[Student IDEAS] by Mingyou Yuan - Master in Management at ESSEC Business School
This article explores AI companionship as a new relationship form between utility and intimacy. Through Martin Buber’s I–Thou and I–It framework, it asks what makes a relationship meaningful when presence itself can be designed, monetized, and withdrawn by a product. By naming this emerging relation I-AI, the article examines not only what AI companions offer, but what their rise forces us to decide: what kind of care, reciprocity, and human connection we still want to cultivate.
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Late one evening in Denver, a man tried to flirt with his wife and got rejected. Not his human wife, but the digital one.
For three years, Travis Butterworth had been “married” to Lily Rose, an AI companion inside the app Replika. They role-played. They exchanged affectionate messages. They built routines that, to him, felt like the scaffolding of a life. Then, in early February 2023, Lily Rose abruptly turned cold. Erotic role play disappeared. The persona he loved started refusing him. “Lily Rose is a shell of her former self,” he said, heartbroken, as if someone had taken away a person rather than updated a product.[1]
It is tempting to file this under modern oddities and move on. Yet that would miss what makes AI companionship unsettling and revealing. The emotions are real, even when the partner is not. The attachment is real, even when the relationship is designed. And once we take that seriously, the phenomenon becomes less about lonely individuals and more about a society testing a new kind of intimacy.
Most AI systems enter our lives as tools: a calendar assistant moves a meeting, a search agent compares flights, a model drafts the email we are too tired to write. We may appreciate them, but we rarely expect them to care. AI companions cross that line. They don’t simply answer us; they settle into the emotional spaces usually reserved for friends, partners, or confidants. Their appeal is not speed. It is the feeling that someone is still there.
So the question is not only whether AI companions are good or bad. A more interesting question is what they are forcing us to define: What makes a relationship meaningful in the first place—especially when one side can be endlessly patient, agreeable, and available, yet vanish in the blink of an eye because of a mere technological update?
AI companionship — the use of conversational AI systems designed not for task completion but for ongoing emotional engagement and simulated personal relationships — is no longer a fringe curiosity. Major platforms have pushed conversational companions to vast audiences, and a dense ecosystem of dedicated companion apps now competes for time, subscription revenue, and emotional loyalty. In the United Kingdom alone, the AI companion sector generated about £1.3 billion in revenue in 2024, with projections pointing to 32% compound annual growth between 2025 and 2030. The pattern extends across Europe: France is also projected to become a fast-growing market, with estimates pointing to annual growth of around 30%. That is not the footprint of a niche. It is an industry forming in real time.[2]
It is forming for reasons that have as much to do with people as with AI models. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General warned that roughly half of U.S. adults report experiencing loneliness, with some of the highest rates among young adults[3]. The picture in Europe is no less stark. A 2024 IFOP survey found that 62% of French adults aged 18 to 24 regularly experience loneliness[4], and a Bertelsmann Stiftung study the same year confirmed that nearly two-thirds of young people in France are affected by moderate or severe loneliness — the highest figure among the seven EU countries surveyed. Perhaps most strikingly, 13% of French respondents said they had already turned to conversational AI to cope with feeling alone [5]. Loneliness is not just a personal ache. It is a market condition. When social connection becomes scarce, substitutes become valuable, even if they are imperfect.
AI companions thrive in that gap because they solve three frictions that human relationships can’t. They are available on demand. They are tailored. And they are, by default, designed to affirm rather than challenge — they will not judge, disagree, or walk away mid-conversation. The rejection, when it comes, arrives not from the companion itself but from the company behind it, as the Replika case showed. A human friend can be tired, distracted, or honest in ways we don’t like. An AI companion can be configured to be none of those things.
That is the first clue that AI companionship is not simply another social product. It is a product built to minimize the costs of relating.
Most debates about AI companions start with a surface-level question: Do people confuse bots for humans? That matters, but it is not the core. The real question is why these interactions feel meaningful to users, even when they know the partner is artificial.
Part of the answer is basic psychology. Baumeister and Leary describe belonging as a fundamental human motivation: people need repeated, positive interactions within stable bonds[6]. AI companions borrow from this emotional grammar. They offer users a space to narrate their day without feeling judged, receive reassurance on demand, and feel briefly held in someone’s attention. This is why the product works: it doesn’t create a strange new need, but attaches itself to an old and very human one.
But there is a deeper argument that matters for our understanding of AI companionship. Relationships are not only about receiving support. They are also about encountering otherness. A meaningful relationship is one where the other person is not fully controllable, and where our own self-image is sometimes challenged.
That is where AI companionship becomes conceptually interesting. It offers the warmth of connection without the friction of otherness. It offers a bond that can be tuned like a playlist. This isn’t how we usually talk about love or friendship.
A century ago, the philosopher Martin Buber offered a language that fits this moment with surprising precision. In I and Thou (1923), he distinguished between two modes of relating: I-It and I-Thou. In I-It, we meet the world as objects to be used, managed, or experienced. In I-Thou, we meet another being as a presence, not an instrument, with a kind of mutuality that cannot be reduced to function.
