TL;DR — Key Takeaways
- More than one in four U.S. adults, 27%, use mainstream AI platforms for personal or companion-style interactions.
- Adults under 50 are the strongest adopters, with nearly 40% reporting companion-style AI use.
- Emotional attachment is significant: 59% of regular users say AI provides needed support, while 43% feel AI understands them as a person.
More than one in four American adults now turn to artificial intelligence (AI) for emotional support, relationship advice, or social connection, according to new research shedding light on how profoundly generative AI is reshaping human intimacy.
The landmark study, titled “The Rise of AI Companions,” was conducted jointly by Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Center, the Elon University Poll, and The Washington Post, with fieldwork executed by YouGov. The findings reveal 27% of U.S. adults actively use mainstream platforms such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Microsoft’s Copilot for personal, non-utility queries, ranging from casual entertainment to deep emotional bonding.
The research surveyed over 4,000 adults with a 3.7 percentage-point margin of error.
Unlike typical early-adopter trends, which often skew heavily toward specific socioeconomic or tech-educated demographics, companion-style AI adoption spans evenly across lines of race, gender, and education.
Age, however, stands out as the primary dividing line. Adults under 50 drive the shift, with nearly 40% reporting companion-style AI use — making them more than twice as likely as older generations to adopt these tools as digital confidants.
A deeper dive into a representative subsample of 1,000 regular companion users underscores a surprisingly intense level of emotional attachment: 59% of these users agree that AI provides the support they need, while 51% say conversing with a chatbot helps relieve stress or distress. Remarkably, 43% feel the technology understands them as a person, and 39% believe it understands them better than most humans do.
Deep integration into daily emotional life extends to personal relationships and secrets. Over half (53%) consult AI to navigate challenging interpersonal dynamics, and nearly four in 10 admit to revealing secrets to an AI that they have never shared with another human being. Furthermore, 20% said their AI companion is occasionally more reliable or supportive than their own friends and family, with 11% outright preferring the bot’s company.
The study also reveals that 47% of companion users regularly interact with multiple AI personalities, pointing to an ecosystem where users consult different bots for varied emotional needs.
“This poll measures trust forming faster than anyone is governing it. Confidence in AI comes from accumulated experience, and 59% of these users already say AI gives them the support they need,” said Mitch Ashley, vice president and practice lead for Software Lifecycle Engineering and AI-Native Software Engineering at The Futurum Group. “Those users are also employees. Companies deploying the same models should expect that reliance to walk in the door with them, then decide what an AI system owes a person who confides in it.”
Despite these clear behavioral shifts, major tech giants have yet to fully account for this usage. Because the report does not separate time-in-app or market share among individual platforms, it highlights a major industry blind spot: Corporate tech leaders are absorbing massive social and psychological workloads without having explicitly designed their flagship products for human companionship.
