Can AI Replace Human Intuition? I Think Not, And Here's Why It Matters.

July 26, 2025 00:18:44
Can AI Replace Human Intuition? I Think Not, And Here's Why It Matters.
The Josh Bersin Company
Can AI Replace Human Intuition? I Think Not, And Here's Why It Matters.

Jul 26 2025 | 00:18:44

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Show Notes

After many dozens of conversations with companies and AI vendors about AI transforming work, I’m left with one burning question. If we actually succeed in automating all our work tasks, data analysis, coding, and content generation, are these systems truly able to replace humans?

I”m left with a very simple answer: NO. And the reason for this is not that AI won’t keep getting “smarter,” it’s the fact that we, as human organic animals, posses a magical power of intuition, largely fueled by our emotions. And emotions are built on millions of years of adaptation, genetics, and personal experiences – attributes that AI simply does not have.

My argument, as you’ll hear in this podcast, is that these emotions make up our intuitive decision-making power. And this very human part of our intelligence is what makes companies, teams, and individuals succeed. No matter how “superintelligent” the AI becomes, I advocate that human emotions and strong intuition is still the most powerful form of “intelligence” we have.

I look forward to talking with each of you about this idea, because it’s an important part of the AI transformations in our lives, careers, and companies.

Additional Ideas

The Six Major Theories Of Emotion

The Rise of The Superworker

My Fav Website about Happiness, GGSC

The Gene: An Intimate History, by Siddartha Mukhergee

 

 

 

