Airbnb's Cautious Approach to AI: Prioritizing Customer Service Over Trip Planning

Why Airbnb's CEO is hugely ambitious for its app, but pragmatic about the potential for AI right now

When it comes to AI, Airbnb has a simple enough objective, as articulated by CEO and co-Founder Brian Chesky: We want to be the leading company for AI-enabled traveling and, eventually, living. The 'eventually' caveat is an important one, particularly at a time when the AI hype cycle remains fundamentally out-of-control. Chesky is clear about what he sees as the tech's limitations at present: I think it's still really early. It's probably similar to like the mid to late 90s for the Internet. So I think it's going to have a profound impact on travel, but I don't think it's yet fundamentally changed any of the large travel platforms...[for] trip planning, it's still early. I don't think it's quite ready for prime time. With that in mind, Airbnb will be starting its own AI journey with a use case that is already seen as an established launch point for exploration - customer service, with plans for what Chesky calls "AI-powered customer support" this Summer. He expands on the strategic reasoning here: As you imagine, we get millions of contacts every year. AI can do an incredible job of customer service, can speak every language 24/7. It can read a corpus of thousands of pages of documents. And so we're starting with customer support. And over the coming years, what we're going to do is we're going to take that AI powered customer service agent and we're going to bring it into essentially Airbnb search to eventually graduate to be a travel and living concierge. This will be "a massive change for Airbnb", he argues, but there are other gains to be had, most notably around engineering productivity, but again, not just yet: Here's what I've heard talking to other tech CEOs - most of them haven't seen a material change in engineering productivity. Most of the engineers [that] are using AI tools, they're seeing some productivity, [but] I don't think it's flowing like a fundamental step change in productivity yet. I think a lot of us believe in some kind of medium term of a few years [where] you could easily see a 30% increase in technology and engineering productivity. And then, of course, beyond that I think it could be an order of magnitude more productivity. But that's going to be down the road. I think that's going to be something that almost all companies benefit from. I think the younger, more innovative start-up companies might benefit a little bit more because they'll have engineers who are more likely to adopt the tool. That's probably pretty important. But this is what I'm hearing from other people and we're pretty much having the same experience. While he's clearly a pragmatist when it comes to AI's transformative potential, Chesky is nonetheless capable of being caught up in enthusiasm for developments in the space: I think it's a really exciting time in the space because you've seen like with DeepSeek and more competition with models is models are getting cheaper or nearly free, they're getting faster and they're getting more intelligent and for all this purpose, starting to get commoditized. What I think that means is a lot of value is going to accrue to the platforms. And ultimately I think the best platforms, the best applications are going to be the ones that most accrue the value from AI. And I think we're going to be the ones to do that with traveling and living. Away from AI futures, Airbnb has been through something of an overhaul, explains Chesky: Over the past several years, we've been preparing for Airbnb's next chapter and we wanted to make sure that guests and hosts love our core service before we introduce something new. So we listened to their feedback and we rolled out more than 535 features and upgrades to improve the experience. This has taken a long time to carry out, but most of the work on the tech stack has now been completed, he adds: You're going to see this year like almost every part of the application is going to be essentially rebuilt from the ground up...every year we are increasing the throughput of features and upgrades. This summer's release is going to be significantly larger than past ones and I expect the ones after that will be larger. Basically what it's going to lead to is fewer engineers being able to basically ship features faster. So there's a pretty, pretty huge gain here. What you should expect is this year we're going to launch significantly more upgrades than last year - and every year it should increase. Watch out for lots that's new ahead, he says: What we did is we rebuilt the tech stack from the ground up. We listened to guest and host feedback, made over 500 upgrades.. I think we're now ready for this next platform, next chapter, to expand beyond our core where Airbnb is just a place to stay. There are a couple of strategic philosophies at play here, he adds: Number one, I think we can do this quite efficiently because we are not going to launch separate apps or separate brands. We're going to have one app, one brand, the Airbnb app. We want the Airbnb app, kind of similar to Amazon, to be one place you go for all of your traveling and living needs. A place to stay is just really, frankly, a very small part of the overall equation. Expect one or two new businesses to launch every year, he predicts, with each one of those taking three to five years or so to scale with a goal of getting to a billion dollars revenue run rate: We're going to start initially with things very closely adjacent to travel.So when people book an Airbnb, there's a lot of experiences and services and other things that would make their stay more special. It would even include things they wouldn't think to search for. From there, we're just going to keep expanding. We're going to expand out to more host services to enable them to become better hosts, and then eventually we'll move it further and further away from our core. The Amazon comparison is an apt one, he concludes: They started with books. The nearest adjacency to books was DVDs and CDs back when people bought physical media. And then they went to toys and other thing and eventually they ended up with fashion. Pretty soon they were doing things pretty far adjacent from media and books. This is the year you'll see the beginning of a new Airbnb. No-one can fault Chesky for his ambition. He talks about Airbnb is currently used by around 1.6 billion devices a year, but it's not what he calls "a very frequently used app", stating:

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky Is in No Rush to Fully Embrace A.I.

