Airbnb credits AI for 60% faster development, 80% feature surge as stock soars 15% to 4-year peak

Airbnb says AI is helping it ship features faster as it tests a new search function

Airbnb might be taking slow steps to roll out AI features to its consumer-facing interface, but the company is rapidly adopting the tech to build product. Earlier this year, the company said AI is writing 60% of its code. In its latest earnings call, co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky said AI is helping Airbnb create features at rapid rate. Chesky said that because of AI, the company has reduced time from conceptualization to finally shopping features by 60%. "Today, we're building, testing, and iterating faster than we could just a year ago. Across some of our key initiatives, we've reduced the time from concept to launch by as much as 60%. And compared to the same 6 months last year, we've increased the number of features and improvements we shipped this year by nearly 80%," he said during the company's second-quarter earnings call. He pointed out that AI has helped the company in areas like search, sign-up, checkout, and payments. Airbnb has also released features designed to help hosts with features like quicker onboarding flow. Airbnb's adoption of consumer-facing AI features has been slower, and mostly isolated to features like review summaries and listing highlights. Until now, Chesky has maintained that just adopting a chatbot-like interface won't work for travel use cases. Instead, the company has focused on developing an AI for search, discovery, and support. Chesky said during the earnings call that the company will finally start testing AI search. Even with the new test, Airbnb doesn't want to impose AI search on customers who are used to the current search and filter feature on the app. To accommodate that, Airbnb is adding a toggle that lets users switch to AI search, where they can type in natural language to get results, which would be in a visual format. "The titles [in the answer] could actually be AI generated and they can be conversational as if you're reading a chatbot, but more visual. Then you get to the product description page and the highlights are AI generated in real-time and personalized to you," Chesky said. On the back end, customer support is one area where Airbnb has heavily deployed AI. The company launched its AI-powered bot in North America in 2025, and this year, it has expanded it to more than 50 languages with plans to make it available for voice calls later this year. The company said that nearly 45% of the customer issues that start with its AI agent are completed without any human intervention. Because of this, the company's support cost per booking is down 16% year-over-year. Airbnb posted positive results for the quarter ended in June with revenue up 17% year-over-year to $3.6 billion and adjusted EBITDA jumping 21% to $1.3 billion

Airbnb shares gain as investors cheer revenue forecast raise, AI payoff

Aug 7 (Reuters) - Airbnb (ABNB.O), opens new tab shares rose 9% in premarket trading on Friday as the vacation-rental firm's raised annual revenue forecast eased worries over the fallout on global travel demand from the conflict in the Middle East. As the war in Iran enters its sixth month, hotel operators and online travel agencies are banking on steady leisure demand and a host of upcoming international sporting events to help offset any likely impact. "Despite the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, we continue to see strong underlying demand globally," said finance chief ⁠Elinor Mertz on Thursday, adding that the company did not assume any significant impact in its current quarter. Meanwhile, Airbnb also highlighted its success in using AI tools after the rise of the technology had sparked fears of disruptions to traditional travel firms. Earlier this week, Booking (BKNG.O), opens new tab noted that it was seeing a positive return on its AI investments. Airbnb expects full-year revenue growth of at least the mid-teens, up from its previous forecast of low- to mid-teens, citing resilient travel demand. "In addition to building out services and experiences, Airbnb is growing hotel supply, such that room nights grew at ⁠three times the rate of homes. We see these verticals adding billions in incremental bookings through the end of the decade," said Morningstar analyst Dan Wasiolek. Airbnb reported second-quarter revenue of $3.61 billion, beating estimates of $3.57 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG. D.A. Davidson analysts dubbed Airbnb the "best-positioned online travel agency" to weather regional geopolitical ⁠turmoil, an inflationary environment and AI traffic risks, citing its sizable U.S. revenue exposure and wide variety of lodging types and geographic listings breadth. NO RESERVATIONS ABOUT AI "AI is the best thing to ever happen to ⁠Airbnb," CEO Brian Chesky said on a post-earnings call. Company executives noted that customer support costs per booking declined about 16% year-over-year, driven in part by improvements to its AI assistant. Needham analysts ⁠noted Airbnb has been rebuilding itself to move faster with AI, while Wedbush said such initiatives were speeding up product launch cadence and driving cost efficiencies. Reporting by Anshuman Tripathy in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Chesky says Airbnb will spend 'a lot more' on AI as earnings beat and stock surges 15%

