These technologies are engaging you—a human driving a car—in human terms. Myriad technologies that detect physical states such as alertness are increasingly being used to infer emotional states such as happiness or sadness. Unlike their machine forebears that set rigid rules of engagement, these systems will follow rules, reading your mood, intuiting your needs, and responding in contextually and emotionally appropriate ways.
Welcome to the next stage of human-machine interaction, in which a growing class of AI-powered solutions—referred to as “affective computing” or “emotion AI”—is redefining the way we experience technology. These experiences are hardly confined to automobiles. Retailers are integrating AI-powered bots with customer segmentation and CRM systems to personalize customer interactions while at the same time capturing valuable lead-nurturing data.2 Apps are designing custom drinks and fragrances for fashion-show attendees based on emotional quotient (EQ) inputs.3 A global restaurant chain is tailoring its drive-through experiences based on changes in the weather.4 The list goes on.
As part of the emerging human experience platforms trend, during the next 18 to 24 months more companies will ramp up their responses to a growing demand for technology to better understand humans and to respond to us more appropriately. System users increasingly expect the technologies they rely on to provide a greater sense of connection—an expectation that should not be ignored. In a recent Deloitte Digital survey of 800 consumers, 60 percent of long-term customers use emotional language to describe their connection to favored brands; likewise, 62 percent of consumers feel they have a relationship with a brand. Trustworthiness (83 percent), integrity (79 percent), and honesty (77 percent) are the emotional factors that consumers feel most align with their favorite brands.5
Historically, computers have been unable to correlate events with human emotions or emotional factors. But that is changing as innovators add an EQ to technology’s IQ, at scale. Using data and human-centered design (HCD) techniques—and technologies currently being used in neurological research to better understand human needs—affective systems will be able to recognize a system user’s emotional state and the context behind it, and then respond appropriately.
Early trend participants recognize that the stakes are high. The ability to leverage emotionally intelligent platforms to recognize and use emotional data at scale will be one of the biggest, most important opportunities for companies going forward. Deloitte Digital research reveals that companies focusing on the human experience have been twice as likely to outperform their peers in revenue growth over a three-year period, with 17 times faster revenue growth than those who do not.6 Moreover, inaction could lead to more “experience debt”7 and user alienation as AI applications make us all feel a bit less human. Chances are, your competitors are already working toward this goal. Research and Markets projects that the size of the global affective computing market will grow from US$22 billion in 2019 to US$90 billion by 2024; this represents a compound annual growth rate of 32.3 percent.8
Time to get started. How will you create emotionally insightful human experiences for your customers, employees, and business partners?
In Tech Trends 2019, we examined how marketing teams—by adopting new approaches to data gathering, decisioning, and delivery—can create personalized, contextualized, dynamic experiences for individual customers. These data-driven experiences, embodying the latest techniques in HCD, can inspire deep emotional connections to products and brands, which in turn drive loyalty and business growth.9 The human experience platforms trend takes that same quest for deeper insights and connections to the next level by broadening its scope to include not only customers but employees, business partners, and suppliers—basically anyone with whom you interact.
In addition to data, human experience platforms leverage affective computing—which uses technologies such as natural language processing, facial expression recognition, eye tracking, and sentiment analysis algorithms—to recognize, understand, and respond to human emotion. Affective computing can help us achieve something truly disruptive: It makes it possible for us to be human at scale. What do we mean by that? Right now, true human connections are limited to the number of people we can fit into a room. Technologies such as phones or webcams connect us to other humans but remain only a conduit, and connections made through technology conduits are useful yet emotionally limited.
But what if technology itself could become more human? What if a bot appearing on the screen in front of our faces could engage us with the kind of emotional acuity and perceptive nuance that we expect from human-human interaction? Today, you may walk into a clothing store and barely notice the screens mounted on shop walls, displaying items currently on sale; the ads aren’t particularly relevant, so you don’t give them a second thought. But imagine if you could walk into that same space and a bot appearing on the screen recognizes you and addresses you by name.10 This bot has been observing you walk around the store and has identified jackets you might love based on your mood today and your purchasing history. In this moment, technology engages you as an individual, and as a result, you experience this store in a very different, more human way. AI and affective technologies have scaled an experience with very human-like qualities to encompass an entire business environment.
The human experience platforms trend reverses traditional design approaches by starting with the human and emotion-led experience we want to achieve, and then determining which combination of affective and AI technologies can deliver them. The big challenge that companies will face is identifying the specific responses and behaviors that will resonate with—and elicit an emotional response from—a diverse group of customers, employees, and other stakeholders, and then developing the emotional technologies that can recognize and replicate those traits in an experience.
Think about the abilities comprising empathy—among them, the ability to relate to others, the ability to recognize ourselves in a storyline, and the ability to trust and feel complex emotions. As humans, we see these abilities in ourselves and, by using our senses, we can recognize them in others. Today a growing number of companies are exploring ways to develop a deeper understanding of the humans who will be using new technologies, and to incorporate these insights into technology designs. They include: