Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023.  Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Four Emotion AI Predictions For 2023

By Patrick Ehlen, Vice President of Artificial Intelligence, Uniphore

It's been a big year for emotion artificial intelligence-the technology that can pick up on the visual and audio cues that people often use to convey their emotions. Advances in computer vision and machine learning have reached new levels of sophistication, allowing enterprises to accurately assess unspoken emotional feedback during remote video engagements. In fact, today's emotion AI tools are so sophisticated, this technology can be used to pinpoint "moments that matter"-instances when customers tune in, tune out or turn off-during business conversations. This adoption will be most beneficial for those serving a sales role, where intel on perceived buy-in, or a message that lacks resonance, is critical.

Despite significant gains, emotion AI has yet to "go mainstream." That will change in 2023, as more businesses realize value in the technology-and see what they're missing out on. Just what will that change look like? Here are our four predictions on the adoption of Emotion AI in the coming year.  

Consumers will overcome their fears about emotion AI "technology that tracks." 

One of the biggest barriers to widespread emotion AI adoption is a pervasive fear that the technology will "track" behaviors users consider personal. However, business applications that use emotion AI are designed to detect buyer sentiment and engagement, not recognize personal feelings or collect sensitive data. As sales organizations better understand the type of data emotion AI looks at-and the level of insight it can bring to cataloging meetings and analyzing what worked and what didn't-fear will turn to fascination and, consequently, adoption.   

Businesses will find new ways to capitalize on emotion AI-and these uses will circulate. 

Sales organizations are inherently innovative; and turning capability into cash is what the marketplace does best. Emotion AI is no different. As more businesses adopt the technology, experimentation will naturally follow. And as forward-thinking enterprises uncover new opportunities for using emotion AI-and maximizing its value-other businesses will quickly catch on. 

Privacy and data security legislation will allay lingering fears and accelerate mainstream adoption. 

Many companies behind emotion AI technology have implemented stringent systems to protect user data to proactively address fears of "data tracking" or other privacy issues. While private, enterprise-level efforts will certainly assuage some fears, government legislation-like the European Union's recent AI regulation-will significantly strengthen confidence in the technology and accelerate its adoption. Because legislation varies by region, solutions that easily adapt to new and emerging government mandates will be considerably more desirable than their less-flexible counterparts as businesses plan for the future. 

The long-term players in the emotion AI market will be those who think globally. 

While many companies are churning out artificial intelligence products based on freely available tools from Google, Facebook, Open AI and others, most focus exclusively on supporting English language AI tools. As a result, many so-called "foundation models" are already outdated. To avoid investing in obsolete (or near-obsolete) tech, companies are beginning to lean into "futureproof" solutions, with a focus on Multilingual capabilities.

In addition, while many current AI modeling efforts focus on interpreting language or visual information in isolation, this is often not how information is represented in the real world. So next year we will see growing interest in multimodal platforms that integrate many types of data inputs. These include gestures and visual cues, tonality, contextual and historical information, and other data points taken from the context of global trends and events. As the technology continues to sharpen and its data security becomes more robust, sales organizations will increasingly gravitate toward extensive use of emotion AI. And as its value becomes more apparent-particularly in virtual engagements-expect greater adoption rates across nearly every industry. 

##

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick Ehlen is Vice President of AI at Uniphore, Inc. He has worked on AI and conversational understanding technologies for 25 years and has published numerous papers and articles about developing computer systems that understand and facilitate human interaction.