A.I. travel planning isn't "quite ready for prime time," said the Airbnb CEO. Despite Silicon Valley's certified A.I. craze, AirBnb (ABNB) isn't so eager to embrace the new technology just yet -- at least, not across the company's core business of travel planning. "I don't think it's quite ready for prime time," Brian Chesky, Airbnb's chief executive, told analysts yesterday (Feb. 13) during the company's quarterly earnings call. Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters That doesn't mean he isn't excited about its possibilities. The technology will profoundly transform the travel industry one day, according to Chesky. But for now, Airbnb is taking baby steps towards A.I. by experimenting with its impacts on customer service. Later this year, Airbnb will roll out A.I.-powered customer support that can offer multi-lingual support and read through the millions of contracts the company handles annually. The customer service A.I. agent will eventually "graduate" by expanding into Airbnb's search and becoming "a travel and living concierge," said Chesky. A.I. is also already being utilized by Airbnb engineers, a strategy Chesky said has already resulted in small "productivity gains." Major payoffs, however, have yet to be had. "I don't think it's flowing to a fundamental step-change in productivity yet," Chesky said, adding that the technology could result in a roughly 30 percent productivity increase in a few years' time. Hesitation towards A.I. hasn't appeared to hurt Airbnb's business. During the October-December quarter, Airbnb's revenue rose 12 percent year-over-year to $2.5 billion while profit surged 24 percent to $461 million. Both figures beat Wall Street expectations, sending Airbnb stock up nearly 15 percent today. The "Amazon" of travel Yesterday, Airbnb also announced plans to invest up to $250 million throughout 2025 to on new business opportunities that will be unveiled in May. "This is the year you'll see the beginning of a new Airbnb," Chesky told analysts. The grand vision is to create an "Airbnb app kind of similar to Amazon (AMZN)," one that operates as the go-to place "for all of your traveling and living needs," he added. While the initial launches will align more closely to Airbnb's current travel focus, Chesky said he plans to take a page out of Amazon's book by moving "further and further away from our core." Amazon started off as an online bookseller in the 1990s before it began offering other media like DVDs and CDs, eventually expanding into the entire retail space and digital entertainment. "We're going to probably follow that path," said Chesky. The CEO is hoping that the company's new trajectory will bring more active users. While Airbnb is currently accessed by 1.6 billion devices annually, users typically only go to the platform once or twice a year -- a figure Chesky is hoping will eventually become once or twice a week. "We're now ready for this next chapter to expand beyond our core, where Airbnb is just a place to stay," he said.

Airbnb CEO says it's still too early for AI trip planning | TechCrunch

Airbnb says it's poised to roll out AI technology -- but not in the way consumers may have initially wanted. Instead of offering tools to help travelers plan or book their trips with the help of AI agents, Airbnb is planning to first introduce AI to its customer support system. This update will roll out later this summer, the company told investors during its Q4 2024 earnings call on Thursday. Explained Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky, AI can do "an incredible job" for customer service as it can speak any language and understand thousands of pages of documents. To start, the AI will work as a customer service agent but its capabilities will expand over time. While companies like OpenAI, Google, and others are working on AI agents -- or AI software that can perform a series of tasks on your behalf -- Chesky believes the technology is still too early to be of use to Airbnb just yet. However, he believes that eventually, AI will have a "profound impact on travel," even if nothing has changed for the major travel platforms as of now. "Here's what I think about AI. I think it's still really early," Chesky said. "It's probably similar to... the mid-to-late '90s for the Internet." He noted that other companies were working on integrations around trip planning, but that he thinks it's too soon for AI trip planning. "I don't think it's quite [a] bit ready for prime time," the CEO added. As AI technology continues to develop, Airbnb will expand the AI-powered customer service agent to be a part of Airbnb's search and, at some point much further down the road, it will also become a "travel and living concierge," Chesky said. In addition to customer service, the company reported some small productivity gains from using AI internally for engineering purposes. But here, too, the executive advised caution, saying, "I don't think it's flowing to a fundamental step-change in productivity yet." In a few years, those gains could reach some sort of "medium-term" impact, Chesky noted, like a 30% increase in technology and engineering productivity. Airbnb didn't say if its use of AI would impact headcount, but CFO Ellie Mertz hinted towards greater efficiencies possible in the realm of customer service, in particular. "In terms of '25 and the outlook there, I would say, there's incremental opportunities across our variable costs, so areas like payment processing and customer service opportunities to just be, frankly, a little bit more efficient and to deliver some margin expansion there," Mertz told investors. Airbnb reported strong earnings in Q4 that saw shares pop by 15% after beating on both earnings and revenue. The company pulled in $2.48 billion in revenue in the quarter, above estimates of $2.42 billion, and earnings per share of 73 cents, above the 58 cents expected.