The Heart in the Machine: Leading with Empathy in the Age of AI

AI transformation, Leadership, Keynote, Future of work, Workplace culture

The problem

In short: In a public webinar hosted by EPOCHA, I showed leaders how to build teams around the human skills AI can't replace, using MIT's EPOCH framework, three strategies and seven practical tips. Around 80% of participants chose Empathy as the most important skill.

As AI takes over more routine work, leaders are asking which human skills still matter, and how to build teams around them. At the same time, low-quality AI output is creating a hidden cost. Researchers at BetterUp Labs and the Stanford Social Media Lab (2025) found that 40% of employees had received AI "workslop" in the past month, with each incident taking almost two hours to resolve. For an organisation of 10,000 people, that adds up to around $9M a year. Zapier (2025) found employees spend 4.5 hours a week revising, correcting or redoing AI outputs.

As a result, knowledge work is shifting from creating content to curating it, and leaders need a clear way to decide where people add the most value.

The solution

I designed and delivered "The Heart in the Machine", a public webinar on leading with empathy in the age of AI, hosted by EPOCHA, a Seoul-based coaching and mentoring company, on 5 February 2026. The audience was a mix of leaders from the real estate, financial services and tech sectors.

What did the talk cover?

The talk built on the EPOCH framework from MIT Sloan (Loaiza and Rigobon, 2024), which names five human capabilities that complement AI rather than compete with it:

Empathy: AI can detect sentiment, but it can't feel, so psychological safety still depends on people.
Presence: reading the room and what goes unsaid, which is where trust is built.
Opinion: ethical judgement, because AI provides options while humans make decisions.
Creativity: AI summarises past data, whereas humans imagine the future.
Hope: the ability to set a vision and motivate a team towards a future the data doesn't yet support.

How can leaders put EPOCH into practice?

I then turned the framework into three strategies, with seven practical tips leaders could use straight away:

Hire for AI literacy and EPOCH skills: balance AI aptitude with experience, screen for "pilots" who use AI to elevate their thinking rather than "passengers" who delegate it, and upgrade aptitude tests to include AI-assisted problem solving.
Audit for EPOCH and identify non-negotiable roles: map team responsibilities on a job canvas, keep tasks high in Empathy or Opinion human-led, and strengthen relational intelligence across the team.
Own your team's upskilling: treat skills as portable "currency" through skills passports, and use Microsoft's "Model, Coach, Care" approach to move managers from monitoring tasks to empowering people.

What did participants say?

In a live poll, around 80% of participants chose Empathy as the most important EPOCH skill for high-performing teams, and around 20% chose Creativity. The skills passport idea also resonated: one junior-to-mid-level participant said afterwards they'd like to see a skills passport introduced in their own organisation.

Key project stats

80%

Chose Empathy as the most important human skill

Human skills AI can't replace (EPOCH)

Practical tips for leaders

Project Gallery

Slide titled The Workslop Productivity Drain showing 40% of employees experienced workslop in the past month, an average of 1 hour 56 minutes to resolve an incident, and a cost of 9 million dollars a year for an organisation with 10,000 employees.