Six large language models now beat the human average on standard emotional intelligence tests. People still choose to receive empathy from a human. So the human advantage is no longer about producing better emotional content. It is that a person standing behind the work is part of what the other side is buying, which changes where a marketing leader puts people rather than where they put tools.
Six large language models took five standard emotional intelligence tests and averaged 81%. The human score on those same tests is 56%. (Schlegel, Sommer and Mortillaro, Communications Psychology, May 2025)
Before you conclude that AI wins, hold on.
Despite what those results suggest, humans still need other humans. I’ll tell you more.
Howard Gardner argued in 1983 that intelligence comes in several distinct forms rather than one general capacity: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily-kinaesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist and existential.
Machine capability arrived first in five of them: language, logic, sound, image and movement. What remains is interpersonal and intrapersonal, which together are what we usually call emotional intelligence.
Marketing handed the first five over years ago
The CMO Survey puts AI at 24.2% of marketing activities. Content creation at 73.9%, content personalisation at 65.4%, automation at 48.9%, data analysis at 46.3%, targeting at 45.2%. (February 2026, Christine Moorman, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, with Deloitte and the American Marketing Association)
So back to the number at the top. Six models including ChatGPT-4, Gemini 1.5 Flash and Claude 3.5 Haiku beating the human average on emotional intelligence tests.
I should note those tests are performance-based, multiple-choice questions about emotional situations, so they measure emotional knowledge and reasoning rather than felt emotion or a relationship held over time.
Still, whatever else emotional intelligence is, the reasoning part of it is no longer ours alone.
The study that changed my mind
Then I read the study that changed how I think about machine intelligence and about whether a singularity is ever really the question: People choose to receive human empathy despite rating AI empathy higher (Wenger, Cameron and Inzlicht, Communications Psychology, January 2026).
So machines can produce the better emotional content.
However what the other side is buying is still a person.
This changes where marketing leaders put people rather than where they put AI tools.
Bloomberry’s analysis of 180 million global job postings found SEO specialist roles down 15% and content marketer roles down 11% from 2024 to 2025, while demand for senior leadership held steady. (reported in the AMA’s State of Marketing Careers Report 2026)
Four questions every CMO should ask
- Which of your people does the customer know by name? Start there, because that is who this issue is about.
- Who is in the room when something goes wrong? Whoever turns up is doing the work the tests cannot measure.
- What would a machine do just as well, given a clear brief? The first draft, the fifteen ad variants, the weekly report. That list is your AI plan.
- Which of those three answers is on your next hiring list? If you have the third listed rather than the first two, you are hiring against the market.
The next two years
Over the next two years the teams that do well will spend their machine budget on the first five columns and their attention on the last two.
Share this with the marketing leader whose next efficiency plan starts with the people.
Sources
- Schlegel, Sommer & Mortillaro, “Large language models are proficient in solving and creating emotional intelligence tests”, Communications Psychology (May 2025).
- The CMO Survey, February 2026. Christine Moorman, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, with Deloitte and the American Marketing Association.
- Wenger, Cameron & Inzlicht, “People choose to receive human empathy despite rating AI empathy higher”, Communications Psychology (January 2026).
- Bloomberry analysis of 180 million global job postings, reported in the American Marketing Association’s State of Marketing Careers Report 2026.
Meltem Günyüzlü Ateş, CFCIM, CAIP is an AI-first marketing leader, advisor and educator in the AI era, and a member of European Women on Boards. She leads marketing operations across 60+ markets at the British Council and writes the LinkedIn newsletter Marketing AI, without the hype. If you are doing this rewiring inside a global marketing function and want a second pair of eyes on the operating model, that is the work she does.