Modern Business Magazine June 2016 | Page 50

MODERN BUSINESS Why we need to bridge the gap between art and commerce By Matt Jackson E arlier this year Apple bought Emotient, an Artificial Intelligence start-up which sells software that has the ability to read your emotions by capturing images of changes to your facial expressions. Given how much commerce is conducted through mobile devices that have the ability to record our expressions you can see the appeal to Apple. 50 ModernBusiness June 2016 Through the work of start ups like Emotient and its predecessor, Affectiva, computers now have the ability to measure changes in the way we feel faster than the human eye can see. Brands like Apple, X-box, Unilever and Facebook are using it to enrich their customers’ experience. The ability to accurately measure how people in an organisation are being affected by their work environment is also desirable to large corporates who spend huge budgets on improving their culture without a reliable feedback system to tell them if it was effective. As business’s appetite for learning to master the way people affect and are affected by others who better to learn from than those who have