Business & Technology

FCIF: Grindr wants AI to completely change how you find your next date

Could AI actually make the online dating and hookup experience better? That’s what Grindr, the LGBTQ+-focused dating and social networking app, has been betting on in recent years as it debuts new features and prepares to roll out a paid premium tier offering it’s calling Edge. The company is so keen on the technology that it sees an opportunity for an even more exclusive paid option that could cost upwards of $6,000 per year. “We leaned into AI in a pretty dramatic way,” said the company’s CEO, George Arison, at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York. “We want the entire app to be AI native in terms of how people use it.” What does that mean for the millions of Grindr users who, on average, spend an hour on the app each day sending about 50 messages? Well, AI could provide more insight into potential matches, recommendations that are based on interests and not merely geography, and a better inbox experience.  While many of the new AI-enabled features will be available solely to subscribers of Grindr’s Edge premium-tier offering, which is expected to go live later this year or early next year, Arison said the goal is to eventually democratize the features to all users. “Ultimately, I want the free product to be extremely robust, and I want people coming back to the app as much as possible,” he said. Although Grindr hasn’t made any job cuts because of AI, Arison noted, the West Hollywood-based company has slowed down hiring, and its workforce has declined about 20% over the past three years. But a leaner workforce is able to beef up Grindr’s features thanks to its use of AI tools, which now write more than 80% of the app’s code, he added. That increase in productivity has upended a once-familiar product for Arison, a longtime tech executive who has been building software for the past two decades. “Always the problem was: I don’t have enough engineers to build the stuff I want to build,” he said. “Now I don’t have enough product managers to manage the products that I want to build while engineers have excess capacity to build stuff.” A $6,000 EXPERIENCE When rumors first started circulating about the price of Edge several months ago, some people were both dubious and snarky about whether anyone would actually pay that much for a premium service. But Arison said that thanks to the AI functionality that will debut in Edge, he’s confident there’s room for another offering down the road—perhaps for a more exclusive user base that numbers in the tens of thousands. “I do think there is a world in which we’ll have a product even more expensive than $6,000 a year at an even more premium level for an even smaller segment of people,” Arison said. “That will probably be something that combines in-app features and out-of-the-app experiences for the more premium lifestyle experience for gay men.”