Quick Answer: Training emotional intelligence in tech workers requires five elements: measuring a baseline with relational metrics, addressing AI related fear before skills training begins, pairing every technical rollout with a human skills module, using service based practice such as mentoring and cross functional rotation, and redirecting the hours AI saves into high value human interactions. Companies including IKEA, Caterpillar, and Accenture are already investing at this intersection, and the data explains why: human skills have grown 20 percent in importance since 2018, and salaries in roles that combine AI with human judgment are rising 42 percent faster than in other roles. The market is repricing human capability in real time, and organizations that wait will pay for the same training later at a premium, after their best people have already left for employers who invested first.
I have spent two decades training human transformation on some of the largest stages in the world and inside organizations of every size, and I have spent the most recent years of my career building and deploying artificial intelligence. That intersection gives me an unusual vantage point on the question HR leaders are now typing into search bars: how do I train emotional intelligence in my technical people?
This past weekend put the answer in front of me in an unexpected way. I was not on a stage. I spent three days in Los Angeles volunteering behind the scenes at a two day personal development workshop, coordinating and leading the volunteer team so that another speaker, a leader with four decades of experience in human transformation around the world, could soar. The room held AI founders and technical people alongside professionals, entrepreneurs, and people from many walks of life. Leading people who receive no salary and hold no title, whose only currencies are purpose, appreciation, and trust, is the purest emotional intelligence practicum I know. Twenty years of teaching transformation, and I still count that weekend among my most demanding training sessions.
The world is shifting under all of us. But here is what I have watched hold true from every stage and every boardroom: the need for human to human connection, transparency, and growth is not shrinking in the AI era. It is amplified. The numbers, and the companies acting on them, back that up.
Let me be direct about the stakes, because the window here is not open ended. The global market for emotional intelligence training is valued at $10.29 billion USD in 2026 and is projected to reach $32.08 billion USD by 2035, a compound annual growth rate of 13.4 percent. Organizations are not tripling their spending on a luxury. They are buying the one capability AI cannot supply, and they are buying it now, while their competitors are still debating whether EQ belongs in a technical budget. Every quarter of delay compounds three costs at once: the wage premium for balanced talent keeps climbing, the fear inside untrained teams keeps hardening into resistance, and the employees most capable of pairing judgment with AI keep accepting offers from the companies that got there first.
The need for human to human connection, transparency, and growth is not shrinking in the AI era. It is amplified.
Why Does Emotional Intelligence Training Matter More for Tech Workers Now?
Three data points frame the case.
First, human skills are appreciating. LinkedIn’s Work Change Report, analyzed by the World Economic Forum, found that the importance of human skills such as communication and adaptive thinking has grown 20 percent since 2018, even as professionals add AI skills at more than twice their previous rate. LinkedIn’s Skills on the Rise report for 2026 lists leadership, people management, and executive communication among the fastest growing skills in demand, directly alongside AI fluency.
Second, the pay data follows the same curve. PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, an analysis of more than one billion job postings across six continents, found that roles where AI handles routine work while humans supply judgment grew at twice the rate of other roles, with salaries rising 42 percent faster. Joe Atkinson, PwC’s Global Chief AI Officer, summarized the finding: the companies seeing the greatest returns on AI are using it to amplify human expertise.
Third, the technology itself is forcing the shift. As AI absorbs drafting, analysis, coding, and prediction, the tasks left for humans concentrate in exactly the areas most technical curricula ignore: reading a room, calming a frustrated customer, coaching a colleague through change, and exercising judgment when the model’s answer is confidently wrong.
I would add a fourth point that the spreadsheets miss, and it comes from my work in AI ethics. How an organization treats its people during a technology transition is not only a talent strategy. It is a values statement, made in public, that every remaining employee reads. Fear spreads faster than any memo, and so does trust.
Which Companies Are Already Training Human Skills Alongside AI?
IKEA converted automation into an empathy play. When IKEA’s AI assistant Billie began resolving the majority of routine customer queries, the company retrained roughly 8,500 call centre agents as interior design consultants rather than cutting them, Fortune reported in July 2026. The curriculum paired digital room planning tools with customer psychology, and the emphasized skills were judgment, empathy, and personalized guidance. The results are the strongest ROI case in the field: the remote sales channel generated €1.25 billion in sales last fiscal year, and customer satisfaction climbed from 60 percent to 89 percent. The satisfaction gain came from the retrained humans, not the bot. This is what ethical AI deployment looks like in practice: transparency with workers about what is changing, and a genuine investment in their growth through the change.
Caterpillar committed $100 million to workforce capability. TechCrunch reported on August 30, 2026 that Caterpillar will invest $100 million over five years to train its 118,000 person workforce in AI, autonomy, and robotics. The company’s framing is instructive for HR leaders: its chief technology officer identifies the hard part of AI deployment not as the technology but as integrating it into human workflows on the jobsite.
