AI's Secret Weapon? Empathy That Builds Real Human Connection
Jade is six weeks pregnant and scared. Beyond the usual worries a young woman might face when she learns she is unexpectedly expecting, she is also battling opioid addiction. She knows that to give both her baby and herself the best chance at a brighter future, she must overcome opioid use disorder—but she's afraid to bring it up with her OB/GYN or primary care doctor.
Instead, Jade turns to an online service. She explains her circumstances to a counselor via chat and is immediately met with empathy: "Jade, I appreciate you sharing your story with me. It takes great strength to recognize a problem and authentically ask for help. I have some suggestions from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists on how you can begin your journey to recovery.'
The counselor then provides Jade with accurate, evidence-based information about buprenorphine, a powerful medication used to help reduce opioid cravings and withdrawal symptoms as part of medication-assisted treatment (MAT), a widely accepted approach to treating opioid addiction.
When AI Delivers Empathy And Accuracy
At first glance, this story seems like a triumph of both technology and human empathy. The internet's power to connect people across distance supported this young mother at her most vulnerable. But there's a twist: The counselor who so deftly responded wasn't a person at all—it was an AI chatbot powered by OpenAI's GPT-4. It had been trained to provide accurate, compassionate treatment guidance to pregnant women suffering from opioid addiction.
In fact, this interaction came from a recent study conducted by a University of Missouri researcher who wanted to determine whether AI could deliver both useful care advice and the kind of emotional intelligence patients often don't receive from human providers.
One more clarification: Jade wasn't a real woman, but one of many simulated patients portrayed by researchers during the experiment. Still, the results speak volumes. The chatbot's responses were later reviewed by clinicians, who found them to be 96% accurate—a remarkably strong showing.
What AI Empathy Means For Business
Let's make this real. How does an experiment involving pregnant women relate to your business? The answer is simple: The ability to embed the kind of empathy demonstrated in this study into your own organization's digital interactions can fundamentally change how customers experience your brand.
In 2025, AI virtual agents and digital assistants mediate more and more of our online conversations. A chatbot may be the first point of contact for a prospective customer. How your company—and your AI—responds in that moment may determine whether you create a loyal customer or lose a lead. But it goes even deeper than that. A positive interaction can turn a customer into an advocate. A bad one can drive them—and possibly others—away.
Design For Emotional Intelligence
The problem often lies in how AI has traditionally been designed. For years, the focus was on fulfilling demands, not understanding emotions. Developers may have assumed that empathy was too complex to build into a model—setting a low bar from the start.
That assumption is crumbling. The addiction chatbot study is just one example of many in which AI demonstrated the capacity to deliver both accurate and empathetic responses. The implications are enormous.
In your business, the way customers interact with AI is crucial to a positive outcome. Their tone, urgency and distress levels are all factors a human can follow and act upon. If your AI can detect emotional cues and act accordingly, it's no longer a command parser—it becomes a listener.
When empathy is baked into your AI from the start, you're building a system that can make people feel heard, respected and supported—before a human even enters the conversation.
Empathy At Every Level
Of course, emotional intelligence shouldn't end with your chatbot. As CEO of a web-based dental imaging software company, I ensure that compassionate innovation is built into our operations in several ways:
• Actively listening to frontline dentists and customers to improve our tools and services
• Collaborating closely with vendors and suppliers to co-create solutions, not just transactions
• Building long-term partnerships based on mutual respect and shared goals
These relationships—internal and external—are where breakthroughs happen. Suppliers become collaborators. Customers become co-designers. Empathy becomes a competitive edge.
A Clear Path Forward
Looking ahead, AI brings both uncertainty and opportunity. From where I sit, one thing is becoming clearer by the day: Future success won't hinge on which company has the most advanced AI model. It will come down to which companies use AI to build stronger, more human connections.
