct soon. It’s only foolish to either not acknowledge it or to attempt to fight this force. Being closely involved in the Financial Industry and Investment Management community, I can see and feel that many revered and sought after jobs and roles such as Financial Advisers, Traders and even Portfolio/Fund Managers are becoming less important and losing its demand day by day. New and savvy investors are fleeing the expensive actively managed funds and moving towards better performing passive funds, most of which are managed through intelligent platforms, rather than trained & experienced professionals.

So, how do we stay relevant in this scary era? Thankfully there are skills and capabilities that Artificial Intelligence will have trouble replicating even with enormous volume of data at their disposal. Amongst them one key skill is Emotional Intelligence (EI).

In an article earlier this year in Forbes Magazine it is quoted “The emotional intelligence required of managers is very difficult to replicate with AI and machine learning, so we expect that strong managers will always have a place in every organization.” An enormously powerful AI enabled platform will surely be able to diagnose your business problem and suggest what you need to do to improve. It might also be able to quantify your gains through the years by crunching billions of records. However, it will still take a human being to motivate your team to get into action, negotiating through a maze of individual issues and interpersonal relations, bringing synergy, and act when ‘unknown unknowns’ appear on your way.

It is a pity that while every organization is spending their hard dollars to train employees on the skills such as machine learning, AI, Big Data et. al., and buzzing with the new found term of “Workforce Transformation”, no one is investing a penny or a cent into building Emotional Intelligence into their workforce. At least I have not come across any. Unfortunately most organizations – not surprisingly, knowing their myopic vision on delivering short term success – do not realize that the ‘human skills’ will be the differentiators and become more valuable over the next decade or so, when virtually everything else will be done by robots. 

You and I need to invest our time and effort in developing emotional intelligence. Social skills like persuasion, negotiation & empathy will help you ride the wave and remain relevant & valuable. Cultivate and hone these abilities with the same vigor that you learnt the technical skills in your career. You will have lot to offer that will be off limit for those ‘smart machines’.

So what do you think? I would be interested to know your thoughts. Your views and comments are most welcome and do share it in your network.

? Dipes Biswas, 2017