Everyone Is Talking About Human-Centric AI. What Do They Mean?

This post originally appeared in Forbes on May 20, 2025.

Generative AI research is flowing in fast, with recent reports from BetterUp and others exploring the more human-centric side of AI. But “human-centric” feels like the next big buzzword in the future of work space. Does it mean using AI to better understand the human condition? Is it to better help people learn and create to ease the time and cognitive load at work? Or is it the other way around — where AI is taking people's thoughts and input to create products? “Both of those directions are part of what I think about when I say ‘human-centric’ AI,” says Andrew Reece, Chief AI Scientist of BetterUp. BetterUp offers personalized coaching and training for both individuals and organizations.

“I get the most joy out of thinking about people problems but then leveraging this incredible machine intelligence to watch the patterns that we don’t always see ourselves to learn more about us,” says Reece. A unique application of this approach is how BetterUp used AI to better understand the hallmarks of a great conversation.

“When I started at BetterUp, there wasn’t a requirement to tie our research back into the product, but we are doing so now. For example, you could say that what BetterUp has traditionally done is selling good conversations. When we realized that we didn’t really know what makes for a good conversation, we had strangers meet up and have short conversations with each other about whatever topic they wanted. Once we had 1,000 hours or so of conversations, we built all the algorithms to start looking at the different things that you and I are doing right now in this conversation.” His point was that it’s not just the words that we’re saying that make up a conversation, but other non-verbal cues such as nodding and smiling, how voices align, the length of pauses, and so forth. AI can spot those nuances, catalog them, and feed them back to make a stronger product.

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