Empathy isn't soft—it's strategic. And increasingly, it's the differentiator that will separate tomorrow's leaders from the rest.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
TechCrunch
7 minutes ago
- TechCrunch
California lawmaker behind SB 1047 reignites push for mandated AI safety reports
California State Senator Scott Wiener on Wednesday introduced new amendments to his latest bill, SB 53, that would require the world's largest AI companies to publish safety and security protocols and issue reports when safety incidents occur. If signed into law, California would be the first state to impose meaningful transparency requirements onto leading AI developers, likely including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI. Senator Wiener's previous AI bill, SB 1047, included similar requirements for AI model developers to publish safety reports. However, Silicon Valley fought ferociously against that bill, and it was ultimately vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom. California's Governor then called for a group of AI leaders — including the leading Stanford researcher and co-founder of World Labs, Fei Fei Li — to form a policy group and set goals for the state's AI safety efforts. California's AI policy group recently published their final recommendations, citing a need for 'requirements on industry to publish information about their systems' in order to establish a 'robust and transparent evidence environment.' Senator Wiener's office said in a press release that SB 53's amendments were heavily influenced by this report. 'The bill continues to be a work in progress, and I look forward to working with all stakeholders in the coming weeks to refine this proposal into the most scientific and fair law it can be,' Senator Wiener said in the release. SB 53 aims to strike a balance that Governor Newsom claimed SB 1047 failed to achieve — ideally, creating meaningful transparency requirements for the largest AI developers without thwarting the rapid growth of California's AI industry. 'These are concerns that my organization and others have been talking about for a while,' said Nathan Calvin, VP of State Affairs for the nonprofit AI safety group, Encode, in an interview with TechCrunch. 'Having companies explain to the public and government what measures they're taking to address these risks feels like a bare minimum, reasonable step to take.' Techcrunch event Save up to $475 on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Save $450 on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW The bill also creates whistleblower protections for employees of AI labs who believe their company's technology poses a 'critical risk' to society — defined in the bill as contributing to the death or injury of more than 100 people, or more than $1 billion in damage. Additionally, the bill aims to create CalCompute, a public cloud computing cluster to support startups and researchers developing large-scale AI. With the new amendments, SB 53 is now headed to California State Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection for approval. Should it pass there, the bill will also need to pass through several other legislative bodies before reaching Governor Newsom's desk. On the other side of the U.S., New York Governor Kathy Hochul is now considering a similar AI safety bill, the RAISE Act, which would also require large AI developers to publish safety and security reports. The fate of state AI laws like the RAISE Act and SB 53 were briefly in jeopardy as federal lawmakers considered a 10-year AI moratorium on state AI regulation — an attempt to limit a 'patchwork' of AI laws that companies would have to navigate. However, that proposal failed in a 99-1 Senate vote earlier in July. 'Ensuring AI is developed safely should not be controversial — it should be foundational,' said Geoff Ralston, the former president of Y Combinator, in a statement to TechCrunch. 'Congress should be leading, demanding transparency and accountability from the companies building frontier models. But with no serious federal action in sight, states must step up. California's SB 53 is a thoughtful, well-structured example of state leadership.' Up to this point, lawmakers have failed to get AI companies on board with state-mandated transparency requirements. Anthropic has broadly endorsed the need for increased transparency into AI companies, and even expressed modest optimism about the recommendations from California's AI policy group. But companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta have been more resistant to these efforts. Leading AI model developers typically publish safety reports for their AI models, but they've been less consistent in recent months. Google, for example, decided not to publish a safety report for its most advanced AI model ever released, Gemini 2.5 Pro, until months after it was made available. OpenAI also decided not to publish a safety report for its GPT-4.1 model. Later, a third-party study came out that suggested it may be less aligned than previous AI models. SB 53 represents a toned-down version of previous AI safety bills, but it still could force AI companies to publish more information than they do today. For now, they'll be watching closely as Senator Wiener once again tests those boundaries.