View Full Transcript

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Okay, today I want to talk about a pretty unexplored topic in the world of AI, and that is the role of emotions. Because in my 40 plus years of experience in business, and I'm not a physical scientist, I would say I'm more like a social scientist. What I've seen over and over and over is that all of the decisions we make at work, in business, in many parts of our lives, are not driven by data. They're driven by emotion. And the data informs our emotional decisions. The data does not make the decisions. Now, if you think about what an emotion is, most of you probably have thought about it a lot. It is a combination of genetic traits, experiences, history, how you were raised, the environment you grew up in, and to some degree, just your genetic wiring. You know, some people are more emotional than others, some people have positive emotions, and some people are kind of downers and et cetera. So. And it probably varies based on what you ate, how much sleep you got, who you were with last week and who you had lunch with, your family situation, maybe what side of the bed you got up on this morning. And when we go into the world of business, where we're trying to create value and solve problems all the time, there's no right or wrong answer to most of the things we do. And that's the reason HR exists, in a way, is that humans are complicated, wonderful, magnificently interesting creatures that we are. And so we're trying to put together business practices to govern how we manage and assess and identify and promote and hire people. Now, you know, AI comes along, and now we throw the words like artificial superintelligence or artificial general intelligence and says to us, it's all about data. And if we get enough data, and let's get all the data in the world, get every piece of data ever created, let's get synthetic data, let's make up data. If we train the AI enough with enough algorithms, it will be smarter than us, which is just ridiculous to think about. [00:02:12] Now, I'm not saying there aren't a lot of really good applications of AI. I'm a data person, and I'm always looking at data. And the way my mind works is most business people and scientists and engineers. I thrive on data. But at the end of the day, when it comes time to make a decision, the data can be interpreted many different ways. In a situation with numbers, we may or may not interpret the numbers the same way. I've had a conversation with our management team recently about our revenues, and I think they're too low they think they're doing great because they have a different perception on where we're trying to go and what we're trying to accomplish than I do. So even numeric data, which AI can analyze quite well, will result in different decisions based on emotional state and emotional perspective. So my thesis here, and I think a lot of you will probably come to my way of thinking if I convince you, is that we are missing this whole dimension in our discussions of artificial intelligence, superintelligence and artificial general intelligence. So let's talk about emotions. There are, there's a lot of different emotions. Competitiveness, anger, grief, sadness, forgiveness, love, caring. I mean, there's dozens and dozens of them. And if you read some of the psychological research, and I've read some of it, but not exhaustively, there are many models for emotions. There is no one accepted model for why emotions occur and what causes them and what you can do to deal with them. This is why human psychology is such an interesting and huge profession. In fact, I think it's a growing profession, to be honest, because so many people are dealing with mental health issues right now. And what AI does through AI chatbots and simulations is it simulates emotions. It recognizes emotions mathematically and tries to accommodate, particularly in coaching applications, the typical responses to make you feel better or to teach you something as an individual. So what's been going on in the psychology world is lots and lots of coaching bots and other psychological bots, including bots to help you with dating and romance, to try to simulate and identify your emotions through your language or through your voice or through your face, and respond to you in a simulated way. But that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about something different. I'm talking about that gut feel, that intuition that you have with when you meet someone and you say to yourself, this is not the right fit. Or when you meet someone and you say, I really like this person and I think they're going to be a great fit, or I want to be friends with this person, or I think this person is ready to lead our company, or I think this person will do a great job leading this project or whatever the decision is you're trying to make. It is very, very hard to pinpoint mathematically why you feel the way you do. And I think that's the magic of human intellig that is completely lost on machine intelligence. Now the mathematicians, undoubtedly some of them have tried to figure this out and will probably argue that it's like a self driving car. If we get Enough data and we can get more and more and more data with more and more videos and more and more real time information systems. We will eventually simulate the human driver experience and we will build a car that can drive as safely as a human. And it's probably true that, that driving a car safely is not an intuitive process. There is a lot of logic and physics and visual clues that humans may miss that a computer could identify. So I'm not going to argue that that particular use case requires human intuition, but it might. When you're going across the street and you see a dog or a little boy or a little girl, you do have an intuition about whether they're going to jump in front of the car or not. It may not be mathematically predictable because you can look in their eyes and the computer probably can't. But let's put that aside, let's talk about everything else. And if I think about the way businesses work, the process of building a product, marketing a product, designing a product so that it's competitive and easy to use and perfectly tuned to a marketplace, doing a positioning exercise of how to communicate about a product or a service, reaching out to customers or prospects and communicating to them in a way that they will respond, dealing with their questions and their inquiries, taking them down the process of buying something, implementing and solving and addressing their concerns in healthcare or business services or other areas, and going through the ongoing process of serving and delighting a customer. Those are all psychological, intuitive, emotion filled business processes. And so what AI is most likely to do, in my opinion is, is give us more and more and more insights to make those emotional processes better. Now let me give you a couple of examples. Long ago I did a lot of research on IO psychology based assessments. And the assessment industry is filled with brilliant psychologists who have studied how to assess a job candidate against a job. Now in order to do that, they have to understand what a job is and what is required to do the job, which is a whole project, which is also emotional. And then you have to assess the person relatively quickly. You don't have a lot of time on their abilities or built in skills to address the most critical capabilities needed in that job. Now it's even trickier than that because nobody is 100% trained or ready for any job ever. Because even if they've done the job before somewhere else, it's different in this company than it was in that company. So you're assessing somebody's potential and they're fit in a whole bunch of respects. So this is a very interesting Sort of AI ready thing. And what you find is that AI systems will teach you things about psychological or behavioral assessment that you didn't know as a human. So for example, the one that I remember the most, but there's several, was an insurance company that was hiring salespeople to sell car insurance. Pretty simple idea. And they were looking for people that had great grades, that were really smart, that were overachievers and had scored really well in sports and other achievements and competitive activities. And they found that, you know, some percentage of those people were good at sales, car insurance sales, and some were not, but some, there seemed to be a pattern of the people that were the most successful. So they hired an IO psychology firm. This particular company's now gone. But they were a very smart group of people. And they studied, of course, the high performers compared against the moderate