As an enterprise leader, every decision you make can shape your organization's future. Your data provides hundreds of metrics, from website clicks to market sentiment and customer engagement, to help you get it right. But what about the emotions behind those numbers?
We may like to think our choices are based on logic, but research points to a significant emotional influence on every decision we make. That’s everything, from purchases – where 95% of decision-making takes place in the subconscious mind – to executive decisions.
Which means that if you’re not accounting for the emotions that drive decisions, you’re only operating with half the story.
Let’s look at what drives a successful decision:
Stimulus > Goals (context + mental models + Beliefs + Biases) > Emotions > Decision
1. It starts with a stimulus – a market challenge or opportunity, for example, that triggers the need for a decision.
2. As a business leader, you assess this stimulus against organizational goals and your own intrinsic ones, which are informed by the context you operate in and the mental models and beliefs you rely on.
3. Emotions act as a bridge, providing the instinct, empathy and human insight that turns cold information and smart, actionable choices. Years of experience only hones your context further to make this decision an informed one.
4. Your final decision is heavily influenced by how well you have understood and leveraged those emotions.
But here’s the catch: many decisions fail because they miss out that critical emotional step. Without emotional intelligence as well as data, there is a risk of making choices that are too mechanical and disconnected from the people they affect – employees, customers and stakeholders.
“If the AI systems we build don’t engage with emotions, they will be disconnected from the real dynamics that drive business success,” explains Vijayalakshmi Murali, senior UX designer at Fractal. “Commercial success in AI isn’t just about scaling technology – it’s about creating experiences that resonate on a deeply human level. That’s where the real value lies.”
AI with heart, not just logic
So, why are so many businesses missing that emotional connection? Unfortunately, most AI solutions available today focus on efficiency. They’re great for automating tasks, but automation isn’t enough to transform your business. Imagine what you could achieve with AI that understands the emotional state of customers or employees and adjusts its responses in ways that resonate deeply, beyond basic logic.
“Foster collaboration and co-creation with employees and customers in your AI journey. Getting adoption is as much a battle as developing the AI models. Keeping stakeholder groups in the objectives of augmenting work with AI can help excite them, rather than cause fear and anxiety, says Terri Bresenham, Co-founder, Forte Health Advisors.
That isn’t as big a shift as it may sound. Think about some of the things that enterprises typically measure as KPIs. Things like brand loyalty, patient trust, user confidence or optimism. By reporting these only as numbers, we miss their emotional context. But changing perspective and recognizing these KPIs as EPIs – emotional performance indicators – can unlock huge strategic value.
Fractal is designing AI systems that embed emotional intelligence to reflect the complexities of human behavior and decision-making. One recent example is a fitness app developed as part of a government project to encourage people to exercise more. Our research showed that app users are more likely to measure their progress against their past performance, not against those of peer group members or influencers. By asking them to achieve 1% more than they did the day before and combining that with an emotionally connected visualization of that goal, the app engaged more users and kept them active.
“The magic of AI design happens when you fuse logic with empathy,” says Jieya Rawal, designer and researcher at Fractal. “It’s in this intersection that AI becomes more than a tool – it becomes a companion for decision-making.”
Emotions drive enterprise success
For enterprises, this means AI helps leadership make better decisions that are empathetic, strategic, and aligned with human values.
Here’s a fun fact: in terms of demographic data like gender, age, celebrity, and living in a castle, King Charles III of the United Kingdom and rock star Ozzy Osbourne are identical. Yet if you used the same messaging for them both, you’d be setting yourself up to fail. A deeper understanding of what drives each person – the cheapest deal, the best benefits, or exploring the latest products, for instance – is the key to getting the best from the relationship. In fact when customer satisfaction issues are resolved through emotionally intelligent responses, businesses see a 15-20% boost in retention.
“When we fuse people’s personalities with demographic data, we can understand the messaging and acquisition strategies that will attract them,” explains Raj Aradhyula, chief design officer at Fractal. “Bringing AI, behavioral science, and design together in this way has the power to impact the business’s top line from a customer acquisition perspective, and the bottom line in terms of cost savings.”
Let’s not forget employees either. Too often, they are left to struggle with dry dashboards full of numbers that make it difficult to call out insights and make sound, impactful choices. However, research shows that when leadership teams factor emotional intelligence into their decisions, they can boost employee engagement by 30%.
