A data-driven look at how artificial intelligence, immersive audio and shifting expectations around privacy and personalization are reshaping modern intimacy — built entirely from public research, not internal survey data.
A note on methodology. Every statistic in this report is drawn from publicly published research — Pew Research Center, Edison Research, Cisco, McKinsey, Salesforce, Ofcom, Cigna, Forbes Health, EMARKETER and others — with direct source links. We did not run our own survey for this edition and we do not present internal product data as market data. Where figures come from market-forecast reports (rather than peer-reviewed studies), we say so explicitly. The full source list is at the bottom of this page.
Executive Summary
Across dozens of independent studies published in the past eighteen months, five trends stand out clearly enough to organize a whole year of consumer behavior around. None of them are about any single app or company — they're structural shifts in how people adopt AI, consume audio, and think about their own privacy and time.
of the US population is projected to use generative AI in 2026, up from 35.8% in 2025 — adoption is still accelerating, not plateauing.
EMARKETER, 2026of the US population listens to digital audio monthly, and most weekly podcast listeners now do it at home — audio is a private, at-home habit again.
Edison Research, 2026dating app users report feeling burned out sometimes, often, or always — fatigue with swipe-based discovery is now the norm, not the exception.
Forbes Health, 202501 · Generative AI
The story of AI adoption in 2026 isn't a single breakout moment — it's a steady, compounding curve. Pew Research's February 2026 survey found that 49% of US adults now use an AI chatbot, with a striking 24% reporting daily use. That's not experimentation; that's a habit embedded in a quarter of American adults' daily routine.
EMARKETER's modeling tells a similar story at a larger scale: an estimated 133.0 million people in the US used generative AI in 2026, roughly 39.2% of the population, up 9.8% from 121.1 million (35.8%) the year before. Globally, adoption reached an estimated 16.3% of the world's population by late 2025, with usage concentrated heavily among people already comfortable navigating digital services.
What's more telling than the topline number is what the usage is for. Pew's breakdown shows the emotional and personal use cases are still a minority of total chatbot use but are growing fastest: 10% of US adults use a chatbot for emotional support or advice, and 4% specifically for companionship. That's a small slice of a very large and growing pie — enough to matter, not enough to be the main story yet.
Sources: Pew Research Center, "Americans and AI 2026" · EMARKETER, 2026
02 · Immersive audio
While video has grabbed headlines in the podcast industry, the underlying audio habit has never been stronger. Edison Research's The Podcast Consumer 2026 found that 58% of Americans aged 12+ consume a podcast every month — an estimated 167 million people — with weekly consumption at 45% of the population, roughly 130 million individuals.
Zooming out to all digital audio (not just podcasts), 79% of the US population — about 228 million listeners — reports listening monthly, and 73% listen weekly. Daily podcast consumers now spend an average of 5 hours and 11 minutes per day with audio sources of any kind.
Two-thirds of weekly podcast consumers now listen most often at home, up from 61% in 2024 and 64% in 2025 — a steady multi-year climb toward audio as a private, domestic habit rather than a commute filler.
This matters for how we think about intimate and personal audio specifically. The infrastructure and habit of "putting in headphones alone, at home, and listening to something made for you" is no longer a niche behavior — it is, statistically, the default way the majority of the population already engages with audio content. The category most primed to benefit from that shift is content designed for individual, private listening rather than shared or ambient consumption.
Sources: Edison Research, "The Podcast Consumer 2026" · National Public Media / Edison, "Infinite Dial 2025"
03 · Modern couples
A March 2026 Tawkify survey of 911 partnered American adults asked directly what gets in the way of intimacy. The answer wasn't a lack of attraction or connection — it was logistics. 65% of respondents named busy schedules as the most common barrier, well ahead of stress or anxiety (41%) and low libido (33%).
Despite that friction, overall satisfaction remains high: 82% of married or partnered adults report being satisfied with their relationship. The gap between "satisfied" and "intimate as often as we'd like" is largely a scheduling and initiation problem, not an emotional one. Separately, phone behavior is a measurable drag on connection: 46% of adults report experiencing "phubbing" (being ignored in favor of a partner's phone) in their relationship, and a 2025 meta-analysis linked partner phubbing to lower satisfaction and reduced intimacy.
Read together, the picture is a generation of couples who are fundamentally satisfied with their relationships but structurally short on the unscheduled time and low-friction rituals that intimacy used to run on.
Sources: Tawkify survey, 2026 · Connected Couples, "Relationship Statistics," 2026
04 · Personalization
Outside of romance specifically, the broader consumer research on personalization is unambiguous. McKinsey finds that 71% of consumers now expect personalized interactions from the products and services they use, and 76% report frustration when that expectation isn't met. Salesforce's research puts a similar number on brand expectations: 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs.
This isn't a marketing statistic in isolation — it reflects a broad recalibration of expectations that generative AI itself helped create. Once consumers experience software that adapts to specific, individual input (a name, a preference, a context) in one category, they carry that expectation into every other category, including the most personal ones. The bar for what counts as "generic" content keeps rising every year.