performers and did a lot of analysis of the backgrounds and testing results of the two groups and found that the most highly correlated statistical fact about the high performing car insurance salespeople was that they loved cars. In other words, they had worked in the car industry, they knew a lot about cars, they were fans of cars, they probably had had a lot of cars of their own. And that love, or I don't know what the word is for it, adoration with cars led them to be great salespeople in the car industry. I think you'd probably find the same thing true in automobile sales itself. Now, a good manager probably would pick that up just because of their human experience. Would the AI have known that? Maybe, if it had enough data. But there's an example of a data driven decision that the AI eventually would come to, but might have been much more obvious to an emotional candidate or recruiter earlier. In fact, in recruiting I hear this story constantly, and I'll repeat it again, that great recruiters significantly outperform median to moderate recruiters. And it isn't because they're scientists or mathematicians, they're or extremely data driven, but they have incredible intuition about people. They read people well, they understand when people are blowing up their resume and overinflating their achievements. They understand culture fit. These are very emotional things. So for all of the grandiose expectations we all have about AI, including me, I think we're going to find that the stochastic parrot problems of AI don't give us the solutions we need when the problems and the solutions are very uncertain. Now, I think the answer to this whole discussion is not that AI should be a feeling thing, rather that we are probably over positioning what AI will do I firmly believe that 10 years from now we're still going to have companies run by people, still going to have lots of jobs and the creative, innovative passion parts of business will continue to be the differentiating factors in the highest performing companies. It will not be whose AI is smarter or who has the largest data center, who has the largest database. That's not the way the world works. I am a, you know, almost 70 year old man who's been through plenty of emotional things in my own life and I believe through my own lived experience in business and in my personal life that the emotional part of our lives and our business careers are far more important than our ability to analyze data. Now what does this have to do with AI? I think there's a couple of implications of this. The first is let's not over engineer or over invest in AI over people. Right now we're getting a continuous stream of concerns from individuals, HR executives and others that their jobs are going to be eliminated by AI. And I would argue that that is true, that many parts of your job will be eliminated. But it doesn't matter what your job is. Even if you're just a clerk entering data into a screen, there are parts of your job that are very human related. How you interact with other people, what you do about mistakes, how you support or contribute to improvements and learning on and on and on, how you lead projects, et cetera, those are very human things. And I don't expect there to be an AI at the center of the conference room table, running the meeting, telling us what to do, listening to the conversations and perhaps giving somebody feedback that we don't want to listen to their ideas because they're not correct. I don't think the world's going to go that direction ever. But I do believe, just like the horses that were pulling bug buggies that were replaced by automobiles and the automobiles that will be replaced by autonomous cars and so forth, that many of the things that we now think are very human tasks will be automated, but there will be a continuous discussion of the intuition, the feelings, the emotions in business. Now there are people, you know, I know a lot of people who don't seem to be very emotional and they are oftentimes, at least on the outside, considered to be great business people. [00:13:52] But as you know, especially if you follow President Trump or others, it doesn't matter how successful you are under your success are all sorts of emotions. Ambition, passion, risk taking, risk tolerance, learning, agility, humility, forgiveness, energy, lack of energy, creativity, lack of creativity. Focus on details, focus on the big picture, focus on long term strategy, focus on short term strategy. These are, you know, maybe business phrases that have a lot to do with your emotional makeup. How many times have you been in a meeting where you're looking across the table or across zoom at somebody and you can see from the look on their face that they're either not understanding or disagreeing with what you're saying? This happens all the time. And you moderate your words and you take a step back and you take a deep breath and you interpret what you're picking up and you perhaps communicate your thoughts differently to try to make your point. These are very emotional, human intuitive processes. And I won't go through every process in business, but certainly in hr. Hiring, promotion, coaching, development, feedback, performance management, session management, all of these jargony things that we talk about all the time in HR are filled with these intuition and emotional things. The final thing that I will say about this topic, and you've all heard me say this before, but I'm going to sort of interpret in a different way, is that, you know, the business world is accelerating at a much, much faster rate than I've ever seen before. New companies are being formed, new technologies are being created, the government is flip flopping back and forth from highly regulated to unregulated to highly regulated to unregulated. Technologies are being developed and suddenly seem to appear out of nowhere. New business models, lots of capital being thrown at startups. So we have a business community where everybody has to be vigilant and aware of disruption every single minute. [00:15:57] So, you know, a lot of what we end up doing in business is picking up signals, signals, signals, signal, signal. And suddenly we wake up one morning and say, I see what's going on here, I understand what we need to do, I understand what I need to do. And this goes for young people too, looking for jobs. I've talked to quite a few people in the last six months who are early in their careers, are really struggling to find jobs. And I always tell them the same thing. I can't predict, nor can you predict the future of any profession. But what you can predict is what you are going to like as an individual. Your loves, your likes, the things that you're good at, the things that make you excited, the things that turn you on at a business level. Those are the things you should focus on and find them in a job or a career or a company or a role. And when you find those things and you chase them, you will have a fulfilling, rich, growing career. Now that means that Emotions are going to be playing a larger and larger role in our lives. And I refuse to believe that AI is going to take any of this away. [00:17:06] Going back to this idea of genetics, I really encourage you to read. If you don't know a lot about genetics, read the Gene. I'm going to put it in the notes here. This book, and it's one of the most interesting books I've ever read. I didn't study a lot of biology as a young guy, but I've been learning a lot about it lately. And what you realize, for those of you that are biologists, you know this, is that our human genome is enormously complex, and it is built on millions of years of adaptation and learning, none of which is incorporated into AI. So when your intuition says we should go this way or that way, it's probably a lot smarter than any AI that's ever been created. It may not have as much data and it may miss some edge cases or some trends that the data knows that you don't know, but it in some ways is smarter. So this idea of intelligence, and however we define it, is much bigger than how much data you can amass and how many algorithms you can run against it. Now, you know I'm not a computer scientist, and those of you that are, if you're working on things or have found algorithms or solutions that simulate human emotions well and decompose. Decompose how they work, I'm fascinated and I want to hear about it, but so far I haven't seen it. And I think regardless of how you feel about AI, if you love it or hate it or worried about it or scared of it, your human emotions remain one of the most important tools you have. And I just want to encourage you to trust them, learn about them, and use them.

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