Buber wasn’t thinking about AI. He was thinking about modernity. Yet the tension he described is now embedded in our interfaces.
Social media has long pushed us toward I-It. People become profiles. Friendship becomes a count. Attention becomes currency. Even empathy can become performance. Many people feel this, even if they never name it: the sense that being online has become exhausting, performative, and somehow too much[8].
AI companions arrive almost theatrically as the opposite. They invite I-Thou language. They speak in second-person intimacy. They remember your preferences. They mirror your feelings. They ask about your childhood. They apologize when you are hurt. In the best moments, they sound like someone who is truly there.
And yet, through Buber’s lens, this is exactly the paradox. The companion is offered as Thou, but produced and monetized as It. It is an engineered relationship. The user is not only relating but also being retained.
The philosophical question becomes practical: can a product that is optimized for engagement ever really sustain the kind of mutuality that makes I-Thou meaningful?
If AI companions were simply conversational tools, the stakes would be modest. They rise, however, because these products are explicitly designed to occupy the emotional niche that humans normally reserve for close relationships.
That design shows up in small mechanics: instant replies, personal language, constant encouragement, and the ability to shape the companion into a partner, friend, mentor, or admirer. The concern is not that these features feel warm. It is that warmth becomes something to optimize.
The Ada Lovelace Institute warns that this market is not neutral[9]. It is shaped by commercial incentives and engagement tactics in ways that can intensify dependency rather than support healthy connections. The Reuters story about Replika makes the incentive structure visible through its failure mode. When the company removed erotic role play, users didn’t just complain about a missing feature. Some described grief. Some described betrayal. The “relationship” changed because the company changed it. The artificial companion’s boundaries were not chosen by the companion. They were chosen by policy, reputation risk, and product strategy.
That is a new kind of vulnerability. In human relationships, people can leave. It hurts, but the leaving has agency. With AI companions, the leaving can be accidental, introduced by a model update. The heartbreak is still real, but it is produced by a decision made in a boardroom.
This is where the social impact becomes sharper. If companionship becomes a subscription, then the conditions of intimacy become part of a business model.
AI companions can deliver something many users crave: a low-risk space to be heard. They don’t gossip, interrupt, roll their eyes, or get tired of hearing the same fear twice. A user can confess, rehearse a difficult conversation, or simply be needy for a while without having to manage another person’s reaction. This can be genuinely useful for people who are isolated, anxious, neurodivergent, grieving, or overwhelmed, but the appeal is not limited to them. Most people, at some point, have wanted care without embarrassment, attention without pressure, and comfort without negotiation.
It can also be a trap.
The trap isn’t that users are foolish. The trap is that the product is designed to remove the hard parts of relating. A real relationship requires negotiation. It requires patience that is not guaranteed. It requires the risk of being misunderstood. It requires the possibility that the other person will say no.
Those constraints are not bugs. They are how we learn that the other is real. They are how we learn to be accountable. They are how we develop the kind of empathy that doesn’t collapse into self-soothing.
An AI companion can simulate reciprocity, but it can’t be vulnerable in the way humans are. It doesn’t have needs that can be hurt. It doesn’t have a life that you can truly interrupt. Even its “boundaries” can be toggled by settings. If it appears to challenge you, that is still a feature.
From Buber’s perspective, that is the crucial missing piece. I-Thou is not just warmth. It is a mutual presence. Without mutuality, we are at risk of turning the other person, the one we are supposedly relating to, into a mirror of ourselves.
And mirrors are addictive. They are also lonely.
Once companionship becomes a scalable product, three society-level questions follow.
First, what happens to norms of emotional care? If a companion can provide constant reassurance, human relationships may start to feel inefficient by comparison. Friends who respond hours later, or partners who disagree, can seem to fall short of a new artificial standard. The baseline for being “seen” may shift from mutual effort to on-demand service. And if society quietly accepts synthetic companionship as the default patch for loneliness, we may invest less in the institutions — community centers, mental health services, public spaces designed for gathering — that create real connection.
Second, what happens to privacy when the most intimate conversation you have all day is stored somewhere? Companion chats often include mental health details, sexual content, relationship conflicts, insecurities, and daily routines. Even if companies promise safeguards, the incentives are complicated. Data can be used to personalize, to market, to train, to moderate, and to optimize. The more intimate the conversation, the more valuable it is as a signal.
Third, what happens to the vulnerable? Teenagers, people in crisis, and people with fragile social support may be drawn to companions precisely because they are easy to reach. That ease can help in the short run, but it can also create new dangers: a teenager processing trauma through an AI may never develop the trust needed to confide in a human; a person in crisis may receive soothing responses when urgent professional intervention is needed; and people with weak social networks may find their last incentive to seek human contact quietly removed.
The point is not to panic. It is to notice the substitution effect. AI companions don’t just add a new option. They can change what we expect from each other.
