On August 20, 2026, LELO published its 2026 Futurist Report, titled The Analogue Counter-Movement: Redefining Intimacy in a Mixed Reality World, produced with applied futurist Tracey Follows. The headline finding: 60% of respondents say they currently use, or have used, AI in relation to their intimate lives. The report's thesis is that this saturation is about to trigger a backlash, and that "protected human presence: private, embodied, untracked and real" becomes the scarce luxury good of the next decade.

Why It Matters

This is the clearest brand-side articulation yet of the strategic split running through sextech in 2026: one camp racing to bolt AI onto everything (Lovense, Honey Play Box, SexLikeReal, most of the Shenzhen manufacturing base), and another betting that the differentiator is *analogue* — physical, private, non-networked, non-logged. LELO, which sells premium hardware at premium margins and has no meaningful AI product, has an obvious commercial interest in the second thesis. But the 60% AI-in-intimacy figure cuts the other way and is the number investors should actually take from this: whatever the backlash timeline, AI is already in the majority of surveyed people's intimate lives, and the privacy exposure that implies is the industry's fastest-growing liability.

The usage breakdown is the most useful part for anyone sizing this market. Among those using AI in an intimate context, 36% go to it for relationship advice and guidance, 28% use it as a confidence booster, and 22% use it to generate fantasies or role-play scenarios. In the U.S. sample, 16% have used AI to help resolve an argument with a partner, 18% admit to passing off AI-written messages as their own, and 15% use it to plan dates. Skepticism has not disappeared alongside adoption: 29% describe themselves as critical of what AI tells them about romance, and 13% consider it actively harmful given the sources it draws on.

Follows frames the coming shift not as a mass rejection of technology but as accumulated small refusals. "The backlash will not arrive as one big rejection of technology," she says in the report. "It will begin as a pattern of small refusals: phone-free bedrooms, offline dating, private clubs and spaces where people pay not for more connection, but for less mediation." The conclusion LELO draws — that as tech-mediated intimacy becomes more abundant and more predictable, unscripted human attention becomes the premium product — is, conveniently, an argument for selling physical objects rather than subscriptions.

Methodology deserves the usual caveats. The global figures come from a Censuswide survey of 1,000 people aged 18–45 across the UK, U.S., France, Italy, Spain, and Sweden, fielded October 3–13, 2025. The U.S.-specific numbers come from a separate double-opt-in Talker Research survey of 2,000 Americans in relationships, split evenly across Gen Z, millennials, Gen X, and boomers, fielded September 24–30, 2025. Both are brand-commissioned consumer panels, not academic instruments, and the fieldwork is roughly eleven months old at publication — worth noting given how fast AI companion adoption has moved in 2026.

Sources

Update — 2026-08-21

Initial entry — story first created.

Update — 2026-09-04

Two weeks on, the report is picking up mainstream pickup — and a working thesis name. On September 1, 2026, SheKnows published Tabitha Britt's write-up of the 2026 Futurist Report under the headline "The Future of Sex Isn't AI — It's Logging Off," adding fresh comment from LELO sexpert and AASECT-certified sex therapist Casey Tanner that sharpens the report's argument considerably.

Tanner's framing is the most useful new material. "AI has quickly moved from the logistical edges of relationships (e.g., planning a date or constructing a text) into the emotional interior of relationships (e.g., resolving conflict, articulating vulnerable emotions)," she told SheKnows — which maps precisely onto the report's own usage split (36% relationship advice, 28% confidence boosting, 22% fantasy generation, 18% passing off AI-written messages as their own). Her read on the consequence: "The survey highlights the possibility that intimacy itself could become less embodied and increasingly cognitive as relationships become surrounded by prompts, analysis, scripts, and metrics."

The scarcity mechanism, stated plainly. Tanner: "What technology cannot easily reproduce may therefore become more valuable, thus forming a new sort of social order around intimacy. As AI makes a certain kind of connection more accessible, AI-less connection may come to be viewed as more elite or exclusive." That is the luxury-goods logic underneath LELO's thesis said out loud — abundance of the mediated version creates a premium on the unmediated one.

Report author Tracey Follows has a term for the alternative: "situated intimacy." Per the SheKnows coverage, Follows defines it as experiences that are private, embodied and unrecorded, and is careful to distinguish it from technophobia: "Situated intimacy is not anti-digital. It is not a fantasy of going back. It is a way of rediscovering the messy complexity of human connection in a way that is not immediately captured, interpreted, stored, upgraded, or performed."

The equity caveat is new and is the strongest critique in the coverage. Tanner flags that the "unmediated connection as luxury" thesis has a class problem baked into it: "The ability to claim privacy, leisure time and uninterrupted space have always been shaped by access to money, work, caregiving and housing. As AI-mediated intimacy becomes cheaper and more normalized, private, tech-free experiences may become something that only people with enough control over their time and environment can reliably protect." That is worth holding alongside the report's own conclusion, since a brand selling premium physical objects has an obvious interest in a future where the premium physical experience is the scarce good.

Where this sits in the week's news. The counter-datapoint arrived the same week: on September 2, adult AI platform Sxxx.ai launched with 150,000 AI-generated images, 15,000 videos and 8,000+ stories and 150 AI companions, no human creators, with its operators pitching adult entertainment's "post-human era." Both things are happening at once — the analogue counter-movement and the fully synthetic platform launched three days apart. LELO's report is a bet on which one becomes the premium tier, not a claim that the other stops growing.

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