The Hidden Rhythms In Our AI Use
IBM, Thursday, February 12th, 2026
Every dataset has a story-but few announce themselves with terms of endearment. When Microsoft AI researchers dug into tens of millions of Copilot conversations, one finding that jumped off the screen wasn't code or spreadsheets. It was a sharp uptick in conversations about relationships, dating, family and love on Valentine's Day.
'I expected a slight fluctuation, but the spike is so obvious,' said Beatriz Costa Gomes, a Futures Researcher at Microsoft AI, in an interview with IBM Think.
That Valentine's Day finding illustrates the bigger story in this new research, which analyzed 37.5 million anonymized conversations on Copilot between January and September 2025. Beyond single day spikes, the data captured the weekly cycles and seasonal rhythms of people's AI use, said IBM Fellow Kush Varshney, in a recent episode of Mixture of Experts. These AI assistants 'are synchronizing with our lives or we're synchronizing our lives with them,' he said.