Loneliness Is A Tech Problem Now: Inside The Industry Trying To Solve It

Friday, 10 July 2026, 8:08 am
Article: Dylan Noonan

It is 9pm on a Tuesday in Auckland, and Mark is scrolling through his phone in an apartment full of light and completely empty of other people. He has 340 followers, a group chat that has not moved in three days, and nobody to call about the mildly funny thing that happened at work. He is not isolated in any obvious sense. He has a job, a flat, a phone full of contacts. He is just lonely, in the quiet, unremarkable way that has become common enough to have its own research field.

The World Health Organization now treats this as a public health issue in its own right. A 2025 WHO report found that roughly 1 in 6 people worldwide are affected by loneliness, and that it contributes to over 871,000 deaths globally each year, placing it alongside smoking and obesity as a measurable driver of poor health outcomes.

New Zealand's own picture is not much better. A 2024 study on older Kiwis described loneliness and social isolation as having reached "epidemic levels," with around 70 percent of people in social housing reporting they had experienced it, more than any other accommodation type. Financial pressure, housing insecurity, and adult children moving overseas for work were all named as contributing factors. Notably, the same study found that having social media access made little difference: three-quarters of older people who used it still reported feeling lonely, sometimes more than those who did not use it at all. Younger New Zealanders are not exempt either. Government wellbeing data has consistently shown loneliness peaking among 15 to 24 year olds before easing through midlife and rising again after 75, and household income remains a strong predictor, with people earning under $30,000 twice as likely to report feeling lonely most or all of the time compared with those earning $150,000 or more.

A Growing Industry Response

Where there is a persistent, well-documented gap in human connection, technology companies tend to show up. Over the past decade, an entire sector has formed around exactly this problem: companionship as a product category.

At one end sit AI chatbot companions like Replika and Character.AI, offering conversation on demand. In the middle are social robots, already deployed in aged care facilities across Japan and increasingly trialled elsewhere, designed to provide company for people living alone. At the far end of the spectrum are physical companion products: highly detailed, customisable dolls built with medical grade silicone and, increasingly, AI voice integration. Manufacturers across this spectrum, from chatbot developers to the physical companion makers verified by Formosa Doll, report steady demand growth as more people look for alternatives to fill a gap that traditional social structures increasingly leave open.

What connects all of these products is not novelty. It is a direct response to Treasury's own observation that an ageing population, more people living alone, and a shift toward tech-mediated rather than face-to-face contact have all been linked to rising loneliness. If technology helped create part of the problem, it was probably inevitable that technology would also try to solve it.

Who Is Actually Buying, and Why

The demand behind this industry is not abstract. It tracks closely with the demographic shifts already visible in the wellbeing data. An aging population means more people living alone for longer. Rising rates of solo living, delayed partnering, and remote or hybrid work all reduce the number of casual, face-to-face interactions a person has in an average week, even while non-face-to-face contact with family often increases.

For older adults, companion robots and simpler AI tools address practical isolation: fewer visitors, adult children living overseas, a shrinking social circle. For younger adults, who report the highest loneliness rates of any age group, companion apps and products often address something different: a mismatch between the quantity of social contact (constant, through phones and social media) and its quality (rarely deep, rarely physical, rarely undivided).

Physical companion products occupy an unusual middle ground here. They are not trying to replace human relationships so much as offer a tangible, private alternative to loneliness, in the same way a pet, a hobby, or a support group might, just with a different shape.

Helpful Tool, or Symptom Worth Watching?

Not everyone agrees on what this all means, and a neutral look at the evidence should say so plainly.

Some psychologists and researchers see genuine value here. For people who are housebound, disabled, elderly, or simply going through a prolonged period without close relationships, a companion product, digital or physical, can reduce acute loneliness and, in some documented cases, ease the transition back toward human social contact rather than away from it.

Others are more cautious. Critics worry that outsourcing companionship to a product, however sophisticated, risks reinforcing withdrawal rather than resolving it, particularly for people already prone to avoiding social risk. The Mental Health Foundation has made a related point about New Zealand's broader wellbeing picture: the pandemic clearly made things worse, but it did not create the underlying problem. The country already had a significant, ongoing mental health and connection issue well before 2020.

Both positions are probably partly right, which is exactly why this remains an open question rather than a settled one.

The Bigger Picture

What is clear is that the line between "social technology" and "companionship technology" is getting blurrier every year. A chatbot that remembers your day, a robot that greets you by name, a doll built to specific likeness and personality: these are all points on the same continuum, responding to the same measurable, government-tracked rise in loneliness.

Whether that is a positive development, a stopgap, or something in between will likely depend on the person, the product, and the specific gap it is filling. What seems unlikely is that this category shrinks any time soon. As long as the loneliness numbers keep climbing, so will the range of products built to answer them.