“At Fractal, we see AI as more than algorithms,” says Ramchand Matta, design strategist at Fractal. “It’s the bridge between raw data and the emotional intelligence that drives real business connections. By designing around the user, we avoid auto-generated calendars that fill executives’ days with back-to-back meetings. Instead, we create an emotionally intelligent system that factors in employees’ needs to reflect on conversations with clients and take comfort breaks and can detect signals of burnout. That’s why we design AI from an understanding of what users need to perform at their best, and we train it to deliver that empathy.”
Why emotional AI is essential for board leaders
Data-driven decisions are valuable, but emotionally aware decisions are transformative. That’s why a board leader’s choices need to account for both the practical, and emotional dimensions for their organization. By aligning data with human emotions, you can make sure your strategic decisions are more impactful. You can drive deeper relationships with customers and employees by nurturing emotional connections, not just transactions.
An AI system that fails to do that risks missing the mark in moments that matter most.
“Business leaders recognize that their income, membership, and customer growth are closely linked to how their technology engages with employees as well as customers,” comments Vijay Raaghavan, head of enterprise innovation at Fractal. “This is about designing AI that goes beyond the transactional. It’s about creating systems that understand human experience in ways we never thought possible. By designing AI that makes communication fun, friendly, and intuitive – like the workplace collaboration platform Slack, for example – you can build a system that will compete with the best in the world.”
Building the future of emotional AI
That formula – Stimulus > Goals > Emotions > Decision – is not just theoretical. It’s the cornerstone of how Fractal is reimagining AI for enterprises. We are creating AI that doesn’t just analyze data, but integrates human emotions at critical decision points, empowering leaders to make better-informed choices.
“Our design philosophy is rooted in one principle: AI that understands, empathizes, and ultimately transforms how we work, live, and connect,” says Anushka Ashok, behavioral science lead at Fractal. “By designing AI in line with the needs, context, and user goals, we can create a future where emotions meet data. One in which AI completes the decision-making cycle and becomes an invaluable partner in business leaders’ decision-making decisions, enabling better outcomes, stronger connections, and sustainable growth.”
Aligned to this thought, Julie Jensen-Hall Global E2E SC D&A Director, Mars Pet Nutrition shared, “When most people think about AI, visions of a futuristic fully automated control room with robots come to mind. While that may be true in some industries, Consumer Goods Supply Chain AI is more realistic and simplistic in its approach. At Mars, the heart of our supply chain is getting our pet parents quality products at the right place and time. Mars supply chain teams and associates are central to making decisions that balance cost, cash, and service to serve our customers.
AI in supply chains is not about replacing that human decision-making but rather enhancing it with speed, precision, and new insights. Whether it’s a more optimized truckload to reduce carbon emissions with less trucks driven or an optimized demand plan which eliminates over-production and waste, AI augments human capabilities.
As leaders, it's our job to ensure that AI serves the human element at the core of our supply chains - empowering our teams and improving pet parent experiences. Emotions are strategic in this process. Leaders need to guide our teams through the technological shift with empathy and transparency, ensuring everyone feels supported and part of the transformation. We need to ensure our teams are successful in this journey by upskilling associates in the AI framework using our in-house Mars University to remove the shroud around what AI is and isn’t. When we understand the technology and what’s in it for us and our pet parents, it addresses the emotional response of anxiety and fear with empowerment instead.
Our Mars Central Pet Nutrition Data and Analytics team is also a facilitator of this journey. We are not just building a data foundation and products; we are fostering an environment of trust and transparency where our functional peers can leverage our skillset to demystify and co-create true digital transformation.
This human-centric approach ensures that AI is a partner in delivering sustainable, impactful solutions that benefit both our people and the planet. By listening closely to the needs of our business and pet parents, we are creating future-proof solutions that are as emotionally intelligent as they are data-driven.”
Over the next few years, the way enterprises embed emotions in their measuring, decision-making, and user experiences will become a key competitive differentiator. Many have already begun this journey, and for those that haven’t, now is the time to start. There are so many ways that emotional intelligence in AI can transform the enterprise. The key question is: How could it transform yours?