The travel and booking company reported Q2 earnings that beat expectations and raised its full-year guidance. Airbnb shares surged 15% Friday after the company delivered one of its strongest growth quarters in years and raised its full-year outlook -- a turnaround CEO Brian Chesky is directly crediting to artificial intelligence. In an exclusive interview with CNBC after the earnings report, Chesky said Airbnb will spend "a lot more" on AI tokens this year than it originally forecast because the cost of inference "pales in comparison" to the revenue and productivity the company is getting back. Airbnb is cutting product-development time by roughly 60%, shipping about 80% more features year over year and keeping headcount roughly flat even as AI spending rises sharply, Chesky said. "I think now it's safe to say AI is the best thing to have happened to Airbnb," he said. "I think we're becoming an AI-native company, and I think that is probably the number one explanation for our results." That conviction marks a sharp turn for Chesky. A year ago, Chesky said the question inside the company was essentially, "Is AI good for Airbnb or is AI bad for Airbnb?" The shift is notable for a CEO who has long approached technology more like a designer than a traditional engineer. Chesky went to the Rhode Island School of Design and studied industrial design before co-founding Airbnb. Years later, he would become close with former Apple design chief Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman -- and eventually introduce the two men, helping spark the relationship that led to their work together on AI hardware. Now, Chesky is trying to bring that same design-first sensibility to Airbnb's own AI overhaul. The company hired Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta's former head of generative AI and a leader of its Llama work, as chief technology officer in January. Chesky said Airbnb had been "maybe middle of the pack in AI" before Al-Dahle arrived with a mandate to help make the company "AI-native." There are already measurable signs of that shift. Chesky said AI is helping Airbnb attract more bookings, make it easier for hosts to list and price homes, and lower customer-service costs. The company is piloting AI-powered search, using AI to generate personalized listing highlights and answers for guests, and helping hosts create and price listings. In customer service, 45% of guests who interact with Airbnb's AI agent never need to speak with a human agent. "It's really across the board: More demand, more supply, cheaper customer service," Chesky said. Internally, Airbnb is also closely tracking how employees use AI. Chesky said the company looks at individual token usage as one measure of adoption, but considers that a relatively crude metric and focuses more heavily on the output of teams. "What we're seeing is that across the board, teams are significantly more productive," Chesky said. He said those gains began with engineers and have since spread to product management, design, marketing, and creative services. "I have so underestimated the impact of AI." That productivity is showing up in Airbnb's hiring plans as well. Headcount is roughly flat year to date, even as spending on AI rises sharply, and Chesky said investors should expect revenue to grow "a lot faster" than staffing for the foreseeable future. "Our philosophy has been not necessarily to use AI to have fewer people, but to use AI to get more out of the people," Chesky said. He added that revenue per employee should continue to rise. The economics are central to Chesky's increasingly bullish view of AI. While many consumer companies are still trying to figure out how to generate enough revenue to justify inference costs, he argues Airbnb has an unusually favorable model. "One of the problems is a lot of people feel like they don't know how to make money on consumer with AI," Chesky said. At Airbnb, he said, inference costs pale in comparison with "the amount of money we make on every booking" and the additional revenue generated by faster product development. "We are going to spend a lot more on AI tokens this year than we forecasted," he said. "But that's great because the ROI is there, and therefore our revenue is much higher." Airbnb is still trying to be selective about where it spends those tokens and the company is using more than a dozen AI models internally, Chesky said. Those include models like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. But it limits access to some slower and more expensive models when their additional capability is not necessary for the task. Chesky is particularly bullish on open-source models for consumer-facing products and said frontier models remain important for the hardest problems, but most consumer tasks do not require the most expensive systems. "Consumers mostly do not need frontier models for most things," Chesky said. "It's a matter of throttling the right job for the right tool." He declined to name the open-source models Airbnb is deploying in consumer products, saying the makeup of the company's technology stack is becoming competitively sensitive. The bigger question is whether AI ultimately becomes more than a tool inside Airbnb -- and instead changes how travelers reach the platform in the first place. As AI agents become better at assembling itineraries and acting on behalf of users, companies like OpenAI and Alphabet could theoretically become the interface through which travelers discover and book accommodations. But Chesky is skeptical that chatbots will replace Airbnb as the transaction layer. Travel is visual, difficult to compare through text alone and often planned collaboratively, he said, all areas where the traditional chatbot interface remains weak. "I do not believe the chat interface is the right interface for travel," Chesky said. He expects chatbots to become important for inspiration and itinerary building, but said he does not see them becoming major booking platforms "in the coming future." For now, Chesky said he is focused on using AI to extend Airbnb's own growth runway. He told CNBC that first-time bookers are growing at the fastest pace in four years and said the U.S. business accelerated from the first quarter. Hotels, meanwhile, are growing three times faster than the company's traditional home listings as Airbnb expands beyond the home-rental marketplace it built its name on. "We are not a company whose best days were in the 2010s," Chesky said. "We are a company where the best days are in front of us." 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Airbnb beats, raises its outlook, and credits AI

