Grindr’s CEO leans hard on AI: “There’s a bit of a hardcore nature to how I expect people to work”

“Not quite as hardcore as Elon Musk,” George Arison says.

Grindr, a publicly traded company, is attempting to build a global “gayborhood in your pocket” and, like many others, is incorporating AI to help it along the way. However, the company’s CEO doesn’t think of AI as some magic bean but rather wants to try it out to see how people interact with it.

Arison, who’s been with Grindr since 2022, says the company is exploring ways to create a new premium tier that would cost more than its current priciest tier ($40) and feature AI features and functionality.

Apparently, several AI-powered products and useful new features are on the way. For example, Grindr’s Wingman is supposed to be your personal helper and come up with witty responses. The A-list is an AI-curated shortlist of best matches, and there’ll be “key takeaways” as chat history summaries.

“First, anything we do with AI, as with any other product, people need to opt in. I’m not going to force them into that product,” Arison told Sherwood News.

He believes that only “a very few " companies have successfully integrated AI into their products. He named X as one such example.

Arison wants to try out AI mostly to see how people interact with the new features, and only time will tell whether it’s a valuable and worthwhile addition.

“I don’t think we can fairly ask people to project what AI can do because they don’t know what AI can do – and neither do I. The best way we’ll know is by trying it, putting it out there, seeing how users use it, and going from there,” he said.

Grindr, which has an average monthly user base of 14.5 million, relies on Anthropic’s Claude and Amazon’s Bedrock to power its AI features and products.

Like other popular dating apps, Grindr is a publicly traded company and is closely watched by investors. It recently reported a second 2025 quarter revenue growth of 27%. Its adjusted EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) was $45 million, with a margin of 43%.

“I’m a very lean operator. I aim to have very lean operations around me because I think those are the fastest-moving operations. They don’t get slowed down by bureaucracy and by people not having the drive to work very hard. So there’s a bit of a hardcore nature to how I expect people to work. Not quite as hardcore as Elon Musk – I can’t try to do even near that level, but in that vein of operations,” Arison said.