In our interview a few weeks ago, Gary P. Dawson and I went off on a long conversation about EQ and AI, and I thought this point he made was fascinating: “As AI becomes more emotionally intelligent, it will be tempting and easy to offload your emotions to your LLM.” There’s been a lot of writing about how people have been leaning so hard on AI that they’re “cognitively offloading” their critical and creative thinking. And as people use AI to write emails and Slack messages, many are engaging in "social-emotional offloading." They're skipping over the hard work of understanding the other person’s needs, the context of the conversation, and the empathy and caring that go into a relationship. I imagine that doing this at scale would be terrible for your relationships, your team, and your company. You can check out the full interview here - https://lnkd.in/gcwJ6djd
The "skipping over understanding the other person's needs" part hits different - like using autocomplete for actual human connection
This is such an important conversation, Evan. The temptation to offload emotional labor to AI is real but the cost is invisible until relationships start to feel hollow. AI can scale efficiency, but it can’t replace genuine presence, curiosity, or the kind of empathy that builds trust over time. That’s where expertise + leadership truly meet knowing when to use the tools, and knowing when to show up as a human. That blend is exactly what Expleader.com represents. A domain for leaders who want to build a brand around both deep knowledge and authentic connection. Thanks for sharing this. Really valuable perspective.
How about when you do the hard work of understanding the other person's needs and use those to prompt the AI for tasks like email draft writing ;)I never use a raw ChatGPT output as an email, but as a writer, there's nothing worse than a blank page and it helps to have a starting point!
Evan, these are the real conversations that we need to be having about AI. These types of critical insights and provoking thoughts are more of what I'm trying to see on my feed. Thank you for sharing this conversation. It made me actually want to check out this interview! Gary is right, EQ is greatly lacking in many orgs and in leadership. I also love the bit about stories, and how without the stories, the concepts are just a lecture. It really reminded me of how Chris McLean trains, he is such a captivating storyteller and brings all the theory into real life situations. Chris would love to hear any thoughts you have on this!