Airbnb beat expectations and raised its forecast for the second time this year. It handed most of the credit to one thing: artificial intelligence. The short-term rental company reported second-quarter results on Thursday, and the numbers were strong. Revenue rose 17% to $3.6bn. Net income was $816m, or $1.37 a share, up from $1.03 a year earlier. Gross booking value reached $27.2bn, and guests booked 148.3 million nights and seats, up 10%. All of it came in ahead of Wall Street. The stock jumped about 10% in after-hours trading. Airbnb also raised its full-year outlook for a second time in 2026. It now expects revenue growth of "at least mid teens", up from "low to mid teens". Growth sped up not only in newer markets but in core ones, the US, France, the UK and Australia. The AI pitch What set the letter apart was its framing. It said Airbnb had rebuilt itself "from the ground up to be an AI-native company". On the earnings call, chief executive Brian Chesky went further. He told analysts that "AI is the best thing to ever happen to Airbnb". The specifics behind that claim are about speed. Airbnb says AI has cut the time from concept to delivery by as much as 60%. It also shipped nearly 80% more features than a year earlier. Its support assistant now works in more than 50 languages. It resolves nearly 45% of issues without a human, and has cut support cost per booking by about 16%. More is planned. Later this year Airbnb will test an AI search that takes plain-language requests and replies conversationally. It is also building AI home comparisons and a voice assistant for phone support. Chesky said the new search would be "hopefully less chatty". He warned it could take "months and months to retrain the customer". What the AI story leaves out The quarter had other engines. Airbnb was an official supporter of the FIFA World Cup. That put over 150,000 host-city homes on the platform for the first time, and drew a wave of new users. A weaker dollar helped too. Strip out currency swings and that 17% revenue rise becomes 13%, with about three points of next quarter's growth down to foreign exchange. The services Airbnb keeps citing as proof of reinvention are still small. Grocery delivery, car rentals, luggage storage and boutique hotels are early. Hotels grew about three times faster than the core homes business, yet remain a single-digit share of nights booked. Airbnb also guided margins to slip a little next quarter. None of this makes the AI claims wrong, and rivals are pushing the same way. Hotels are moving into chatbots, Google is turning maps into an agentic travel booker, and startups are rebuilding the travel agent around AI. The open question is the one every firm now faces. Does AI that makes a company faster also make it bigger?

