AI Might Be Smart, But It Can’t Hug You Back: Why Power Skills Still Matter

We’re living in a moment where artificial intelligence (AI) is showing up like the cool new kid at school—slick, impressive, and eerily good at everything from writing reports to generating images to predicting trends. It’s got data. It’s got speed. It even has tone.

But let’s not get it twisted: AI is a thought partner, not a soul partner.

For all its brilliance, AI still can’t do one thing that matters most in our work and relationships—it can’t feel.

Sure, it can mimic empathy. It can offer a digital shoulder to cry on. But when you’re in a tense team meeting, navigating a colleague’s subtle bias, or helping someone process the weight of exclusion or loss, there’s no substitute for human presence, emotional intelligence, and relational courage.

It’s kind of like playing a video game on God mode—you’re powerful, but disconnected from the stakes. No fear. No failure. No friction. And that’s exactly where the real growth happens.

🚫 The Risk of Over-Reliance: You Can’t Build Trust on Autopilot

Here’s where it gets tricky: the more we turn to AI to mediate, manage, or even mimic our interactions, the less we flex our trust-building muscles.

Trust is built in the awkward pauses. The eye contact. The apology that takes effort. The silence that holds space. The time it takes to really understand where someone is coming from, not just what they typed.

When we rely on AI to help us “say the right thing” without doing the inner work—we miss the point.

We risk turning emotional labor into emotional outsourcing.

And that’s dangerous, especially in environments that already struggle with inclusion. If leaders and colleagues start depending on tech to manage sensitive conversations, resolve team tension, or deliver feedback, we short-circuit the human wiring that keeps culture alive.

Trust doesn’t come preloaded. It’s earned, built, broken, and rebuilt—in real time, with real people.

✨ A Moment AI Can’t Match

A few years ago, I sat across from a young leader—brilliant, driven, but unsure whether they truly belonged in the room. They had received some harsh feedback that was more about someone else’s bias than their actual performance.

They weren’t looking for a performance review. They were looking for reassurance. They were wrestling with the weight of being “the only” in the room—something AI couldn’t possibly understand, let alone address with the nuance it deserved.

I didn’t offer a perfectly-worded script. I offered my presence. I shared my own experience. I listened without fixing. And in that moment, trust wasn’t downloaded. It was built. That conversation turned into mentorship. And that mentorship became fuel.

No chatbot would’ve met that moment.

🤖 But What About Emotional AI?

To be fair—emotional AI is having its moment. From sentiment analysis in customer service bots to AI that tracks facial expressions and vocal tone, developers are racing to teach machines how to recognize, mimic, and respond to human emotions.

You’ll see it in wellness apps, virtual therapy platforms, even hiring tools that attempt to read candidate “energy.”

And while that sounds promising, let’s be real—it’s more approximation than intimacy.

Emotional AI can detect a tremor in your voice or a furrow in your brow, but it can’t interpret the context behind it. It doesn’t know your cultural background, your lived experiences, or how years of microaggressions have shaped the way you respond to authority or feedback.

It doesn’t know that your silence in a meeting is protective, not passive.

Or that your tone is cautious because the last time you spoke up, someone weaponized your words.

Emotions are not just signals—they’re stories. And stories require connection, curiosity, and care. Emotional AI might clock your “mood,” but it won’t follow up with, “You okay for real?”—especially when your answer is “I’m fine,” but your eyes say otherwise.

That’s why we need culturally attuned, emotionally literate humans in leadership—not just machines with good mimicry.

Emotional AI may help us recognize emotion, but it can’t repair harm. It can’t build culture. It can’t teach someone how to be brave enough to speak, or humble enough to listen.

And in the work of inclusion, that makes all the difference.

🧠 How That Moment Connects to DEI

That story wasn’t just about being supportive. It was a real-time demonstration of psychological safety—a foundational DEI principle that empowers people to show up fully, speak honestly, and trust that they won’t be punished for being vulnerable.

That young leader needed a safe space—not a perfect algorithm—to make sense of what they were experiencing. They needed someone who understood how intersectional identities shape how bias lands, how feedback is internalized, and how hard it can be to hold your head high when you’re navigating systems not built with you in mind.

AI couldn’t provide that depth. But a present, culturally attuned leader could.

And that’s the heart of intersectional leadership—the ability to see people not just through the lens of performance, but through the complexity of their lived experience. It means knowing that someone’s silence may not be disengagement—it might be exhaustion. It means knowing that empathy doesn’t require a plugin; it requires practice.

💔 Where AI Falls Short

1. 🧠 Reflection Without Depth AI can summarize your journal entries or spin a poem about heartbreak, but it doesn’t know what it means to wrestle with your own fears at 2 AM.
2. 🤝 Support Without Soul AI doesn’t know your mama’s voice. It can’t hold space when you're grieving or celebrate you without a prompt.
3. 💬 Dialogue Without Dissonance Real leadership—especially inclusive leadership—requires you to build muscle in hard conversations. You can't outsource that to a chatbot.
4. 🌱 Learning Without Relationship AI can teach you a new skill in minutes. But it can’t mentor you, challenge you, or help you grow from failure.
5. 🤖🫥 — Polite but hollow

🧩 Why This Is a DEI Issue

If we’re serious about building inclusive cultures—at work, at home, in our communities—we can’t automate the soul out of it.

Power skills like empathy, self-awareness, cultural fluency, and relational trust are not optional. They are foundational to equity. And they only develop through deep, messy, human-to-human engagement.

So yes—let AI be your co-pilot.

But don’t forget: trust, growth, and transformation don’t live in the algorithm. They live in us.

Your Turn

🔥 What’s one moment lately where a real, human interaction made the difference? Let’s not lose that in the AI hype. Drop it below 👇🏽