Step Aside, Robot, Emotional Intelligence Is Here

By Daniel Goleman

Goleman is the author of the international best-seller, Emotional Intelligence, and Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day.

July 31, 2025

A drumbeat of news has hailed the benefits of AI for the workplace of the future. The technology will process decisions faster. It will be a great tool for workers of many kinds. But even as this nonhuman world grows, I find that it has a paradoxical undertone: Emotional intelligence will be even more important for the jobs machines can’t fill.

The biggest limitation of AI, it seems to me, is its lack of emotions. These language-learning models are, in essence, elegant code. “In the age of AI, EQ counts” is how Alan Guarino, vice chairman for Board and CEO Services at Korn Ferry, succinctly put it to me.

Indeed, one of AI’s critical shortcomings is its inability to replicate the human “social brain,” the complex circuits in our forebrain that lock into the brain of the person in front of us and pass emotion back and forth. You can see the social brain in operation when two people are in rapport. The key ingredient of rapport is full mutual attention, along with a nonverbal synchrony. When two people lock into each other this way, a third ingredient emerges: good feelings.

When a leader exhibits executive presence, that’s rapport in action. The person who receives that sense of presence feels positively about their relationship, and about that leader. Presence implies concern and caring, and promotes trust and loyalty.

Of the positions AI simply can’t replace, leadership is the most obvious. But this irreplaceability encompasses many other roles in which trust, caring, and responsiveness to emotional nuance matters. This human skill makes us appreciate doctors, teachers, therapists, even salespeople and marketers. Consider, too, how people pass emotions between each other without saying a word about them—again, due to the brain’s social circuits. A large portion of what we understand comes to us as an unspoken, but crucial, emotional context for the words we hear.

This nonverbal transmission of mood matters for business. A series of studies at the Yale School of Management by Professor Sigal Barsade showed that if the head of a team was in a bad mood, people on that team “caught” that mood—and performance plummeted. Conversely, if the team leader was in an upbeat mood, performance improved via the same process of transmission.

Smart companies will help employees (those who survive the coming AI revolution) enhance their emotional-intelligence skill set. Those skills include resilience and emotional balance, effective communication, true empathy and listening, and the ability to motivate, inspire, and influence. While these qualities are essential to effective leadership, they also happen to be among the key skills for the future identified by a World Economic Forum global survey of employers.

These people skills are learned and learnable. But let the buyer beware: The quality and “stickiness” of the many emotional-intelligence programs available to companies varies greatly. To evaluate the helpfulness of the one you use, you might try a before-and-after assessment of the full spectrum of emotional-intelligence workplace competencies. This is best done using a 360-degree tool wherein people who work with someone day-to-day rate them anonymously. This ensures a more objective evaluation than self-assessment does. One such 360-degree measure is the Emotional and Social Competency Inventory, or ESCI-360 (full disclosure: I had a hand in its design). The ESCI-360 captures the degree to which someone improves in this set of personal skills.

Bottom line for business: Amp up the emotional intelligence in your training and development offerings. This human skill set can be upgraded at any point in life, if the learner is motivated. And offering schooling in emotional intelligence should help any business, no matter what the AI future brings.

Photo Credits: Evgeny Gromov/Getty Images