CNET
11 minutes ago
- CNET
CNET Daily Tariff Price Tracker: I'm Tracking 11 Key Products for Changes as Policies Shift and Prime Day Arrives
Price hikes resulting from Trump's tariffs could be closer than ever. James Martin/CNET For the last three months, tariffs have been a hot topic, with one major concern for consumers and businesses: Will they raise prices and by how much? It's a question more relevant than ever this week, as President Trump punts another major deadline down the road and with the relief of Amazon's Prime Day sales. Amid those worries, I've been tracking prices every day for 11 key products likely to be hit by tariff-induced price increases, and the answer I've come to so far is this: Not so much, at least not yet. The winding road of tariff inflation still stretches out before us into an uncertain future, so the threat of price hikes continues to cloud the horizon. To date, I've seen two noteworthy price increases, one for the Xbox Series X and the other for a popular budget-friendly 4K TV. Some other products -- including Apple's popular AirPods -- have gone on sale for brief periods. CNET Tariff Tracker Index Above, you can check out a chart with the average price of the 11 products included in this piece over the course of 2025. This will help give you a sense of the overall price changes and fluctuations going on. Further down, you'll be able to check out charts for each individual product being tracked. We'll be updating this article regularly as prices change. It's all in the name of helping you make sense of things, so be sure to check back every so often. For more, check out CNET's guide to whether you should wait to make big purchases or buy them now and get expert tips about how to prepare for a recession. Now Playing: Should You Buy Now or Wait? Our Experts Weigh In on Tariffs 09:42 Methodology We're checking prices daily and will update the article and the relevant charts right away to reflect any changes. The following charts show a single bullet point for each month, with the most recent one labeled "Now" and showing the current price. For the past months, we've gone with what was the most common price for each item in the given month. In most cases, the price stats used in these graphs were pulled from Amazon using the historical price-tracker tool Keepa. For the iPhones, the prices come from Apple's official materials and are based on the 128-gigabyte base model of the latest offering of the iPhone 16. For the Xbox Series X, the prices were sourced from Best Buy using the tool PriceTracker. If any of these products happen to be on sale at a given time, we'll be sure to let you know and explain how those price drops differ from longer-term pricing trends that tariffs can cause. The 11 products we're tracking Mostly what we're tracking in this article are electronic devices and digital items that CNET covers in depth, like iPhones and affordable 4K TVs -- along with a typical bag of coffee, a more humble product that isn't produced in the US to any significant degree. The products featured were chosen for a few reasons: Some of them are popular and/or affordable representatives for major consumer tech categories, like smartphones, TVs and game consoles. Others are meant to represent things that consumers might buy more frequently, like printer ink or coffee beans. Some products were chosen over others because they are likely more susceptible to tariffs. Some of these products have been reviewed by CNET or have been featured in some of our best lists. Below, we'll get into more about each individual product, and stick around till the end for a rundown of some other products worth noting. iPhone 16 The iPhone is the most popular smartphone brand in the US, so this was a clear priority for price tracking. The iPhone has also emerged as a major focal point for conversations about tariffs, given its popularity and its susceptibility to import taxes because of its overseas production, largely in China. Trump has reportedly been fixated on the idea that the iPhone can and should be manufactured in the US, an idea that experts have dismissed as a fantasy. Estimates have also suggested that a US-made iPhone would cost as much as $3,500. Something to note about this graph: The price listed is the one you'll see if you buy your phone through a major carrier. If you, say, buy direct from Apple or Best Buy without a carrier involved, you'll be charged an extra $30, so in some places, you might see the list price of the standard iPhone 16 listed as $830. Apple's been taking a few steps to protect its prices in the face of these tariffs, flying in bulk shipments of product before they took effect and planning to move production for the US market from China to India. A new Reuters report found that a staggering 97% of iPhones imported from the latter country, March through May, were bound for the US. This latter move drew the anger of Trump again, threatening the company with a 25% tariff if they didn't move production to the US, an idea CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly shot down in the past. This came after Trump gave a tariff exemption to electronic devices including smartphones, so the future of that move seems in doubt now. Apple's flagship device is still the top-selling smartphone globally, as of Q1 of this year, although new research from the firm Counterpoint suggests that tariff uncertainty will cause the brand's growth to stall a bit throughout the rest of 2025. Duracell AA batteries A lot of the tech products in your home might boast a rechargeable energy source but individual batteries are still an everyday essential and I can tell you from experience that as soon as you forget about them, you'll be needing to restock. The Duracell AAs we're tracking are some of the bestselling batteries on Amazon. Samsung DU7200 TV Alongside smartphones, televisions are some of the most popular tech products out there, even if they're an infrequent purchase. This particular product is a popular entry-level 4K TV and was CNET's pick for best overall budget TV for 2025. Unlike a lot of tech products that have key supply lines in China, Samsung is