Drill into your head that a customer has a lot of brands to pick from. He thinks from a heart that throbs for a particular one. That brand might have put its 110 per cent in getting connected with its customers emotionally. So, it's up to you to come with a blockbuster upselling and cross-selling idea. What I mean to say is that the knowledge economy is offbeat.

In June 2015, Ned Sahin paid a visit to a 23-year-old man named Danny who is on the autism spectrum. Danny can't speak, can't care for himself, and can't recognize or respond to human emotions. For most of his life, he's lived in a residential care facility in upstate New York. Sahin is a neuroscientist and the founder of Brain Power, a tech company dedicated to creating wearable AI systems to help people with brain-related challenges like autism. That morning, Sahin brought Danny a pair of Google Glasses equipped with a program designed to help children with autism.

"Thank you, Charlotte," the personal assistant AI known as Adam responded. "I'll be sure to pass that along to the developers. "Would you be interested in some hot chocolate? There's a new café two blocks away that's said to have some of the best in the city." The young executive laughed lightly. "Adam, it's as if you could read my mind!" Welcome to the age of artificial emotional intelligence, an era in which our technologies are increasingly able to read, interpret, predict, and even influence our emotions. From the early stage, we find ourselves at today, these programs, robots and other devices will grow to become our friends, confidants, and possibly much more–like the film Her brought to life. In the process, they will transform nearly every aspect of our relationship with technology, beginning with the world of commerce, the driver for all of this change. Why would we do this? Because emotions are at the heart of the human experience. Before there was technology, before there ...