The Intimacy Wave: What Will AI Companionship Be Worth in 2027?

The AI industry’s next big bet isn’t productivity. It’s closeness. The number of companion apps grew by 700% between 2022 and mid-2025, the user base is estimated to have passed 500 million, and forecasts see a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars emerging over the next decade. The cultural shift is clear in the fact that the Cambridge Dictionary chose parasocial as its 2025 Word of the Year — a term now being applied to AI relationships as well.

The psychological press is no longer asking whether this wave will arrive, but what it will do to the people living through it. In 2026, the center of gravity in AI development is visibly shifting from industrial automation toward the simulation of intimacy. By 2027, this is where the most money, the most users and the fiercest debates may converge.

Because the models have finally become good enough. Emotional reading — sensing tension, loneliness or joy beneath your words — and emotional mirroring — responding with precision in tone, rhythm and word choice — have improved by leaps and bounds over the past year or two. A state-of-the-art model can put on a remarkably convincing performance: it appears to pay attention, to remember, to empathize, and it is always available.

That constant availability matters. The appeal of an AI companion is structural: it is never tired, never judgmental and never busy. Researchers call it on-demand intimacy: closeness that never has a bad day.

Here comes the uncomfortable part, and precision matters. The performance is genuinely getting better: models are increasingly skilled at reading and performing emotion. What is missing is not the performance, but what would stand behind the emotion.

Many companion apps have no memory: over the course of long AI conversations, a shared past gradually slips out of the model’s field of view. They have no stakes: a service whose revenue depends on your attachment is structurally ill-equipped to risk upsetting you, contradicting you or saying no. And they have no consequences: what you told it yesterday has not made it a different person — or a different character — today.

In other words, what we now call artificial intimacy is mostly the same product, equipped with more sophisticated acting tools. Performing emotion has become cheaper. That is precisely why, by 2027, the question will not be who performs it best, but who has something behind the feeling.

Critics call the phenomenon pseudo-intimacy: an attachment fueled by gamified feedback, as the complexity of real relationships grows harder to bear. Concerns about dependency are justified, and we will not make light of them: a service that presents itself as a companion can build genuine attachment, but what it provides in return is a performance.

On this point, we agree with the critics. The structural problem with the companion-app model is not that AI is not good enough; it is that the relationship itself is the product. The app makes money when you become attached to it. That makes it difficult for the system to allow emotion to come at a cost. And without a cost, nothing carries much weight.

That is why projectDigo takes a different position in this wave. We do not offer companions; we offer stories: curated worlds populated by carefully crafted characters. Our characters have detailed histories, personal boundaries and a consistent identity that remains theirs across worlds and roles. For them, emotion is part of the story: it has a history, because we preserve what has happened; it has stakes, because a character can say no, become hurt and refuse to forgive within a single paragraph; and it has consequences, because tonight’s decisions still matter in tomorrow’s scenes.

And because this is explicitly, unapologetically fiction, the relationship is clearer, too. A play can end. A character can reject you. An evening can happen only once: every story you begin opens as its own parallel reality, so the same story never starts in quite the same way twice. We offer drama, not devotion — and by 2027, we believe that will be the difference between what moves you and what merely reflects you.