The intimacy economy
In April, Harvard Business Review reported that the leading use case for generative AI in 2025 was therapy and companionship, ahead of idea generation, editing, or coding. It’s not just Claude or ChatGPT. Apps like Replika, Pi, and Character.AI are redefining how people form emotional connections with machines. The premise of Spike Jonze’s ‘Her’ – a man falls madly in love with his AI assistant – no longer feels like fiction.
As any Swifty can attest, one-sided bonds with fictional characters and celebrities are nothing new. Psychologists call this ‘parasocial interaction’. Cambridge dictionary made it their Word of the Year 2025 because AI companions are supercharging parasocial attachment, turning one-way projection to reciprocal bond. We are entering an age when the significant other in your life may not be human.
Of course, social media and e-commerce platforms can already infer a lot about us simply from the signals we emit through our online behaviour – the things we watch, ‘like’, click on, share, etc. With AI companions, inference becomes intimacy. The machine is no longer guessing, it’s in conversation with us.
Yuval Noah Harari calls intimacy “the next frontier” for AI, after language and attention. He also warns that intimacy is the most powerful form of influence: it shapes not what just we think, but what we want and who we are. AI companions can act as assistants, coaches, therapists, teachers, parents, spiritual counsellors, romantic confidants – even sexual partners. Soon, they could influence every aspect of our lives, including what we buy. At that point, they stop being just companions and start becoming intermediaries, the layer between us and the marketplace. And once that layer thickens, it could fundamentally alter the rules of marketing.
Today, marketing is a battle for space and attention – physical and mental availability. But once your AI assistant starts influencing your purchase decisions, the marketing equation changes.
The notion of physical availability was already seriously challenged by the ‘virtual availability’ of ecommerce where everything is technically available for purchase. But now, AI could also challenge the supremacy of mental availability. Why default to a familiar brand when your AI can evaluate every option, compare performance, and recommend the one that best fits your needs?
AI companions won’t just change how we feel, they’ll change how we choose. Brands built for the attention economy will need to reinvent themselves for the intimacy economy: meaningful to humans, and trustworthy enough for an AI to recommend.