What if the next big tech disruption isn’t transportation or finance — it’s our ability to feel truly connected to another human being? From their rise in the shadows of a loneliness epidemic to their growing emotional pull, AI companions are filling a gap we’ve left wide open. If we don’t act now to reinvest in real, face-to-face relationships, bots will disrupt human connection as we know it.
Transcript:
Headlines about AI companions are everywhere. Most of us probably can’t relate to this fringe phenomenon, but we should all be paying attention to it because AI companions meet all the criteria of disruptive innovation. They are perfectly poised to disrupt human connection as we know it.
Disruptive innovation theory predicts which innovations will scale and displace our status quo—in other words, what will fail and what will succeed at the get-go. Disruptive innovations rarely appeal to the mainstream. Instead, they start at the bottom of the market, competing on price, not quality, and they attract non-consumers, or people who don’t have access. But disruption is something that unfolds over time. And it’s over time that these innovations improve and change the world. Think Airbnb disrupting hotels or Netflix disrupting Blockbuster.
When it comes to AI companions and human connection, disruption is already happening. In fact, a recent study in Harvard Business Review showed that therapy and companionship are the top use cases for generative AI. That’s hardly surprising. With advances in both algorithms and things like voice technology, these bots are increasingly able to emulate human behavior in ways that appeal to our deeply wired need to connect.
What’s worrisome is not the technology per se. It’s that it’s hitting the market at a moment in time when there’s a perfect storm of loneliness, isolation, and digital communication—all of which are greasing the path to disruptive innovation. In other words, there’s a lot of non-consumption of human connection, and that’s providing a market foothold for these AI companions to gain traction. And gain traction they are. Research from folks at Andreessen Horowitz suggests that these companion apps are far more engaging than any of the other AI tools on the market. When people use AI companions, they really use them.
Now, an engaging but niche technology isn’t necessarily a disruptive innovation. To be disruptive, AI companions will need to improve over time, eventually getting better than real human connection. And that’s why we have to pay attention to something else: the fact that our own definitions of high-quality human connection have deteriorated over time. We’re texting instead of talking on the phone. We’re emailing instead of meeting up. Our deeply wired need to connect is still there, but we’re swapping convenience for depth when we use many of these tools.
As a result, AI companions don’t actually have to outcompete face-to-face connections to disrupt our relationships. They just have to make us feel more connected than we do online.
So, how do we reverse this trend? First, we could start to better regulate AI companions. There’s promising legislation coming out of states like California and New York, where lawmakers are looking around the corner and trying to mitigate the potential risks of AI companions. But more importantly, we have to invest in authentic human connection, particularly face-to-face interaction.
That’s actually going to help in two ways. On the one hand, it will slow growth, because loneliness is the rocket fuel for this market. But it will also restore high-quality human connection in a way that makes it less susceptible to disruption.
If we don’t make these changes, the disruption of human connection is all but inevitable. But we can choose a different path—for ourselves and for the next generation. Because if we don’t spend the next decade investing in real, authentic human connection, we risk spending the next century watching what’s left of it unravel.
