Can AI Teach Us How to Become More Emotionally Intelligent?
Artificial Intelligence solutions have been widely adopted in all kinds of industries. Whether it’s just a tool for automating emails or a complex program that makes complex engineering calculations, AI has definitely become crucial for everyday tasks in different fields. While we are used to seeing AI as a human-like machine, there is actually more to it than that. We teach these machines to be like us, but they can also teach us to become more human. Hence, here is how AI can help your business team become more emotionally intelligent.
The Importance of Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace
Emotional intelligence is commonly associated with traits such as self-management, self-awareness, social awareness, and relationship management. Thus, it is integral to every aspect of our lives, but even more so in the workplace.
Every successful business is built on good communication and emotional intelligence allows us to achieve precisely that. If you and your employees have a high level of emotional intelligence, it will be easier to work as a team.
Techniques to Improve Emotional Intelligence
Improving emotional intelligence within your team is essential for the long-term success of your company, especially when your business is rapidly expanding. Here are some common techniques used to improve emotional intelligence:
Be assertive instead of aggressive.
Respond to situations instead of reacting to them.
Practice proactive listening.
Keep your motivation levels high.
Show empathy towards others.
Accept criticism and learn from it.
Become a leader in your own right.
See the big picture instead of just the details.
How AI Teaches Us to Become More Emotionally Intelligent
Keeping the above points in mind, we can turn to AI and see if it’s possible for machines to teach us how to become more emotionally intelligent. Interestingly, there are already programs such as Cogito that are designed to teach employees to be more empathetic when dealing with customers. The program sends out cues to customer support agents to remind them to relate to angry customers that had bad experiences. This is just one example, but more AI tools similar to Cogito are being developed.
AI can mimic human behavior by identifying patterns in the actions that accompany certain emotions (e.g. empathy, motivation, leadership, etc.) Then, programs can be designed to suggest to the users to perform these actions in specific situations. While this is not exactly teaching empathy to humans, it is still a way to help employees learn by example and become better at their job.
Angela King, a writing expert from the custom writing Best Essays Education site, explains, “AI solutions can analyze speech, text, etc. and can help employees learn certain skills as well as improve emotional intelligence. That being said, we need to remember that all of this is artificial. Machines are programmed by humans – they can’t actually experience the emotions that they are trying to teach humans.”
Indeed, there are different views on whether emotional intelligence can be taught to humans by machines. Moreover, some critics have argued that teaching machines empathy in the first place (to allow them to teach humans afterward) could potentially make humanity lose the ability to truly feel that emotion. This view is definitely a more radical one, but what is true no matter how you look at it is that machines cannot truly feel emotions.
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At the core of empathy is the ability to relate. An empathetic person is someone who is able to understand what another person is going through by putting themselves in that person’s shoes, so to say. A machine, on the other hand, can only be programmed to recognize empathetic behaviors rather than actually relating to another person by consciously trying to empathize with them.
That being said, AI tools that aim to teach humans empathy and other emotions can still be useful if the person being taught is actively trying to become more empathetic. We do learn by example, so performing a specific action when prompted by a program may not do much at first, it can become a habit and can eventually help employees become more empathetic.
Improve Emotional Intelligence in Your Business with the Help of AI
Now that you know how AI can be used, it is a great idea to utilize it to increase emotional intelligence in your business. Work with your team to decide which AI solution you can adopt in your company that will help you and your colleagues develop your emotional intelligence. Estimate which resources you possess and then choose the right AI tool for your needs and goals.
Keep in mind that AI tools can’t substitute everything. Your employees need to make an effort themselves too and not rely on AI solutions all the time. Encourage active learning above all else and use emotional intelligence AI solutions as devices for temporary training rather than permanent integration.
