It seems wild to me—borderline surreal—that the agentic revolution in AI is kicking off with financial and logistical grunt work. We’ve got sophisticated autonomous agents out here negotiating flight bookings, rebooking disrupted trips in real time, managing hotel allocations, optimizing shopping carts, and even executing trades or spotting fraud. Companies like Sabre, PayPal, and Mindtrip just rolled out end-to-end agentic travel experiences. Booking Holdings has AI trip planners handling multi-city itineraries. IDC is predicting that by 2030, 30% of travel bookings will be handled by these agents.
And I’m sitting here thinking: Really? That’s the killer app we’re leading with?
Don’t get me wrong—convenience is nice. But if we’re going to hand over real agency and autonomy to AI, why are we starting with the stuff that already has decent apps and human backups? Why not tackle the thing that actually keeps millions of people up at night, costs us years of happiness, and has no good solution yet: figuring out who the hell we’re supposed to be with romantically?
Here’s what I would build tomorrow if I could.
My agent talks to your agent. No humans get hurt in the initial screening.
I train (or fine-tune) my personal AI agent on everything that matters to me: my values, my non-negotiables, my weird quirks, my long-term goals, attachment style, love language, political red lines, even the fact that I can’t stand people who clap when the plane lands. It knows my dating history, what worked, what exploded spectacularly, and the patterns I miss when I’m blinded by chemistry.
Your agent has the same depth on you.
Then, with explicit consent from both sides (opt-in only, obviously), the two agents start a private, encrypted conversation. They ping each other across a secure compatibility network. They run a deep macro compatibility check—values alignment, lifestyle fit, intellectual spark, emotional maturity, future vision—without ever exposing raw personal data. Think zero-knowledge proofs meets advanced personality modeling.
If the match clears a high bar (say, 85%+ on a multi-layered rubric we both approve), the agents arrange a low-stakes introduction: “Hey, our agents think we’d hit it off. Want to hop on a 15-minute video call this week?” No awkward DMs. No ghosting after three messages. No spending weeks texting someone only to discover on date two that they’re a flat-earther who hates dogs.
The messy parts? Hand them over.
Most people I know would pay to outsource the exhausting early stages of modern dating:
- Crafting the perfect first message
- Decoding vague replies
- Deciding whether that “haha” means interest or politeness
- The emotional labor of rejection after investing time
Let the agents handle the filtering. Humans show up only when there’s already a strong signal. Rejection still happens, but it’s agent-to-agent, private, and painless. You never even know the 47 near-misses that got filtered out. You only see the ones where both agents went, “Yeah… this one’s different.”
And crucially: no wild, unauthorized credit-card shenanigans. My agent would have hard rules burned in at the system level. It can research, analyze, and negotiate introductions. It cannot spend a dime, book a table, or Venmo anyone without my explicit, real-time confirmation. Period. That’s non-negotiable.
The scale effect would be insane.
Imagine millions of these agents operating in parallel. The network effect is ridiculous. What takes humans months of swiping, small talk, and disappointment could happen in hours of background computation. Successful dates skyrocket because the pre-filtering is orders of magnitude better than any algorithm on Hinge or Tinder today. (And yes, those apps are already experimenting with AI matchmakers and curated “daily drops,” but they’re still centralized, still inside one walled garden, still optimizing for engagement over outcomes.)
We’d see fewer one-and-done disasters. Fewer people burning out on the apps. Fewer “I just haven’t met anyone” stories from genuinely great humans who are simply terrible at marketing themselves in 500 characters.
It’s surreal because the real problem has nothing to do with money
Booking a flight is solved. It’s annoying, sure, but it’s transactional. Finding someone who makes you excited to come home every night? That’s not transactional. That’s existential. Yet here we are, pouring billions and brilliant engineering hours into making travel slightly more frictionless while the loneliness epidemic rages on.
We’ve built technology that can rebook your connection when your plane is delayed, but we haven’t built the one that could quietly introduce you to the person who makes delayed flights irrelevant because you’d rather be stuck in an airport with them than anywhere else without them.
That feels backward to me.
The agentic revolution is going to happen either way. The models are getting more capable, the tool-use is getting more reliable, the multi-agent systems are maturing fast. The only question is what problems we point them at first.
I vote we point them at love.
Build the agent that can talk to other agents. Give it strict financial guardrails and deep psychological modeling. Let it do the boring, painful, inefficient parts of dating so humans can do the fun ones: the spark, the laughter, the vulnerability, the first kiss.
The future doesn’t have to be agents booking my flights while I’m still doom-swiping alone on a Friday night.
It can be agents quietly working in the background, connecting hearts across the noise of modern life, until one day my agent texts me:
“Hey… I found someone I think you’re really going to like. Want to meet her?”
Yes. A thousand times yes.
That’s the agentic future worth building.
