Thanks for the comments, Emily!

1. Even when making the tough calls like layoffs or audits, empathy is invaluable. Appreciating the perspective of the suddenly severed employee leads to more constructive outplacement practices (especially around timing and messaging) and reduces the potential for litigation or further negotiation that will eat time. And the best auditors are often those that "trust and confirm": assuming errors to be in good faith unless/until it becomes unavoidable that there has been wrongdoing, which even then helps anticipate and address the legal defense.

2. Some of the most interesting stuff happening in AI right now is around mental health therapy, where it's critical for the programming to understand how subjects see themselves (e.g. a chronic procrastinator who see themselves as overhwelmed as opposed to depressed). The best practices of great therapists area being integrated into the automated services. We're not talking about affective empathy (true feeling, impossible) but cognitive empathy (logical projection of how the subject is thinking).

Make sense?