If you did a word association exercise with a group of CEOs and asked them to fill in the blank before “intelligence,” most would say “artificial.” No surprise: AI dominates the headlines and draws most of the conversational oxygen in any industry today.
What I find equally interesting is emotional intelligence and the direct correlation between AI’s rise and the urgency around EQ in forward-thinking organizations.
The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs report, drawing on input from over 1,000 employers representing more than 14 million workers, offers a useful starting point. A striking 86% of employers believe AI will completely change how their businesses operate, and 41% are already planning to reduce their workforce in areas where tasks can be automated.
Teams are getting smaller, tasks are being reassigned, and the people left are expected to handle work that’s more complicated, more uncertain, and more uniquely human than before. Judgment, trust, and the ability to read people’s emotions and reactions can’t be automated. These skills require a human touch, which is why emotional intelligence is fast becoming a critical leadership competency.
Research by TalentSmart found EQ to be the single strongest predictor of performance, accounting for 58% of success across all job types, with 90% of top performers scoring high in emotional intelligence. Daniel Goleman’s research in the Harvard Business Review echoes this: nearly 90% of the skills that distinguish star senior leaders from average ones are EQ-related, not cognitive.
When a team of three can now do what a team of nine did just a few years ago, the difference between a good team and a great one comes down to how members communicate, handle conflict, give and receive feedback, manage their emotions, and stay focused when priorities shift.
The WEF data backs this up. Between now and 2030, the fastest-growing skills include resilience, flexibility, agility, creative thinking, leadership, social influence, empathy, and active listening. These aren’t “soft skills”; they’re prerequisites for any successful AI strategy.
And here’s the gap: McKinsey’s 2025 workplace research found that while 92% of companies plan to increase AI investment over the next three years, only 1% of leaders consider their organization mature in its AI deployment. The bottleneck isn’t technology, it’s people. Sixty-three percent of employers in the WEF survey identified skills gaps as the single largest barrier to business transformation, and those gaps won’t be closed with software.
Recognizing the opportunity is one thing; executing on it is another. Here are five starting moves that can be rolled out with low friction or cost.
Assess. Most companies have a good handle on sales numbers and engineering progress, but when it comes to EQ, they’re flying blind. Engage a partner who can deliver baseline assessments and identify the people and teams that need the most focus.
Normalize EQ. For the next quarter, add one EQ topic to the group meeting agenda each month. For example, empathy in June, self-regulation in July, and conflict navigation in August. Focusing on one topic at a time leads to more meaningful conversations and heightens awareness.
Be consistent. Make EQ a standing item on the leadership agenda. Pair every AI rollout with a human-skills rollout. If you’re deploying a new tool or agentic workflow, build a parallel track for the human side: how the team will communicate about the change, how managers will coach through the transition, and how roles will evolve.
Formalize it. Rewrite your promotion criteria. If performance reviews still weigh technical output over how someone leads, influences, and develops others, your system is telling the organization that EQ doesn’t matter. Fix the scorecard, and behavior will follow.
Set the culture. As an MBA professor, I often talk about the signals ownership and leadership teams send, and how those signals shape culture for better or worse. What truly differentiates a company in a market where AI is everywhere isn’t the AI itself; every business will have access to it. The difference will be the people using it: their judgment, their relationships, and the culture they build together.
As AI becomes the baseline for how every organization operates, the defining competitive edge will be the people. For companies that pair cutting-edge tech with EQ-powered teams, the results will be game-changing.
Eric Bartosz is the founder and CEO of BAR40 Fractional Solutions, where he leads the firm’s fractional executive engagements and SHRM-accredited EQ training and certification programs. He is an adjunct MBA professor at DeSales University and Muhlenberg College, a Forbes Business Council contributor, and bestselling author of Achieving Personal Excellence.
