Gen Z Is Leaving Social Media – and Retreating Into Group Chats

01 /The Concept

Alfi is an AI assistant for group chats, currently operating inside iMessage, WhatsApp, and Telegram.

Alfi's job is to keep conversations alive – helping participants engage more and make decisions faster. Its defining feature is that it doesn't need to be explicitly summoned. It reads the conversation and decides on its own when to speak up and when to stay quiet.

A few representative scenarios:

Participants can generate an image directly inside the chat – say, a playful illustration of the group in some fantastical setting. Alfi takes input and suggestions from everyone before producing something that works for the whole group.

When the group is planning to meet offline, Alfi can help coordinate timing – collecting each person's availability and working toward a slot that fits everyone.

Alfi tracks upcoming events the group has discussed and sends reminders as the dates approach. There's also a "Reminders" button that displays the full event schedule at a glance.

When a restaurant is on the agenda, Alfi suggests suitable options nearby and can actually book a table at the agreed time and place using Yelp's API.

Occasionally, Alfi will nudge the conversation unprompted – asking why someone dropped a sad emoji, for instance. Chat admins can control how frequently these proactive interruptions happen.

Alfi adapts its writing style to match the chat's tone, including inside jokes and recurring references it picks up from observing the group. The personality is learned, not generic.

The startup went through Y Combinator last spring, then raised a follow-on round from YC and another investor – the amount undisclosed. Last year's version was a simpler assistant focused on more transactional tasks. The new release, named Alfi, is positioned as "the first AI assistant with social intelligence for group chats."

02 /Why It Matters

Alfi's founders believe a quiet but significant behavioral shift is already underway: Gen Z is gradually moving away from broadcast social media and into the more intimate space of group chats. The group chat, they argue, is the new real social network.

Group chats have their own problem, though. Without active hosts or moderators working to sustain energy and facilitate decisions, groups tend to slowly die. And even motivated moderators can't be present 24/7 – and eventually burn out.

Alfi is designed to be the moderator who never gets tired and is always online.

The "first AI assistant for group chats" claim, as these things usually go, is a slight overstatement.

Digipals ([covered here](/review/chtoby-vzletet-nuzhno-protiv)) is currently going through Y Combinator and has published its concept on the YC site ahead of Alfi. It's built a remarkably similar product – an AI assistant for group chats – motivated by the same observation: "Social media is becoming more media and less social."

"In my Facebook and Instagram feeds, I no longer see my friends," the Digipals founders write. "A third is ads. A third is content from strangers the algorithm decided to push. The last third is AI-generated filler optimized for views and likes. So I talk to my friends in real life, or in group chats where only my actual friends are."

The key difference between the two: Alfi focuses on keeping chats alive. Digipals focuses on helping chat participants meet up in person more often.

To do that, Digipals' AI agent stays current on each member's schedule, location, preferences, and relationship history with other participants. It then helps coordinate actual meetups – identifying times when everyone is free, finding venues that work geographically for the group, making reservations, helping split bills, and prompting people to share photos afterward.

Digipals is also building a more open architecture it calls an "AI-native social operating system" – where the AI assistant is actually a collection of modular widgets, each purpose-built for a specific function. Third-party developers can build their own widgets, and chat admins can browse a widget marketplace to customize their group's assistant.

A third player in the space: Continua ([covered here](/review/a-tut-nuzhny-sovsem-drugie-ii-agenty)) raised $8 million in its first round last summer for an AI assistant focused specifically on coordinating shared events and activities. Unlike Alfi and Digipals, Continua doesn't claim to be building the next social network – it has a narrower, more functional scope, useful for family chats planning a trip, a birthday dinner, or a weekend getaway.

03 /Opportunities

Gen Z's shift away from social media platforms isn't quite a full exodus – it's more of a behavioral pivot. Broadcasting to a large, undefined audience is giving way to narrowcasting to a chosen, bounded one, even if the platforms are sometimes the same.

Overall social media engagement dropped roughly 10% in 2025, with Gen Z driving most of the decline. Only 44% of 18-to-24-year-olds still use Facebook, against a population average of 79%. And 52% of Gen Z reportedly planned to leave social platforms entirely that year.

Meanwhile, the average social media user belongs to 83 group chats across different platforms. WhatsApp is the most popular venue – and nearly 60% of messages on WhatsApp are now group messages, not direct ones. Discord's monthly active users grew 15% by the end of 2025.

Even inside social networks, activity is moving private. On Instagram, 70% of Gen Z activity is now direct messages – users are literally sending their reactions to Stories and posts to each other privately rather than posting publicly.

Social platforms aren't going anywhere. But the trend toward group chats as the primary social layer is real and measurable. That opens a window – now – for products and platforms built specifically for this context. The more interesting question is what to build.

AI chat assistants like Alfi and Digipals are one option. But it's unlikely to be the only one. What else could be built around the group chat as the core social surface?