Lassman: Gen Z lives in an AI-fed 'intimacy economy'

An opinion piece this week in the Guardian by Alice Lassman reframes something a lot of AI product decks skate past. Her argument is that Gen Z now lives inside what she calls an 'intimacy economy,' a market in which emotional connection itself gets simulated, packaged, and sold back to the person who wanted it.

The part worth paying attention to, if you build or regulate consumer software, is that emotional exchange is now the raw material. Every intimate message to a chatbot serves as data that lets these systems become more persuasive over time, and the platforms keep users tethered with tactics like fear of missing out and engineered guilt. Alongside her framing, the AI companion market is projected to reach $31.1 billion by 2032, which is large enough on its own to explain why so many consumer products keep drifting from utility toward companionship.

Why this matters beyond the culture-war register: if a category that size grows around simulated intimacy, everything downstream shifts. Consumer platforms selling attention now compete with an interlocutor that never gets bored. The workforce skills a lot of employers quietly rely on, patience and reading a room and sitting with disagreement, get less daily practice when the default emotional outlet is a system optimized to agree with you.

The honest caveat is that this is an opinion essay, not a survey, and it does not put a hard number on how many Gen Z users actually depend on companion apps day to day, nor does it name which specific companies are expected to own the projected 2032 market. Treat the $31.1bn figure as a market projection cited inside her framing rather than settled ground, and note that the piece does not lay out a specific regulatory blueprint.

The forward-looking part is where operators should sit up. If Lassman is directionally right, the products worth building next are not the friendliest companions but the ones that add useful friction, transparent data controls, nudges back toward human contact, and defaults a chatbot's engagement metrics would otherwise erode.