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Principal Financial Group has upskilled more than 90% of its roughly 19,000 employees in AI fluency and data literacy, and CHRO Lisa Coulson is treating that as the starting point, not the destination. The company’s parallel investment in emotional intelligence training now runs enterprise-wide, covering individual contributors through senior executives, embedded into core development programs rather than offered as an executive perk. Coulson’s argument is that AI surfaces insights but humans still own the judgment calls, and that gap between insight and decision is where emotional intelligence earns its budget.
What this means for your business
The question this story puts to every CHRO is sequencing. Most workforce AI programs treat technical upskilling as phase one and leave the “human skills” conversation for a future roadmap item that never quite arrives. Principal ran both tracks simultaneously, which is harder to fund and harder to explain to a skeptical CFO, but it reflects a real operational logic. As AI absorbs more of the routine processing work, the residual human work skews heavily toward judgment, communication, and trust-building with customers. If your people aren’t trained for that residual, the productivity gains from AI largely evaporate at the customer interface.
There’s a conflict-of-interest flag worth naming here. The article’s author runs LEADx, an emotional intelligence training company, which gives him a financial stake in the conclusion that EI training is indispensable. That incentive doesn’t make the argument wrong, but it does explain why the piece presents the AI-plus-EI formula as settled rather than debated. The honest version of this story acknowledges that the causal link between enterprise-wide EI training and measurable business outcomes is still thin in the literature. Principal’s 90% AI upskilling figure is concrete and verifiable. The EI investment is described in terms of program design and leadership conviction, not business results.
The structural insight that holds regardless of the author’s frame is this: AI doesn’t eliminate the need for human judgment; it concentrates it. When a system handles volume and pattern-matching, the moments that reach a human are disproportionately the ambiguous, high-stakes, emotionally loaded ones. That’s a different skill requirement than general workforce training programs are built to address. CHROs who treat EI development as a soft add-on to AI upskilling are probably mis-pricing the risk. The falsification condition is simple enough to track: if AI-augmented teams with strong EI training don’t outperform AI-augmented teams without it on customer satisfaction and retention metrics within two years, the investment thesis here collapses.
Based on reporting from This CHRO Upskilled 90% Of Her Workforce In AI. Then She Doubled Down On EI., originally published 2026-08-31 06:00:00.
