By Ankush Sabharwal
With the widespread adoption of AI in day-to-day functioning, discussions have moved from “what AI can achieve” to “how well AI understands us.” Uniquely placed on this new frontier of innovation is a human-centric AI that can actually recognise and comprehend emotion, intent, and context.
Traditionally, the AIs have been dealing with structured data, logic-based decisions, predetermined rules and ML based NLP with limited data. But human interaction is loaded with nuances, emotions, cultural cues, and shifting contexts. To slow down and build technology that integrates with human consciousness through empathy and trustworthiness, we have to create an AI that thinks and acts like humans; and even talks like humans in any language.
Human communication
Tone, emotion, timing, and awareness of a situation are sometimes more important in human communication than the actual words used. By integrating emotional intelligence, linguistic nuance, and contextual awareness, AI systems are now capable of offering interactions that are more empathetic, personalised, and relevant to users’ situations.
A 2025 study introduced a hybrid emotion recognition system that combines acoustic and textual analysis to enhance customer interactions in contact centers, demonstrating improved accuracy in detecting nuanced emotional states.
So where is human-centred AI making a difference?
Healthcare: AI is capable of identifying emotional distress or cognitive disorientation in patients, enhances mental health diagnostics, therapeutic chatbots, and post-treatment monitoring. These systems engage patients with affective responsiveness, fostering trust and adherence to clinical recommendations.
Customer support: Intelligent assistants are now able to recognise tone, urgency, and dissatisfaction on the fly, so the business can solve issues quicker and more personally, hence augmenting churn reduction and brand loyalty. AI-powered emotion recognition has been shown to increase customer satisfaction by 40-50%, highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing user experiences.
Education: Human-centric AI in the digital classroom can assess whether a student is confused, bored, or disengaged; adaptive learning experiences where content and pace change depending on the student’s emotional state can be enabled by this setup.
Travel and tourism: Emotion-aware virtual agents provide real-time assistance and vary their tone during flight delays, cancellations, or other disruptions. By looking between the lines of user queries, AI supplies suggested services built around user preferences, further driving satisfaction and loyalty. People can talk to an AI agent and get the ticket booked as IRCTC’s AskDisha, powered by CoRover.ai BharatGPT.
Retail: Human-centric AI takes retail support a notch higher than the usual “people who bought this also bought…” By understanding the mood and purchase intent of shoppers, AI can suggest appropriate offers. It also facilitates emotion-driven campaigns by predicting which visuals. In India, 82% of consumers express confidence in AI-based purchase decisions, indicating a strong acceptance of AI-driven personalisation in the market.
Defence: Human-centred AI is enhancing decision support systems, autonomous surveillance, and threat detection by integrating cognitive load monitoring and adaptive interfaces, thereby improving soldier performance, mission planning, and real-time situational awareness.
As AI evolves, the pursuit of building emotionally conscious and contextually aware systems has become not a luxury but a necessity. The shift ensures that technology will not work against us but rather with us to enhance human experience instead of replacing it. The future lies in machines that do not supersede humans in terms of thought but understand mankind.
The author is founder and CEO, CoRover.ai