As more companies continue to embrace the new era of AI, the CEO of Grindr (GRND), George Arison, thinks dating will be at the forefront of that change. "AI is going to change so many businesses and so many products and dating will be at the forefront of that in so many ways," Arison said.
According to Arison, artificial intelligence can be used to help users on a number of different aspects including weeding out scammers, writing messages, and finding a tailor made match. "We think there's a huge opportunity where we can expand the pool so instead of just looking locally, you can look more broadly, nationally or internationally for who your mate actually is for the long term," Arison said.
Full Video Transcript Below:
J.D. DURKIN: I do want to ask you about artificial intelligence. It's obviously the thing that's being talked about, arguably the most. Generative AI. It's all over earnings calls. It's all over the conversation on Wall Street. This is something that I know has been really important to you virtually from day one of this company. What should people know about the intersection of Grindr with AI?
GEORGE ARISON: So AI is going to, I think, change so many businesses and so many products. And dating is going to be at the forefront of that in a lot of ways, because dating is all about having two people meet each other and data, and better analytics and machine learning can really help with that. For Grindr, I see three really big opportunities. Number one, on the generative side, our users produce incredible amount of content. We had $111 billion chats sent last year in the product. We have 5.5 million daily active users. So that's 600 messages per person per day. You know, to put that in context, like Whatsapp, it's about 50 messages per day.
So our users generate a lot of content. We can help them write those messages to save time and we can understand who they are better through all those messages. Right because it's one thing what you say in your profile, it's another thing what you say in messages to different people. That can then help us match them to other individuals in a better way. So I think there's a huge opportunity on the generative AI side. I think there's another huge opportunity on the matching side. We know that gay men in particular are more willing to travel further out to meet their long term partners and gay men actually get married later.
There's a -- USAToday had a report a few weeks ago where average gay male person gets married at 38, whereas it's like 28 or 29 for a straight person. So later in life people want to settle down. We think that's a huge opportunity where we can expand the pool. So instead of just looking locally, you can look more broadly nationally or internationally for who your mate actually is for the long term. And AI can really help with that. And then thirdly, on making the product better, right? We can have a world where we find spammers sooner in the product through AI and eliminate them.
There's even a model where people now actually create honey traps through AI and then the spammers are found and the honey traps are talking to them to distract the spammer instead of talking to real users. So instead of being in whac-a-mole, fighting with the spammer all the time, just kind of distract the spammer. So I think there's a lot of opportunity and I'm really psyched about it. I think of it as like, there will be an AI wingman slash, you know, assistant potentially in the product one day that's really helping you to navigate the world and navigate relationships. And I think it's going to be really awesome.
And you know, it feels - so I started a company in 2007 called Taxi Magic, which is now known as Curb, which is in all the cabs in New York. And that was before the iPhone existed. And we knew mobile was going to be really big, but you didn't really know how big it was going to be or what was going to do. That's kind of how it feels now with AI like we know it's going to be big, but we didn't know how big it's going to be, what impact is it going to have and to be in a place where it can have such an immediate impact and you can actually innovate with it really well. It's really exciting.