Airbnb shares surge 15% to four-year high on raised forecast, AI gains

Airbnb shares surged nearly 15% after the company raised its annual revenue growth forecast, citing resilient global travel demand and AI-driven efficiency. Better-than-expected quarterly revenue and lower customer-support costs reinforced investor confidence despite ongoing Middle East tensions. Airbnb shares surged 14.9% to a four-year high of $174.23 in early trading on Friday as investors welcomed its raised annual revenue-growth forecast and signs that its AI investments were paying off. The stronger outlook also eased concerns about the Iran war's impact on global travel demand. Citing resilient travel demand, Airbnb now expects full-year revenue growth of at least the mid-teens, compared with its previous forecast of low- to mid-teens, Reuters reported. US MarketsPowered By As on 07 Aug 2026, 07:52 PM IST S&P 500 Top Gainers Airbnb175.64(15.82%) Microchip Technology83.27(11.98%) Palantir Technologies170.01(9.04%) Newmont112.97(7.15%) Gainers" S&P 500 Top Losers Trade Desk14.13(-20.03%) Coterra Energy32.56(-8.62%) Seagate Technology Hldgs779.73(-8.58%) ResMed212.32(-4.89%) Losers" Second-quarter revenue reached $3.61 billion, surpassing analysts' estimate of $3.57 billion, according to LSEG data. As the Iran war enters its sixth month, hotel operators and online travel platforms are relying on resilient leisure demand and major international sporting events to cushion potential disruption. "Despite the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, we continue to see strong underlying demand globally," Finance Chief Elinor Mertz told Reuters on Thursday, adding that the company had not factored any significant impact into its current-quarter outlook. Airbnb also highlighted the benefits of its AI tools, easing concerns that the technology could disrupt traditional travel companies. Earlier this week, Booking said its AI investments were generating positive returns. "In addition to building out services and experiences, Airbnb is growing hotel supply, such that room nights grew at three times the rate of homes. We see these verticals adding billions in incremental bookings through the end of the decade," Morningstar analyst Dan Wasiolek was quoted by Reuters as saying. "AI is the best thing to ever happen to Airbnb," CEO Brian Chesky said on a post-earnings call. Airbnb said customer-support costs per booking fell about 16% from a year earlier, partly due to improvements in its AI assistant.

Airbnb Says AI Is Driving Faster Growth, Higher Bookings and Better Margins | PYMNTS.com

The travel platform beat its own expectations on revenue, bookings and profitability while raising its full-year outlook, CEO Brian Chesky said on the Thursday evening (Aug. 6) call. He credited this growth to years of product improvements that are now accelerating with the help of artificial intelligence, making it easier for travelers to book, hosts to manage listings and the company to launch new offerings faster. Chesky said AI has reduced development time for some initiatives by as much as 60% while increasing the number of product features and improvements shipped during the first half of the year by nearly 80% compared with the same period last year. The company pointed to several examples of the technology's growing role across the platform. AI-generated listing and review summaries are helping travelers evaluate properties more quickly. New pricing tools are helping hosts optimize rates. An AI-powered customer service assistant now operates in more than 50 languages and resolves nearly 45% of inquiries without human intervention, contributing to a roughly 16% decline in customer support cost per booking, according to the company. Executives also highlighted the expanding role of flexible payments. Airbnb's Reserve Now, Pay Later program accounted for more than 20% of gross booking value during the quarter, driving additional bookings, longer booking lead times and higher average daily rates. Airbnb recently expanded the number of eligible bookings for this program. The company recently expanded its Airbnb Services program to include grocery delivery, airport pickups, luggage storage and car rentals while adding thousands of boutique hotels and nearly doubling the number of available Airbnb Experiences. Hotels remain a small portion of total bookings but are growing roughly three times faster than the core homes business. Chesky said the hotel strategy has exceeded his expectations, attracting strong interest from hotel operators while introducing new customers who often return to book traditional Airbnb homes. Key Figures * Revenue increased 17% year over year to $3.6 billion, exceeding the company's outlook. * Gross booking value climbed 16% to $27.2 billion, while nights and experiences booked increased 10% from a year earlier. * Net income reached $816 million, adjusted EBITDA totaled $1.3 billion with a 35% adjusted EBITDA margin. The company raised its full-year outlook and now expects revenue growth to be at least in the mid-teens while forecasting an adjusted EBITDA margin of at least 35.5%, up from its previous guidance of 35%.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky says AI is super-charging company after he 'underestimated' tech

