Professional matchmakers have been around in some capacity for over 50 years, and arguably much longer just in less official business capacities. We’ve seen a lot of changes over the years as the industry has grown into a popular option for singles to find love.
As technology and experience continue to grow, we expect to see more changes in the future for matchmaking services. In this article, we’re going to explore three of the biggest trends we expect to see over the next handful of years in the industry.
1. AI will support matchmakers, but don’t expect it to lower prices.
The artificial intelligence (AI) market is expected to grow by 28.46% from 2024 – 2030. And while this number is impressive, it most likely pales in comparison to the growth in how often AI will be used internally in industries. One industry we expect to see the use of AI begin to grow is with professional matchmakers.
Here are a few of the ways we expect that to be utilized:
- Used to find better matches in large and complex databases
- Used to provide training to matchmakers
- Used to provide dating coaching services to clients
We’re already seeing new matchmaking services and apps popping up that say they utilize AI to curate matches. For example, here’s Keeper.ai that says it’s “driven by AI and relationship science.”
And here’s another option called Iris that says it’s, “Pioneering the future of AI dating.”
While we haven’t reviewed and therefore don’t recommend either of these options, they stand to represent the trend that is already beginning. We do expect this to begin showing up at the bigger name matchmakers in the coming years.
You might assume that this will lower the price of a membership to a matchmaking service as it lessens the workload on the matchmaker. While this is possible, we don’t expect it to happen.
2. Expect to see growth in the number of people using personalized matchmaking services.
According to Grand View Research, the entire dating app industry is expected to see a 7.4% annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2023 to 2030. We expect that a decent portion of this will be for professional matchmaking services.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen extensive growth from some of the major players in the industry. For example, Tawkify has been pushing extensive marketing efforts to grow their membership base. Additionally, a company like Three Day Rule was recently purchased and expects to see rapid growth with the appointment of new CEO, Adam Cohen-Aslatei.
Couple this with the normalization of using a professional matchmaker across all age brackets and you have the recipe and fuel for extensive growth.
3. Matchmakers may feel more pressure to ‘do the right thing’.
For clarity, this trend is not meant to lead you to believe that most matchmaking services are trying to do the wrong thing. In fact, most quality matchmakers care about their clients and try their best to deliver great service. Even if a matchmaker doesn’t care about their clients, referrals are the number one source of new business, and referrals only come when you deliver great service.
That said, one of the trends we expect to see in the future for matchmakers is more pressure to do the right thing and not cut any corners. The reason for this is that over the past few years we’ve seen several matchmakers hit with high-dollar lawsuits that proved to be successful. When this happens, it tends to put the rest of the industry ‘on notice’ and reinforces the importance of doing the right thing — even if for selfish reasons.
Two examples of recent matchmaker lawsuits include:
The future is exciting.
In the end, it’s hard to predict exactly what the future will hold, but we can say this —it will be exciting. Professional matchmaking services are here to stay and it will be exciting to see their growth and the integration of technology.