a South Korean company, so it might have some measure of tariff resistance. After spending most of 2025 hovering around $400, this item has now seen some notable upticks on Amazon, most recently sitting around $450. This could potentially be in reaction to Trump's announcement of 25% tariffs against South Korea this week. Xbox Series X Video game software and hardware are a market segment expected to be hit hard by the Trump tariffs. Microsoft's Xbox is the first console brand to see price hikes -- the company cited "market conditions" along with the rising cost of development. Most notably, this included an increase in the price of the flagship Xbox Series X, up from $500 to $600. Numerous Xbox accessories also were affected and the company also said that "certain" games will eventually see a price hike from $70 to $80. Initially, we were tracking the price of the much more popular Nintendo Switch as a representative of the gaming market. Nintendo has not yet hiked the price of its handheld-console hybrid and stressed that the $450 price tag of the upcoming Switch 2 has not yet been inflated because of tariffs. Sony, meanwhile, has so far only increased prices on its PlayStation hardware in markets outside the US. AirPods Pro 2 The latest iteration of Apple's wildly popular true-wireless earbuds are here to represent the headphone market. Much to the chagrin of the audiophiles out there, a quick look at sales charts on Amazon shows you just how much the brand dominates all headphone sales. For most of the year, they've hovered around $199, but ahead of Prime Day sales this week they are currently on sale for $149. HP 962 CMY printer ink This HP printer ink includes cyan, magenta and yellow all in one product and recently saw its price jump from around $72 -- where it stayed for most of 2025 -- to $80, which is around its highest price over the last five years. We will be keeping tabs to see if this is a long-term change or a brief uptick. This product replaced Overture PLA Filament for 3D printers in this piece, but we're still tracking that item. Anker 10,000-mAh, 30-watt power bank Anker's accessories are perennially popular in the tech space and the company has already announced that some of its products will get more expensive as a direct result of tariffs. This specific product has also been featured in some of CNET's lists of the best portable chargers. Bose TV speaker Soundbars have become important purchases, given the often iffy quality of the speakers built into TVs. While not the biggest or the best offering in the space, the Bose TV Speaker is one of the more affordable soundbar options out there, especially hailing from a brand as popular as Bose. You can currently get this model at a healthy discount for Prime Day, down to $200 from $280. Oral-B Pro 1000 electric toothbrush They might be a lot more expensive than their traditional counterparts but electric toothbrushes remain a popular choice for consumers because of how well they get the job done. I know my dentist won't let up on how much I need one. This particular Oral-B offering was CNET's overall choice for the best electric toothbrush for 2025. Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i Chromebook Lenovo is notable among the big laptop manufacturers for being a Chinese company making its products especially susceptible to Trump's tariffs. Starbucks Ground Coffee (28-ounce bag) Coffee is included in this tracker because of its ubiquity -- I'm certainly drinking too much of it these days -- and because it's uniquely susceptible to Trump's tariff agenda. Famously, coffee beans can only be grown within a certain distance from Earth's equator, a tropical span largely outside the US and known as the "Coffee Belt." Hawaii is the only part of the US that can produce coffee beans, with data from USAFacts showing that 11.5 million pounds were harvested there in the 2022-23 season -- little more than a drop in the mug, as the US consumed 282 times that amount of coffee during that period. Making matters worse, Hawaiian coffee production has declined in the past few years. All that to say: Americans get almost all of their coffee from overseas, making it one of the most likely products to see price hikes from tariffs. Other products As mentioned, we occasionally swap out products with different ones that undergo notable price shifts. Here are some things no longer featured above, but that we're still keeping an eye on: Nintendo Switch: The baseline handheld-console hybrid has held steady around $299 most places -- including Amazon release of the Switch 2 remains to be seen. This product was replaced above with the Xbox Series X. release of the Switch 2 remains to be seen. This product was replaced above with the Xbox Series X. Overture PLA 3D printer filament: This is a popular choice on Amazon Here are some products we also wanted to single out that haven't been featured with a graph yet: Razer Blade 18 (2025), 5070 Ti edition: The latest revision of Razer's largest gaming laptop saw a $300 price bump recently, with the base model featured an RTX 5070 Ti graphics card now priced at $3,500 ahead of launch, compared to the $3,200 price announced in February. While Razer has stayed mum about the reasoning, it did previously suspend direct sales to the US as Trump's tariff plans were ramping up in April. Asus ROG Ally X: The premium version of Asus's Steam Deck competitor handheld gaming PC recently saw a price hike from $799 to $899, coinciding with the announcement of the company's upcoming Xbox-branded Ally handhelds.
Wall Street Journal
12 minutes ago
- Wall Street Journal
Nvidia's Run Toward $4 Trillion Fuels Stock Gains
A big day for Nvidia NVDA 1.80%increase; green up pointing triangle shares helped power a fresh all-time high for the Nasdaq composite on Wednesday, despite new tariff threats from the Trump administration. All three major U.S. indexes posted gains after President Trump released new letters setting levies on goods from a half-dozen countries including the Philippines, Libya and Iraq. That followed the prior day's tariff announcements, which included a tax of up to 200% on pharmaceutical imports.