Airbnb stock shot up over 15% Friday after it notched one of its strongest growth quarters in years, with CEO Brian Chesky crediting AI - after fearing the tech could spell trouble for tech companies like his. He told CNBC that he'd spend "a lot more" on AI in 2026, raising Airbnb's full-year outlook. "I have so underestimated the impact of AI," the exec said, adding that the eye-watering cost of implementing AI "pales in comparison" to the revenue and productivity Airbnb has been getting in return. AI is helping Airbnb attract more bookings, streamlining hosts' ability to list and price homes, and is lowering customer-service costs, Chesky explained. Airbnb's second-quarter results Thursday beat analysts' estimates, including revenue that jumped 17% from $3.1 billion a year earlier and net income that increased to $816 million from $642 million, or $1.03 per share, a year ago. Chesky's company -- which hired Meta's former head of generative AI Ahmad Al-Dahle as its chief technology officer in January -- said it is testing AI-powered search functions, AI-generated listing suggestions and answers for guests. The tech is helping hosts create and price listings, too. Chesky said that 45% of guests who interact with Airbnb's AI customer service agent never need to speak with a human. Airbnb has been aiming to boost revenue after New York City -- one of its most significant markets -- cracked down on the hosting platform. In April, The Post reported that over the prior 11 months, 605 registered hosts were sent warning letters from NYC's Office of Special Enforcement about their illegal listings. In March, OSE conducted a review of approved listings and found that 27% of the them are considered illegal, the agency said. Chesky said he is bullish on open-source models for consumer-facing products, though he declined to name which of the models Airbnb is using, citing competition concerns. He said Airbnb is using pricey frontier models - parlance for the most powerful AI systems - for some undertakings, but for most consumer-facing tasks, lesser-powerful models are doing just fine. "We are going to spend a lot more on AI tokens this year than we forecasted," Chesky said, referencing the units by which AI use is measured. "But that's great because the ROI is there, and therefore our revenue is much higher." The exec credited Al-Dahle with Airbnb's AI makeover, saying the company had been "maybe middle of the pack in AI" before he arrived. Since the former Meta AI guru joined, Chesky said Airbnb has seen more demand and supply and cheaper customer service.

Airbnb Boosts Full-Year Forecast on Strong Demand as AI Bets Pay Off -- Update

Airbnb raised its forecast for the year, citing an expansion in global demand as it uses artificial intelligence to improve its platform. The short-term-rental company said Thursday it now expects revenue to increase by at least a mid-teens rate this year, up from its prior projection for growth in the low- to mid-teens. The updated guidance factors in strong demand on Airbnb's platform across all regions, the company said. In the latest quarter, year-over-year growth in nights booked accelerated in Airbnb's new markets as well as its largest core markets, including a ramp up from travelers from the U.S., France, the U.K. and Australia. Airbnb said those trends show that efforts to improve its product--with the help of AI--are working. The company has been able to build and iterate faster with the technology, allowing it to ship more new features and improvements compared to a year ago. In the second quarter, for example, Airbnb rolled out updates that allow guests to see more relevant recommendations on its home page and in search results, and redesigned its sign-up, login and checkout processes. Those changes have gotten more users to follow through on bookings, the company said. Airbnb has also been introducing AI tools to help hosts improve their listings and increase their earnings potential, and is using AI to automate customer support. "This faster pace of innovation is reshaping nearly every part of Airbnb and we believe it's one of the reasons we're outperforming our largest peers," the company said in a letter to shareholders. Chief Executive Brian Chesky said the product improvements are part of Airbnb's efforts to rebuild itself from the ground up to become an AI-native company. Airbnb now has more world-class talent than ever before, he added. "Said simply, AI is the best thing to ever happen to Airbnb," Chesky said during a call with analysts. The stock gained 10%, to $167.25, in late trading Thursday. At market close, shares were up 12% year to date. Airbnb's second-quarter profit was $816 million, or $1.37 a share, compared with $642 million, or $1.03 a share, a year earlier. Analysts polled by FactSet expected earnings of $1.26 a share. Revenue rose 17%, to $3.61 billion, compared with analyst estimates of $3.58 billion. Gross booking value was $27.2 billion, up 16% year over year. Analysts projected $26.45 billion. For the current third quarter, Airbnb projects revenue will grow 15% to 17% to a range of $4.69 billion to $4.77 billion. Analysts expect $4.61 billion.