Modern dating is increasingly shaped by A.I. Top dating apps like Tinder, Hinge and Bumble are all experimenting with A.I.-driven features ranging from matching algorithms and A.I. assistants to conversation starters and profile photo selection. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, A.I. coding agents are also changing how the apps themselves are built.

Over the past year, Tinder, the world’s biggest dating app, has become increasingly A.I.-pilled. “We’re using A.I. in every stage of the dating journey,” Vinay Kuruvila, CTO of Tinder, tells Observer in a video interview. At parent company Match Group, internal A.I. spending was budgeted at roughly $5 million at the start of 2026 and is now expected to reach about $10 million for the year, according to the company.

While Kuruvila said the company wasn’t “tokenmaxxing” its push to increase A.I. adoption has nonetheless driven a sharp rise in token spending this year, as it has worked to “try to get everyone in the company A.I.-pilled.”

Across Match Group, the average engineer spends about $600 per month on tokens, while the top 1 percent spend around $3,000 per month. There are guardrails: once engineers hit a spending cap, set around the 80th percentile, they need a manager’s approval to keep going, a check meant to ensure the tokens are being used wisely. While recommendations is one of its most A.I.-pilled teams, the company’s number one user sits on the profile team. Kuruvila said Tinder’s most productive engineers are using autonomous agents that run 24/7.

Tinder uses A.I. across everything from recommendations to photo selection, though Kuruvila said the area where the company has seen the most success with A.I. and machine learning is its recommendation algorithms, which have changed significantly since he joined as CTO in August 2025.

With recommendations, the goal is to show users people “they are very likely to vibe with,” Kuruvila said, based on common interests and the likelihood that they will have good conversations and, ultimately, go on real-life dates. One of Tinder’s core internal metrics is Sparks, which the company defines as a six-way conversation within a given week. Tinder says Sparks are strongly associated with conversation quality and connections that move off the app, and that users who experience them are more likely to return the following month. A related metric, Sparks Coverage, tracks what percentage of active users are having those meaningful outcomes.

A.I. is also helping Tinder bring new features to the app. Most notable is Photo Insights, an opt-in camera roll scanning feature that Tinder plans to roll out globally “soon.” The feature, with users’ permission, analyzes their photos and selects the ones most likely to strengthen their profiles. Tinder has been testing Photo Insights in several markets. The company has found that many users, particularly men, struggle to identify their best photos, and the feature is performing well in testing.

“If you put a shirtless gym selfie because you think that’s your best photo, but most women are turned off by it, you’re not going to get outcomes,” Kuruvila said. “People don’t know how to best represent themselves on dating apps. I think A.I. has tremendous potential to help someone represent themselves authentically and in a way that serves them well on their profile.”

There is also a major launch coming to the platform later this year that Kuruvila refers to as “real-time recommendations.” He compares it to TikTok, where liking one video can quickly prompt the algorithm to serve another on the same topic. Currently, Tinder can take up to four hours to detect changes in a user’s swiping behavior. By the end of the year, that process will happen in a matter of seconds. Tinder declined to share further details, including how the feature differs from Learning Mode, but said it would have more to say closer to the end of the year.

Tinder’s A.I. transformation comes as Match Group invests more heavily in A.I. across its portfolio of dating platforms. CFO Steven Bailey told Observer in July that the company had given all 2,300 employees access to tools like Claude and said Hinge’s A.I.-driven matching system had increased matches by 15 percent since being rolled out a few quarters earlier.

The bigger question is whether more A.I. is actually what online daters want. A study commissioned by Match Group surveyed 1,000 people between the ages of 18 and 39 and found that 47 percent of singles had a negative view of A.I.’s use in romantic contexts. At the same time, commentators have raised broader concerns about whether A.I. can meaningfully encourage connection between users.

Whether Tinder’s bet on A.I. can help address the loneliness epidemic will ultimately depend on how effective its algorithms are at getting people off the app and onto actual dates. Few users are likely to complain about A.I. if it leads to better matches. But implemented poorly, the same technology designed to improve connection could end up overwhelming the very human interactions that dating apps are meant to facilitate.

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