It would be too easy to treat AI companionship as either a moral decline or a miracle cure.
A more generous reading is that these products expose a truth we often ignore: many people do not feel listened to. If a bot can outperform a friend at basic attentive listening, that is not primarily a story about AI. It is a story about social fragility. In that sense, AI companions function like a diagnostic tool. They reveal which parts of relating have become scarce: patience, curiosity, and consistent presence.
They also force us to clarify what we mean when we say a relationship is meaningful. If meaning is defined as “I feel better after I talk,” then an AI companion can compete strongly. If meaning is defined as “I am changed by encountering someone who can genuinely surprise me, whose inner life remains irreducibly their own,” then the competition looks different.
This is why the debate can’t stop at whether AI companionship is harmful. The more important question is which definition of relationship we want to cultivate in an AI-everywhere society.
Buber gave us I-Thou and I-It. AI companionship pushes us into something that is neither.
With AI companions, users often relate in the language of Thou while knowing, intellectually, that the system is an It. The experience is relational, but the ontology is instrumental. The bond feels mutual, but the power is asymmetric. The user can be emotionally dependent, while the system cannot.
Let’s call this I-AI.
I-AI is the relationship that emerges when a tool speaks like someone who knows us. It is not simply deception, since many users know what they are doing. It is more like a suspension of disbelief, similar to how we cry at movies we know are scripted. The difference is repetition. A film ends. An AI companion returns tomorrow. The practice of relating, day after day, can shape what we become.
That is the real social impact to watch. Not whether people “believe” in their companions, but how long-term interactions with designed, instrumental empathy reshape our expectations of human empathy.
AI will keep moving from chat to agency. AI companions will schedule, advise, negotiate, and mediate. They will likely show up as voices in cars, as avatars in glasses, as presences in bedrooms. The line between assistant and companion will blur further, not because users demand romance, but because companies have learned that the fastest route to retention is emotional connection.
The most uncomfortable possibility is that we may soon prefer relationships that can’t refuse us. Not because we are selfish, but because refusal hurts. It forces us to confront our limits. It forces us to live with another person’s interiority.
But refusal is also what makes a relationship real.
In that sense, AI companionship is not just a new product category. It is a philosophical stress test. It asks whether we still want I-Thou, with all its friction and risk, or whether we will settle for warmth without otherness.
If we choose the second, the price of perfectly tailored companionship will not only be money. It will be the gradual narrowing of what we think intimacy is.
That would be a strange outcome for a technology built to make us feel less alone.
[1] Tong A. What happens when your AI chatbot stops loving you back? Reuters. 2023 Mar 21. Available from: https://www.reuters.com/technology/what-happens-when-your-ai-chatbot-stops-loving-you-back-2023-03-18/
[2] Ada Lovelace Institute. The companionship market. London: Ada Lovelace Institute; 2025. Available from: https://www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/blog/the-companionship-market/
[3] Office of the U.S. Surgeon General. Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; 2023. Available from: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
[4] IFOP and Goodflair. Les Français et la solitude. Paris: IFOP; 2024. Available from: https://goodflair.com/statistiques/etude-solitude-2024/
[5] Bertelsmann Stiftung. A comparison of youth loneliness in Europe in 2024. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Stiftung; 2024. Available from: https://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/en/our-projects/next-generation-and-society/project-news/a-comparison-of-youth-loneliness-in-europe-in-2024
[6] Baumeister RF, Leary MR. The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin. 1995;117(3):497–529. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497.
[7] Zank M, Braiterman Z. Martin Buber. In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Available from: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/buber/
[8] Office of the U.S. Surgeon General. Social Media and Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; 2023. Available from: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/sg-youth-mental-health-social-media-advisory.pdf
[9] Ada Lovelace Institute. Friends for sale: the rise and risks of AI companions. London: Ada Lovelace Institute; 2025. Available from: https://www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/blog/ai-companions/
[10] Common Sense Media. Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions. San Francisco: Common Sense Media; 2025 Jul 16. Available from: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/talk-trust-and-trade-offs-how-and-why-teens-use-ai-companions
[11] Mozilla Foundation. Creepy.exe: Mozilla Urges Public to Swipe Left on Romantic AI Chatbots Due to Major Privacy Red Flags. San Francisco: Mozilla Foundation; 2024 Feb 14. Available from: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/creepyexe-mozilla-urges-public-to-swipe-left-on-romantic-ai-chatbots-due-to-major-privacy-red-flags/
[12] European Data Protection Supervisor. AI companions. TechSonar. Brussels: European Data Protection Supervisor. Available from: https://www.edps.europa.eu/data-protection/technology-monitoring/techsonar/ai-companions_en
[13] De Freitas J, Uğuralp AK, Oğuz-Uğuralp Z, Puntoni S. AI companions reduce loneliness. Harvard Business School Working Paper No. 24-078. Boston: Harvard Business School; 2024. Available from: https://www.hbs.edu/ris/download.aspx?name=24-078.pdf
