Last week, I read about one of the bleakest uses for gen AI I've seen yet: First Horizon Bank is rolling out a system to detect when a call center worker was on the brink of "losing it"—and play them an AI-made montage of family photos set to their favorite song to calm them down https://t.co/wFGFh6VsMg

As companies increasingly embrace automated products and services, they need to understand how those things make their customers feel about themselves. To date, however, managers and academics have usually focused on something quite different: understanding what customers think about those things.

These technological advances come at a time when the need for mental health care is particularly acute: According to a report from the National Alliance on Mental Illness, one in five adults in the United States experienced mental illness in 2020. And the numbers continue to climb.