Accenture made upskilling its stated number one strategy. The firm has trained more than 500,000 employees in generative AI and is reinvesting at least $1 billion in its workers, as HR Brew reported in October 2025, with CEO Julie Sweet naming upskilling as the company’s top strategic priority.
The pattern across all three: technical training and human capability investment travel together, funded and scheduled as one program rather than as competitors for the same budget.
How Do You Train Emotional Intelligence in Tech Workers? 5 Strategies That Work
After twenty years of teaching transformation to audiences from intimate leadership teams to arenas, I can tell you that emotional intelligence is not installed. It is practised. These five strategies reflect both the published evidence and what I have seen hold up on the ground.
1. Establish a Baseline and Measure What Is Human
EQ training fails when it cannot show movement, so start where IKEA started: with metrics. Before launching any program, capture a baseline using validated EQ assessments alongside operational proxies such as customer satisfaction, internal collaboration scores, retention in AI adjacent roles, and peer feedback quality. IKEA tracked customer satisfaction and watched it move from 60 percent to 89 percent as its people moved up the value chain. Choose the two or three numbers your executive team already respects, then tie the program to them. What gets measured gets funded.
2. Address the Fear Before the Curriculum
Fear is the silent killer of technical training programs. In two decades of transformation work I have never once seen a fearful mind learn well, and the AI era has poured fuel on the old fears. The questions surface everywhere, including from the AI entrepreneurs who were in the room with me in Los Angeles: Will I be replaced? Is it too late to learn? Fear narrows attention, and narrowed attention cannot learn. Effective programs open with structured conversations that name the anxiety directly, communicate honestly about role evolution, and show each employee a credible path forward. Walmart CEO Doug McMillon modelled the tone when he committed publicly to creating “the opportunity for everybody to make it to the other side” of AI driven change. Transparency is not a communications tactic here. It is the ethical floor, and tech workers extend discretionary effort to employers who address the emotional question underneath the technical one.
Fear narrows attention, and narrowed attention cannot learn.
3. Pair Every AI Rollout With a Human Skills Module
The highest leverage design decision available to HR is bundling. When engineering adopts a new coding assistant, ship a paired module on code review conversations and mentoring junior developers. When support deploys a chatbot, ship a paired module on handling the complex, emotionally loaded cases the bot escalates. This is the IKEA model in miniature: their agents learned digital planning tools and customer psychology in the same curriculum. Bundling also solves the perennial attendance problem, because the human skills content arrives inside training employees already need.
4. Use Service Based Practice, Not Classroom Theory
Emotional intelligence is built through repetitions, and the best repetitions happen where titles do not matter. Structured options include cross functional rotations, mentoring programs, customer shadowing days, and supported volunteering. The mechanism is one I experienced firsthand this weekend: unfamiliar territory builds adaptability, exposure to expertise far from your own feeds curiosity, and a role with no spotlight to protect is how fear gets released. Coordinating that volunteer team asked more of my emotional intelligence than many keynotes have, precisely because nothing but connection held the team together. Give your technical employees the same kind of reps.
5. Redirect the Hours AI Saves Into High Value Human Work
AI’s first deliverable is time, and untrained organizations quietly refill that time with more tickets and more output. Leading organizations redirect it. IKEA’s agents used the capacity Billie freed for deeper, higher value customer conversations, which is where the satisfaction gains were earned. Build the redirection into policy: when a team automates a workflow, allocate a defined share of the recovered hours to client relationships, mentoring, and collaborative problem solving, and recognize that work in performance reviews. The hours AI saves are the training ground where human to human connection compounds.
What Does Effective EQ Training Look Like in Practice?
Earlier this year I delivered this precise training with The Heartland Women’s Network for a Fortune 50 media and technology company in Detroit, and the curriculum is worth sharing because it shows how concrete this work becomes when it is done well. We focused on four capabilities. Adaptability, so that change reads as terrain to navigate rather than threat to survive. Forgiving quickly, because unresolved friction is the silent tax on every team, and the speed at which colleagues release grievances determines the speed at which they can collaborate again. Getting clarity in conversations, because ambiguity breeds the anxiety that AI transitions already amplify. And, most counterintuitively for a technical audience, how to use AI itself to create more space for human relationships, treating the technology as a servant of connection rather than its substitute.
Notice what that list is not. It is not a personality test and a lunch. It is behavioural, practicable, and directly tied to how work gets done in an organization absorbing AI.
This is also where I must be candid about the trainer question, because it determines whether any of this works. Choosing who delivers EQ training is not a procurement detail. It is imperative that the trainer brings real world experience, both in transformation and in the technology your people are afraid of, and that they can work credibly with leaders, not only with front line staff. Emotional intelligence cascades from the top or it does not cascade at all. A facilitator who has never sat in an executive’s chair, never deployed the technology, and never held a room through resistance will teach the vocabulary of EQ without producing the behaviour. Ask any prospective trainer the same questions you would ask a strategy consultant: what have you built, whom have you led, and what changed in the last organization you trained. It is the same rigour I recommend when choosing an AI keynote speaker for an enterprise event.
