Is AI Eroding Your Emotional Intelligence?
Best-selling author Dan Goleman worries that relying on AI for common workplace challenges could dull our abilities to notice our own reactions or make sense of what they are telling us.
Daniel Goleman is author of the international best-seller Emotional Intelligence and Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day. He is a regular contributor to Korn Ferry.
The conversation about artificial intelligence is dominated by debates over what AI will eventually replace. Which jobs will it automate? Which tasks will disappear from the human repertoire? Which experts will it outperform and render obsolete?
For leaders, there is another form of replacement worth considering.
People are turning to AI for much more than information and organization. They are using it to prepare for difficult conversations, think through complex decisions, practice presentations, receive coaching, and process emotions. AI is becoming an intermediary between people and their own inner lives, as well as between people and one another.
An annual research initiative called AI in the Wild studies how people are using generative AI. For its third annual report, researchers examined more than 12,000 use cases drawn from a database of nearly 50,000 records gathered across social media platforms, online forums, and published articles between March 2025 and February 2026.
The methodology has clear limitations, but the findings are intriguing. Personal and professional support has continued to rise as a reason people turn to AI, with therapy and companionship being the most common use case for the second year in a row. More than 1,400 examples fell into this category, accounting for 11% of the dataset, more than twice the proportion found the previous year. Other common uses included relationship advice, resolving personal disputes, building confidence, preparing for interviews, adjusting the tone of an email, and finding a safe place to ask a difficult question.
There are good reasons to be concerned about people forming emotional attachments to technology. For leaders, there is also a more immediate question: If AI increasingly becomes the translator and intermediary in our relationships, which emotional intelligence capacities do we lose the opportunity to develop?
Consider a common workplace challenge: receiving a difficult email from a colleague. AI can help us interpret what the person might mean, identify what we are feeling, draft a measured response, and anticipate how they might react. This can be enormously useful. AI might talk us out of an impulsive response or help us consider a perspective sitting inside one of our blind spots.
Yet the way we use that support matters. Research on cognitive atrophy has raised concerns about what happens when people routinely outsource the work of thinking. A similar risk may exist with emotional intelligence. If we move too quickly from discomfort to an AI-generated interpretation or response, we lose the chance to notice our own reactions, make sense of what they are telling us, and decide how we want to engage.
These capacities develop through practice. We get better at conflict by experiencing conflict. We develop empathy through the often uncomfortable work of understanding perspectives different from our own. We build self-awareness by staying with our reactions long enough to recognize what they reveal about our needs, values, and assumptions.
We also become better at difficult conversations by having them. The goal is rarely to produce a flawless email but to build enough awareness, empathy, and emotional steadiness to talk through something when the right course of action may not be obvious.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't use AI to counsel us. In fact, AI may offer useful scaffolding for developing emotional intelligence and getting us to see things in new ways. It can help us slow down, see a situation differently, and arrive at a conversation with more perspective. Much depends on what we ask it to do.
Instead of asking AI to tell us what someone's email means, we might first form our own interpretation and then ask what we could be missing. Instead of asking it to write difficult feedback, we might draft the feedback ourselves and ask where our blind spots may be. Instead of asking what we should do, we might ask for questions that help us think more carefully about the situation.
The distinction is subtle but consequential: Are we using AI to exercise our emotional intelligence, or to avoid exercising it?
As AI becomes more capable of performing parts of the relational work of leadership, emotional intelligence may be one more human capacity vulnerable to atrophy. The question is whether we use the technology to deepen that capacity or gradually hand the work over.
Co-written by Elizabeth Solomon
Click here to learn more about Daniel Goleman's Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence.
