About Us
“Never before have organizations known so much about
people, yet understood them so little.”
Why Emtherical
By combining advances in generative AI with decades of expertise in behavioral
science, consumer insights, and data science, we created technology that reveals the
human emotions expressed through language. We are building the emotional
intelligence layer for modern organizations, helping leaders better understand the
people they serve so they can make better decisions, build stronger relationships, and
create experiences that are not only smarter, but more human.
Kirsten Zapiec is Chief Executive Officer at Emtherical, where she is helping organizations unlock the emotional intelligence hidden within human conversations. She brings more than 30 years of executive leadership experience at the intersection of market research, customer insight, brand strategy, and artificial intelligence.
Prior to founding Emtherical, Kirsten served as Executive Vice President at GfK, where she led strategic client relationships and growth initiatives, and previously as Senior Vice President and North American Brand & Communications Practice Lead at TNS Kantar. Throughout her career, she has advised many of the world’s leading brands on understanding consumers, strengthening customer relationships, and turning insight into business strategy.
A recognized thought leader in the evolving relationship between AI and human decision-making, Kirsten believes the next generation of AI should do more than process information; it should help organizations better understand people. Under her leadership, Emtherical is pioneering new approaches to measuring human emotion from language, enabling businesses to make more empathetic, informed decisions in healthcare, customer experience, marketing, and beyond.
Kirsten’s vision is to help organizations thrive in an AI-mediated world by restoring what technology has often overlooked: a deep understanding of people.
Alexander Doak is Chief Technology Officer at Emtherical, where he owns the full technical platform powering the company’s emotion intelligence capabilities, from the model fine-tuning pipeline through GPU-accelerated production scoring. With more than a decade of experience designing and delivering production ML and NLP systems, he specializes in transforming complex technical challenges into reliable, scalable solutions that organizations depend on for real decisions. His work spans end-to-end data pipelines, custom-trained classification models, and applied AI platforms across financial services, healthcare, education, and enterprise SaaS. At Emtherical, he architects the systems that detect ten distinct human emotions in unstructured text and translate them into actionable intelligence, combining deep technical execution with a clear understanding of the business outcomes that insight enables. Alexander is known for pairing rigorous engineering with an ability to make sophisticated technology clear, practical, and genuinely useful to the people who rely on it.
Jennifer Oyler is Chief Operating Officer at Emtherical. She is a distinguished academic and business executive with extensive experience in CX. Prior to co-founding Emtherical and serving as COO, she served as a Customer Experience and Digital Insights executive for Principal Financial Group, Decooda, and FLEETCOR. She also has extensive insights and data science experience with State Farm Insurance, Texas A&M, and Virginia Tech. She holds a PhD in Organizational Behavior from Virginia Tech and MBA from the University of Arkansas. She has completed her CPCU, Series 63, and SIE.
Jessica Lilie is Chief Growth & Insights Officer at Emtherical, where she is helping shape the company’s commercial strategy, market positioning, strategic partnerships, and growth roadmap as it pioneers a new generation of emotional intelligence and augmentative AI. She brings more than 30 years of executive leadership experience in market research, consumer insights, customer experience, brand strategy, analytics, and enterprise growth across healthcare, technology, media, and education.
Prior to joining Emtherical, Jessica served as Vice President of Research, Insights, and Analytics at Sutter Health, where she founded and led the organization’s first enterprise Strategic Insights function. Throughout her career, she has built and transformed research and insights organizations for leading companies including Apollo Education Group, BabyCenter, CNET Networks, IDG, and Ziff Davis Media. She has advised executive leadership teams on customer experience, brand strategy, innovation, and growth, helping organizations translate complex data into actionable business decisions.
Jessica is recognized for connecting behavioral science, advanced analytics, and emerging AI capabilities to solve complex business challenges. She believes the future of artificial intelligence lies not only in processing information but in augmenting human understanding — helping leaders better understand customers, employees, and the emotions that shape decisions. At Emtherical, she is leading efforts to develop strategic partnerships, identify subscription-based growth opportunities, and position the company as a leader in contextual emotional intelligence.
Jessica’s vision is to help organizations make smarter, more human-centered decisions by combining executive judgment, behavioral insight, and AI to create deeper
understanding, stronger relationships, and lasting business impact.
The Emtherical Story
We chose the name Emtherical because it reflects the three principles that guide everything we do.
Emotion is the language of human experience. It is what shapes our decisions, relationships, and behavior.
Empathy is what happens when we truly understand those emotions. It transforms data into understanding and insight into action.
Empirical reminds us that understanding people should never be left to intuition alone.
It should be measurable, explainable, and grounded in science.
However, our name reflects something even bigger: the meeting point between
humanity and artificial intelligence. While AI gives us unprecedented ability to understand people at scale, we believe its highest purpose is not to replace human
understanding — but to deepen it.
That’s the idea behind Emtherical. Technology with humanity at its heart.