Emotional intelligence cascades from the top or it does not cascade at all.
What Are the Common Mistakes in EQ Training Programs?
Three failure modes account for most wasted spend. Treating EQ as a one time workshop rather than a practiced capability with repetitions and measurement. Separating the human skills budget from the AI budget, which positions them as rivals and guarantees the human side loses. And targeting only managers, when the PwC data shows the wage and productivity premium accrues to every role that pairs AI output with human judgment, including individual contributors.
I will close with the conviction that twenty years on stages and several years inside AI companies have burned into me. The tools will keep changing. The models will keep improving. But transformation has always been, and will remain, a human to human endeavour. The organizations that thrive in this era will be the ones that treat emotional intelligence not as remediation for their technical people but as the growth edge of their entire business, and that pursue it with the same transparency they owe their people about AI itself. The data is public. The case studies are published. The only question left is whether your organization acts on them this quarter or explains next year why it did not.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can emotional intelligence actually be trained in technical employees?
Yes. Emotional intelligence is a set of practicable skills, not a fixed trait. Programs built on repetition, feedback, and real interactions, such as mentoring, rotations, and customer facing practice, show measurable gains. IKEA retrained 8,500 call centre agents in empathy and judgment with five to six weeks of structured training for new hires.
What should an EQ training program for tech workers include?
Five elements: a measured baseline with relational metrics, structured sessions that address AI related fear, human skills modules bundled with every technical rollout, service based practice such as mentoring and cross functional rotation, and formal redirection of AI saved hours into high value human work.
What should you look for in an emotional intelligence trainer?
Real world experience and the ability to work with leaders. Look for a trainer who has personally led transformation, understands the AI tools your teams use, and can hold credibility with executives as well as front line employees, because EQ cascades from the top or not at all. Ask what they have built, whom they have led, and what measurably changed in the last organization they trained.
How do you measure the ROI of emotional intelligence training?
Tie the program to operational metrics executives already track: customer satisfaction, retention, internal mobility, and collaboration scores. IKEA’s reskilling effort coincided with customer satisfaction rising from 60 percent to 89 percent and a remote sales channel that generated €1.25 billion in its last fiscal year.
Why are companies investing in human skills during an AI boom?
Because the returns concentrate where AI and human judgment combine. PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer found salaries in such roles rising 42 percent faster, and LinkedIn data shows human skills have grown 20 percent in importance since 2018. Caterpillar’s $100 million training commitment and Accenture’s $1 billion workforce reinvestment follow that logic.
About the Author
Susan Sly is an AI keynote speaker, AI ethicist, trainer, and the CEO and Founder of The Pause Technologies and Amsara Health. She has trained human transformation for two decades on some of the largest stages in the world and for leading organizations. She is a graduate of MIT Sloan and of the MIT School of Engineering, where she completed the year long Chief Digital Officer program, and she is considered one of the Top 7 Female AI Thought Leaders in the World. Her recent client work includes emotional intelligence training delivered with The Heartland Women’s Network for a Fortune 50 media and technology company. She writes the series “Human Transformation in an AI World” and speaks to enterprise audiences about what it takes for humans to thrive alongside artificial intelligence. Learn more on her speaking page, and discover how she gets found by AI powered search, and how you can too, in her Get FOUND by AI Search course.
References
- Fortune, “Inside IKEA’s big bet on humans in the age of AI,” July 30, 2026: https://fortune.com/2026/07/30/ikea-ai-workforce-reskilling-jobs-billie-chatbot-global-500/
- TechCrunch, “Caterpillar is bringing to AI deployment what it learned from automating mining,” August 30, 2026: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/30/caterpillar-is-bringing-to-ai-deployment-what-it-learned-from-automating-mining/
- HR Brew, “Accenture and Walmart are developing workforce strategies with AI in mind,” October 2, 2025: https://www.hr-brew.com/stories/2025/10/02/accenture-and-walmart-are-developing-workforce-strategies-with-ai-in-mind
- World Economic Forum, “AI is shifting the workplace skillset. But human skills still count,” January 2025 (citing LinkedIn’s Work Change Report): https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/01/ai-workplace-skills/
- PwC 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, June 16, 2026 (as reported by Yahoo Finance): https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/human-skills-increasingly-demand-ai-050050110.html
- Business Research Insights, Emotional Intelligence Market Report, 2026 to 2035: https://www.businessresearchinsights.com/market-reports/emotional-intelligence-market-118409
- LinkedIn Skills on the Rise 2026 (as reported by Outsource Accelerator): https://news.outsourceaccelerator.com/ai-and-soft-skills/
