Is it finally time to outsource empathetic listening to AI? The answer is becoming more complex by the day.
Empathetic listening is one of the most powerful skills for a leader to develop. At its core, empathetic listening is the ability to truly understand another person’s perspective—not simply by hearing their words, but by tuning into the emotions and meaning beneath them. It goes beyond problem-solving to create trust, connection, and resilience within teams.
But empathetic listening from managers is increasingly rare. As the WSJ reported recently, flattening corporate structures are creating much larger employee-to-manager ratios. People are having a hard time grabbing even 5 minutes with their boss, leading to frustration and unheard concerns.
Even when employees do get time with their boss, the reality is that few managers are actually good listeners.
But AI is offering a new option. While empathy was once viewed as a uniquely human capability, new studies are showing that AI is becoming increasingly effective at demonstrating empathy.
So where does that leave leaders? Should we stop worrying about how we listen and simply outsource our emotions to machines?
Research has shown that AI is not only capable of generating empathetic responses, but in some cases people even rate AI as more empathetic than human professionals.
A 2023 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that patients preferred chatbot responses to doctors’ responses nearly 79% of the time, describing them as more empathetic and higher quality.
Another study done by researchers at the University of Southern California found that AI-generated responses were received much more positively than human-generated responses. Participants said that the AI responses made them feel more heard, better understood, and more connected to the responder.
Furthermore, studies are showing a major rise in the use of AI for a range of personal, emotional, and stress management support purposes.
It’s clear that AI is quickly becoming a go-to tool for empathetic listening. The question is whether humans can keep up - and whether we need them to.
Leaders are often far more focused on talking than listening. As Jeff Yip of Simon Fraser University said on a recent HBR podcast “In our business schools, [...] we often train managers to lead from a speaking perspective. [...] We celebrate speaking, we have TED talks and keynote speakers, but there’s no real main stage for keynote listeners.”
As a result, listening is often an underrated skill. And leaders assume they are much better at it than they really are. After all, anyone can sit and listen, right?
But the issue isn’t really if leaders know how to listen. Rather, it’s that they don’t actually do it in the moment.
One of the biggest reasons is the emotional context. In any given moment, leaders are carrying the weight of their own emotions. They’re under pressure. Exhausted. Experiencing their own frustrations. Coming to the situation with their own perceptions and viewpoints.
Personal emotions can make it difficult to tune into someone else’s struggles. In fact, research highlights that stress literally reduces the brain’s ability to empathize.
That’s why it’s not enough for leaders only to learn the theory of how to listen with empathy. They also have to learn to understand and regulate their own emotions to practice the skill in the moment of interaction.
By all logic, AI is winning the empathy race. It can say all the right things, tailor responses to emotional cues, and deliver perfectly phrased acknowledgments at scale.
But while the words may resonate, there’s a critical difference: people know it is still AI. And that knowledge changes everything.
A recent article in Nature Human Behaviour showed that when people were told their empathetic responses came from AI, they rated them as significantly less meaningful, even if the content was identical to human responses.
The same was true in the studies discussed above by USC and medical researchers: Once people knew it was AI, they immediately felt more detached from the responses.
Moreover, there seem to be limits in the benefits that people get from interacting with AI. A longitudinal study from MIT Media Lab found that extended interaction with AI chatbots often left people feeling lonelier over time, not more connected.
Participants in the studies still preferred responses they knew were human, even if they were less than perfect than the AI-generated responses. It’s clear that no matter how good AI is at mimicking empathy, people still need the real thing.
In an interesting twist, the USC study showed that participants rated responses as most empathetic when they were written by AI, but they believed they were created by a human.
The short-cut implication is that leaders might benefit from using AI to help them improve their written communications. But that won’t work unless it’s reinforced by high-empathy listening when they are in person.
So the real implication is that AI is raising the bar for leaders. In an environment where AI can provide scripted empathy, humans must offer something deeper: genuine emotional connection. That requires learning how to stay present, regulate one’s own emotions, and listen not just for words but for meaning. And it requires recognizing that emotional dynamics within teams are not distractions from performance; rather, they are the foundation of it.
There’s an old riddle that asks: If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? In the age of AI, perhaps the more pressing question is: If AI listens empathetically but no human truly hears you, do you feel understood?
Empathetic listening remains one of the most vital skills for leaders, not because AI cannot simulate it, but because only humans can transform listening into connection, trust, and shared resilience. That is something no machine can replace.