2025 in Hindsight: Humanizing AI and Looking Ahead

As 2025 comes to a close, I’ve been reflecting on the incredible journey this year has been for the world of AI – and for me personally. If I had to capture the theme of the year, it would be “humanizing AI.” Across the board, I witnessed a shift: technology conversations that used to be all about speed and scale began to center on empathy, ethics, and inclusion. And that shift was evident in the projects I worked on, the conferences I attended, and the daily interactions I had as an entrepreneur building Emotion AI.

At the start of the year, Emotional Intelligence in AI was a niche topic. Now, it’s edging toward mainstream. I saw customer experience teams embrace Conversational Analytics to make their chatbots and voice agents more responsive to real customer feelings. Some of the skepticism is fading as success stories emerge – people are realizing that a slightly more empathetic chatbot can dramatically improve customer satisfaction. On the flip side, the cautionary tales were also valuable. We all heard about AI systems that stumbled because they lacked a human touch, and those stories fueled a healthy industry discussion about Responsible AI and where the boundaries should be. I found myself in panels not just about what AI can do, but what it should do. That’s progress.

This year also brought neurodiversity to the forefront in tech circles in a way I haven’t seen before. As a community, we talked more openly about designing products for different neurotypes and about the strengths neurodivergent people bring to our teams. Personally, one highlight was hosting a roundtable with neurodivergent tech professionals – their insights on creativity and problem-solving left me inspired and reinforced why I champion these voices. It gave me hope that the tech world is slowly but surely becoming more inclusive and aware that one size doesn’t fit all, whether in hiring or user experience.

For my startup, 2025 was a year of growth and learning. We expanded our Emotion AI platform into new domains – from customer service, deeper into healthcare and education – discovering along the way that empathy in AI is universally important, whether you’re helping an upset customer or supporting a student’s learning. We also doubled down on our ethical guidelines, implementing an ethics review for every new feature. As a CEO, I’ve learned that scaling a company doesn’t just mean scaling the tech or sales; it means scaling your values and ensuring they resonate through every new hire and every product decision. Trust, once lost, is hard to regain in this field.

Looking ahead to 2026, I’m filled with optimism. I anticipate that AI will continue to get “smarter” about human context, and I plan to be at the forefront of making sure it also gets kinder. The groundwork laid in 2025 convinces me that the future of AI is bright if we keep humans at the center. That means continuing the hard conversations about Responsible AI, investing in diversity of thought, and remembering that technology is ultimately here to serve people, not the other way around.

Thank you to everyone who has followed along on my posts and journey this year – your comments and ideas have often sparked new thoughts for me. Let’s recharge over the holidays, because next year there’s plenty of work (and exciting innovation) to be done. Here’s to a new year of building AI that amplifies the best of humanity. See you in 2026 – I can’t wait to continue this adventure together.