Artificial Emotional Intelligence

Artificial Emotional Intelligence (AEI) refers to Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that mediate human affect by sensing, processing, and responding to emotional states through multimodal inputs, including text, voice, and physiological signals (Chen et al. 2024 ). As AI systems (especially generative AI) become more conversational, personalised, and multimodal, AEI increasingly mediates therapy, companionship, customer service, education, and work (De Freitas et al. 2026 ; Zao-Sanders 2026 ). This marks a shift from mediating information and behaviour to mediating affect in sensitive contexts: AEI already underpins chatbots designed to mitigate suicide risk (Maples et al. 2024 ), customer-service systems that respond to frustration (Fan et al. 2024 ), and personalised sexbot applications (Rubinsztein and Ciriello 2024 ). This shift reflects technical progress, but also intensifies concerns about social fragmentation, care-capacity gaps, and the expansion of monetisation-oriented platform logics into domains historically organised around care, trust, and professional duty (Arsel 2026 ; Leong et al. 2021 ; Seleznova et al. 2023 ). Despite its significance, this reconfiguration of digital intermediation remains under-conceptualised in Information Systems (IS) research.