That's according to Whitney Wolfe-Herd, Founder and CEO of online dating platform provider Bumble, which has over four million paying users. What does she mean? Well, it's 2025, so no-one is going to be shaken to their core by the spoiler that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a lot to do with it as much as romantic good luck.
There's nothing new about the idea of computer dating, of course. It was the mid-1960s when a British businesswoman, Joan Bell, first set up the St. James Computer Dating Service, using a time-shared computer to pair romance-seeking couples based on questionnaire responses. Flash forward to today and we live in a world where some 80% of 2,000 GenZ respondents claim they would be open to marrying a chatbot, according to a study conducted by Joi AI, which pitches itself as a "sex-positive space for users to indulge in romance, practice dating, and explore their fantasies".
But AI offers new opportunities for today's lonely hearts to tap into a higher quality prospective matches, argues Wolfe-Herd:
We've been testing our modernized matching algorithm and we're already seeing early positive results with increases in relevancy and match rates...Machine Learning (ML) has always been the foundation of how we match you. But you cannot believe how fast AI is moving when it comes to helping be a strong personal predictor of success on matches. This is the top focus of ours. How do we accelerate our AI powered machine learning and our super personalized algorithm to make sure that people get on Bumble and they feel like it's the smartest matchmaker in the world. You get on low efforts. You've been guided to a great profile and now, boom, just like magic, that algorithm has delivered you high quality matches, high quality chat, and hopefully, love.
It all starts with candidates having a great profile, she argues, and that's something that a lot of people don't have:
Most people have no idea how to build a dating profile. I have met some of the most amazing singles and when I look at their profile, I am shocked that they could not express how great they were in a simple profile. So leveraging AI to coach them through that experience is going to have a huge uplift on how we can help people show up better and really move that member base into a higher quality profile base, which then leads to better matches, better chats, the whole flywheel kicks in.
Coaching will be powered by both humans and AI. We want you to know how to talk to each other. We want you to know how to write your bio. We want you to know how to show up. How do you know what you value? How do you know who you want to connect with? So AI is a huge accelerant and a huge accelerator to the dating experience to make you really understand how to get the most out of this experience.
Over at Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge, CEO Spencer Rascoff has similar ambitions for AI tech. ML has powered the firms core matching algorithms for years, AI is now being brought into the product experience itself:
By leveraging AI, staying relentlessly user-first and moving with speed, we have a real opportunity to reignite and redefine the future of human connection. The impact of deep learning is already reshaping our matching algorithms across the entire company, powering more personalized, more relevant and more effective experiences for our users, and this is just the beginning.
A pilot is currently underway in New Zealand to test an "AI-enabled discovery experience", which pulls in attributes such as insights gleaned from phone camera rolls and responses to dynamic questions about what users are seeking in order to generate a curated, personalized daily match. What this is delivering is a "daily drop" in the form of "a single bespoke AI-driven match", explains Rascoff:
The quality of the match is driven by AI because by the user inputting more information about themselves, answering questions, and also sharing access to their camera roll, which is a window to your soul, the quality of the matches are better through that than our traditional also AI-driven algorithm.
More sophisticated deployment of AI will also help to change perceptions of Tinder, he suggests:
For a decade, Tinder has been an infinite card stack where you swipe left or swipe right to assess the essentially attractiveness of the photo that you're looking at. That worked well 10 years ago when there was more of a hook-up culture, when smartphones were new and when there was novelty around that type of feature set. But as Millennials aged up and as GenZ entered into our sweet spot, that product has less resonance.
No such qualms over at Grindr, the world's largest and most popular gay mobile app in the world, with, as of the end of 2024, some 14.7 million monthly active users. Here AI is being tapped into to meet the more immediate, shall we say, needs of its users, powering a new service called Right Now, which launched in March in 17 cities, including New York, Miami, London, Paris, and São Paulo. Right Now does what it says on the tin. Or as CEO George Arison puts it:
Right Now is the first major launch of ours that is very intent focused, which is for people who want an immediate connection with somebody, whether it's today or tomorrow or in the very near term. Right Now is a way to get that more easily than previously was possible...We know that 20% to 25% of our users are using Right Now on a weekly basis, at least once a week. Shares of location are about twice what they are in normal conversations, which indicates the likelihood of meeting between people is much higher.
But alongside those "immediate connections", Grindr is also looking to AI to support its pursuit of those in search of a long-term relationship, he adds:
We know that among gay men 35 and under, half of them want to be in a long-term monogamous relationship. That's a really big change from how gay men thought about things even 10 years ago and certainly 20 years ago when I was younger, and we need to serve them really well in that regard. Grindr is by far the primary place where gay relationships today in America are formed. About between three to four gay relationships in the US are formed on Grindr, so it's a huge percentage. But I think we can do a better job at that than we do.
Overall Grindr is making a significant push into using AI, with a 2025 Product Roadmap that includes six new intent-based, AI-powered personalization and travel products, including A-list, which uses AI to highlight past connections, making it easy to rekindle and meet up, and Discover, which has a global reach and allows users to source and browse the "hottest and most compatible profiles from across the world and actually shoot your shot" There's also the Explore Heatmap which will allow people to cruise "the world's liveliest gayborhoods and the users that call them home".
Of these, A-list uses gen AI to go through the 130 billion messages that Grindr users send over the course of a year and curate best-fit priority connections with summaries of conversations that have already taken place. Arison says:
I've not yet seen another consumer product launch something like A-list, where they're identifying a very clear user need and then using the most innovative gen AI that's out there to create a previously unimaginable solution. This was not possible before. I, frankly, use numerous products where I wish there was an A-list. Like, for example, I'd love an A-list in my personal Gmail. It will be really fantastic because contacts information in Gmail is nowhere near as helpful as it could be and should be. And so I think there's a ton of opportunity with that..
As for Discover:
I think of Discover as a new page inside Grindr, where you can see people based on your interest and their interest, where there's congruence from all over the world. It breaks down the geographic barriers that usually exist inside dating products, including on Grindr, where our main grid is very local based, and that's very beneficial. But we also do know that people want to find people everywhere. And this way kind of gives them a view into people all over the world that might be appealing to them.
He concludes:
We believe that these AI products are turning Grindr into an AI-native product overall. So in the same way that we basically invented location-based products in 2009, we are now doing the same thing with AI and are very much at the forefront of what is possible.
And who said romance was dead?
But seriously these sort of apps and platforms live or die on their ability to provide highly-sophisticated personalization functionality, the sort of targeted. outreach that marketers and customer service people across all forms of enterprise organizations pursue as a Holy Grail on a daily basis. As a use case for the transformative potential of AI, those looking for love - or something more ephemeral - provide an interesting study group with potentially transferable learnings to be gleaned over time.