Sources: McKinsey, "The next frontier of personalized marketing" · Salesforce personalization research, via involve.me, 2026
05 · Privacy
As AI tools handle increasingly personal input, trust and privacy have moved from a compliance checkbox to a core product requirement. Cisco's 2026 Data and Privacy Benchmark Study found that AI is now the primary catalyst driving 90% of organizations to expand their privacy programs, with 93% planning further investment specifically to keep pace with AI-era complexity and rising customer expectations.
The direction of travel is consistent across every study we reviewed: as AI becomes more capable of using personal data to personalize an experience, users become more selective about which apps they'll trust with that data in the first place. For any product that asks for identity-adjacent input — a name, a preference, a voice — the ability to demonstrate anonymity or minimal data retention is increasingly a competitive differentiator, not just a legal requirement.
Source: Cisco Newsroom, "AI Fuels Surge in Data Privacy Investments," January 2026
06 · Dating app fatigue
Perhaps the clearest behavioral signal in this year's research is a documented pullback from swipe-based dating apps. A Forbes Health survey (July 2025) found that nearly 4 in 5 dating app users report feeling emotionally, mentally, or physically burned out sometimes, often, or always. That echoes a broader 2024 finding that 78% of users felt similarly exhausted.
Cigna's 2025 survey found that 57% of Americans report feeling lonely, with a notable gap between single adults (39%) and married adults (22%). Researchers have also found that dating-app users report modestly worse psychological well-being on average than non-users, across measures including loneliness, anxiety and distress — correlation the studies are careful not to overstate as causation, but a signal worth watching.
The behavioral response is already visible: in-person singles events on Eventbrite roughly doubled between 2022 and 2025, with an 85% jump in attendance year-over-year at their 2024 peak. People aren't necessarily giving up on connection — many are actively looking for lower-pressure, less performative ways to find it.
Sources: ScienceBlog, dating app burnout research, 2025 · Axios, "Dating app fatigue," May 2026
07 · Looking ahead
Extrapolating cautiously from this year's data (and being explicit about what's a forecast versus a fact), three questions look most likely to define next year's edition of this report:
We'll revisit each of these directly in the State of AI Romance 2027 edition, with a "What changed since last year" section comparing this year's baseline numbers to the following year's.
Key Takeaways
AI adoption is still accelerating, not plateauing — up from 35.8% to 39.2% of the US population year over year (EMARKETER).
Audio listening is at an all-time high and increasingly happens at home, alone, privately (Edison Research).
Time, not desire, is the top barrier to intimacy for partnered adults — 65% cite busy schedules (Tawkify).
Personalization is now a baseline expectation, not a differentiator — 71% expect it, 76% get frustrated without it (McKinsey).
Privacy has become a trust prerequisite for AI products, with 95% of organizations calling it essential (Cisco).
Dating app fatigue is measurable and widespread, pushing people toward lower-pressure ways to connect (Forbes Health, Axios).
Conclusion
None of these six trends exist in isolation, and none of them are about any single product. But laid side by side, they describe a fairly specific set of conditions: more people comfortable with AI-generated content than ever before; audio listening at record highs and increasingly a private, at-home habit rather than a commute filler; couples who are satisfied with their relationships but structurally short on time and low-friction rituals; a near-universal consumer expectation that digital experiences adapt to the individual rather than staying generic; privacy treated as a prerequisite for trust rather than an afterthought; and a documented, broad-based fatigue with high-pressure, performative ways of finding connection.
That combination — AI-generated, personal, audio-first, privacy-respecting, low-pressure — is the design space Caresse operates in. We didn't set out to build against a market forecast; the product predates most of the 2026 research cited above. But it's a useful sanity check to see the shape of a product mapped so directly onto independently observed consumer behavior, rather than the other way around. If you're curious what that looks like in practice, see how Caresse works or compare it against other apps in the space.
Appendix
Every source cited in this report, in order of appearance. We link directly to the original publisher wherever possible.
Frequently asked questions
EMARKETER estimates 133.0 million people used generative AI in the US in 2026, about 39.2% of the population, up from 121.1 million (35.8%) in 2025. Pew Research found 49% of US adults report using an AI chatbot, with 24% using one daily as of its February 2026 survey.
Yes. Edison Research's The Podcast Consumer 2026 found 58% of Americans 12+ consume a podcast monthly (about 167 million people), and 79% of the US population listens to digital audio monthly. Two-thirds of weekly podcast consumers now listen most often at home, up from 61% in 2024.
Yes. McKinsey reports 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions and 76% get frustrated when they don't happen. Salesforce separately found 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.
Cisco's 2026 Data and Privacy Benchmark Study found AI is the primary catalyst driving 90% of organizations to expand their privacy programs, and 95% of organizations now say privacy is essential to building customer trust in AI-powered services.
Signs point that way. A Forbes Health survey found nearly 4 in 5 dating app users report feeling burned out sometimes, often, or always. Separately, 65% of dating apps downloaded in 2024 were deleted within a month, and in-person singles events on Eventbrite roughly doubled between 2022 and 2025.
Time, not desire. A 2026 Tawkify survey of partnered American adults found busy schedules are the most commonly cited barrier to intimacy, reported by 65% of respondents, ahead of stress or anxiety (41%) and low libido (33%).
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