AI makes emotional intelligence more important than ever

"The growth of advanced AI makes human connection and soft skills more important than ever," says CPO Alan Winters

As more and more people use AI tools, emotional intelligence (EI) and soft skills will be key to showing employees and clients that we care. This requires organisations to place more emphasis on recruiting, hiring and training for EI.

AI and EI are complementary. AI can transcend efficiency and elevate employees by enabling more time for employees to empathetically support and address customers’ needs and emotions with care and precision. The result is a more authentic brand experience, longer-lasting customer experiences – and potentially more business opportunities.

Cultivating EI within organisations

Given its growing importance, EI should be strengthened and encouraged at both the employee and organisational level, so that it becomes part of an organisation’s culture across all employee touchpoints, including recruitment, hiring, onboarding, training and upskilling. This has many implications across an organisation, changing who is hired, what candidate assessments are used and how employees develop from a career performance perspective within the EI-AI paradigm. It requires a top-down approach, to ensure that all locations and functions operate with a unified EI focus, even across diverse languages and cultures if an organisation is multinational.


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This amount of EI enablement requires comprehensive change management that cannot happen without the full support of executive leadership, to help ensure EI is integrated across all levels and functions. With HR leading the charge, here are a few ways to help secure buy-in from the executive suite:

EI enhancements within the employee journey

Map out the employee lifecycle and show where – and how – changes to infuse EI skills can enhance services at each major step in the lifecycle. This can include changes to the character traits you hire for, what assessments are used to assess candidates’ abilities, the tactics your team uses to communicate with and engage employees, strategies for how teams measure employee performance, and how you develop employees from a career path perspective, to name a few.


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Establish your starting point

Where do your employees and your organisation stand today, on EI competency? How does your organisation’s EI competence compare to your competitors'? Collecting these baseline benchmark insights will help you and your cross-functional leadership team understand where you are on the EI journey, identify where to focus and how your plan will take the company forward. A few examples of key data that can help benchmark your organisation’s EI for leadership include survey scores for initiatives like ‘Great Places to Work’, Indeed and Glassdoor rankings, and industry stack ranking versus your competitors.

Measuring EI impact

Consider how you will measure and report the impact of your organisation’s EI investment. A monthly scorecard can help track all metrics in one location and help demonstrate how operational EI improvements support tangible business results. Depending on your business model, metrics could include cost savings, revenue improvement, and improvements in attrition. At Teleperformance, we also track if, and to what extent, the growth in our representatives’ soft skills is moving the needle with clients through metrics such as industry stack ranking and the share of a client’s business we receive. 


Read more: Emotional intelligence undervalued in the workplace


EI: a necessity in the age of AI

The growth of advanced AI tools makes human connection and soft skills more important than ever. As advanced AI tools continue to commoditise the more mundane and repetitive aspects of client and customer service, organisations and brands will need to invest more in employee EI as a competitive differentiator within the market.

By Alan Winters, chief people and diversity officer and deputy chief global compliance officer at Teleperformance