The 2030 Consumer | EP. 1: AI and the future of Companionship ft. Rahul & Naman

At Stellaris, we're always trying to balance what’s possible with what’s probable. The 2030 Consumer is our way of exploring that edge, where a trend could evolve into long-term consumer behaviour.

In our first episode, Rahul Chowdhri chats with Naman Jain about AI companionship, a category that’s growing fast, but still full of open questions, including:

Will we all have AI friends by 2030?

Will voice be India’s dominant interface?

Will these apps monetize like therapists or like Netflix?

Too early to tell, but the signals are there, and the questions are worth asking.

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🎧 Listen in as we unpack what might lie ahead for this emerging space.

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Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4vajboWRCVNqxPYuTn12lo?si=7_tb9EEIRXKDN8yLmbH4XQ

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00:00 Coming up...

00:55 Introduction

02:05 What are AI Companions?

05:23 Age-wise relevance of AI Companions

06:39 AI Companions: Wrappers or Models?

08:20 Personalizing AI Companions

09:43 Multi-lingual bots

10:22 Delivering bots to users

12:03 Chat vs. Voice for India

14:20 Building for a global market

17:47 AI companions in 2030

19:50 Human-assisted bots

20:38 Different use cases

23:27 Monetization strategies

26:25 Driving adoption of AI companions

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