ing for the New Zealand Department of Child,
Youth, and Family Services. He saw social
workers quit after just a few years and realized
why: Big organizations understand data but
don’t really understand the demands they
place on individual people. So, he realized, if
he wanted to help people inside large organi-
zations, he needed to present his idea in a lan-
guage the corporate team could understand.
After taking a course at MIT’s Media Lab,
he cofounded Cogito in 2007—named for
the famous Descartes philosophy Cogito,
ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). The
company got a grant from the U.S. military
to study soldiers with PTSD, and so Feast
and his cofounder began tracking how nurses
interacted with their military patients.
“We discovered that if you use the technol-
ogy to understand the conversation—and to
measure the conversational dance between
nurse and patient—you could start getting a
read of the degree of empathy and compas-
sion they displayed,” he says. When he gave
nurses a dashboard to see their results in real
time, their levels of compassion and empathy
went up. It was the aha moment that shaped
Cogito’s initial product.
That’s how Feast joined an industry of
similarly minded startups, all of which aim
to quantify and guide human interactions.
For example, there’s Butterfly, an AI tool
that aims to help managers engage with their
employees and increase workplace happi-
ness. There’s also KangoGift, software that
tracks employee job performance and, in an
effort to increase recognition and content-
ment, alerts managers to exceptional work
productivity. (KangoGift also flags the small
stuff, like employees’ birthdays.)
IBM has also been exploring the space
with Project Debater, a program it intro-
duced in 2019. It’s billed as the first AI sys-
tem that can debate complex ideas with
humans—functioning as a kind of devil’s
advocate that can raise potential concerns or
repercussions to any big decision. For exam-
ple, a financial analyst might use Debater
to think through different projections with
a customer, or a CEO could ask Debater to
explore the merits of a new HR policy.
It’s easy to create fears about tech like
this—that it’ll become viciously sentient like
Terminator, or be creepily human like the
bot in Her. But as technologists look at this
new crop of AI office assistants, they see a
different problem: It isn’t with the technol-
ogy; it’s with the humans.
“AS SOON AS we call the software ‘AI,’ a lot of
people think it’s doing more than it is,” says
Rosalind Picard, founder and director of the
Affective Computing Research Group at the
MIT Media Lab. Many experts share her
concern. If companies misunderstand what
the tech can do, they may end up harming
their human employees in the process.
For example, back at MetLife, Cogito
told call center agent Conor Sprouls that
he responded too slowly to his caller. In
reality, though, he was searching for docu-
ments to help them. Another time, Cogito
told a MetLife staffer to stop talking over a
customer; in fact, the two had been shar-
ing a laugh. Those may be small stumbles,
but they’ve prompted a lot of conversation
about how this data should be used. If a
manager sees it out of context and thinks
their employee is rude, the consequences
could be real. (At MetLife, employees
review the data before anyone else sees it.)
Or a problem could appear in reverse.
What if an employee is genuinely rude, and
a company thinks its AI software can serveas low-cost training? “Empathy doesn’t just
happen because an AI told you to be more
empathetic,” warns Rumman Chowdhury,
who leads Accenture’s Responsible AI ini-
tiative. “The creation of any AI that involves
‘improving’ human beings needs to be
designed very thoughtfully, so that human
beings are doing the work.”
In anticipation of this, IBM is working to
standardize and promote what it calls an “AI
fact sheet.” IBM Research communications
manager Chris Sciacca describes it as simi-
lar to a nutrition label on a loaf of bread, but
in this case, it would explain the algorithm
and data sets behind the software. That way,
users would appreciate its limitations.
Whatever the case, experts agree that
we’re a long way from truly, emotionally
intelligent AI. And Cogito’s Josh Feast thinks
that’s OK. He imagines AI splitting into two
distinct workplace categories. There will be
software to automate our tasks, and software
to augment our own abilities. With the latter,
he says, the goal is very grounded: to “extend
and reinforce our humanness.”CIGARS
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