Airbnb says AI now writes 60% of its code as CEO predicts job descriptions will be rewritten

Airbnb says AI now writes 60% of its new code | TechCrunch

A large part of Airbnb's Q1 2026 earnings call was dedicated to talking about how the company is using AI tools for coding, customer support, and search. Notably, the company claimed that 60% of the code its engineers produced in the quarter was written by AI -- echoing comments by other Google, Microsoft, and Spotify, which have all talked about AI accelerating their programming. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky noted that the company finds AI particularly helpful for building tools for its API partners who manage their properties using different software. "API partners say they want to be better hosts and need better tools. AI gives huge leverage -- where you might have needed a team of 20 engineers before, an engineer can now spin up agents to do a lot of work under supervision. Adopting AI tools gives us leverage to build more software for API partners, accelerating work we previously did not have resources for," Chesky said. Airbnb has been slowly expanding its use of AI for customer support over the past year, and Chesky said on Thursday that its customer support AI bot now handles 40% of issues without escalating to a human agent, up from about 33% earlier this year. The travel company has also been experimenting with using AI to power its search function. However, Chesky acknowledged the difficulty of truly employing AI tools in the travel or e-commerce spaces, pointing to weaknesses in the chatbot user interface. "I do not think anyone has figured out AI for travel or e-commerce yet [...] The design of a chatbot, as currently constructed, does not work for travel or e-commerce. There are four problems: too much text (most of e-commerce is photo-forward); no direct manipulation (you have to type everything rather than adjust sliders); poor comparison (you can get lost trying to compare thousands of options in a thread); and most bookings are multiplayer, while chatbots are primarily single-player, and not map-native. Airbnb said net income rose 3.9% to $160 million in the first quarter, while revenue increased 18% to $2.7 billion, compared to a year earlier. Nights booked went up 9% to 156.2 million in the period. The company said its new "Reserve now, pay later" feature drew almost 20% of its gross booking value in the quarter.

Airbnb CEO Predicts AI Will Rewrite Job Descriptions | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The company's engineers now coauthor 60% of the code they produce with AI, enabling teams to ship faster, iterate more quickly, and deliver more improvements to guests and hosts, according to the letter. In Airbnb's customer support operation, over 40% of the guests who contact its AI Assistant have their issues resolved without a human agent. That means faster resolution times and a 10% year-over-year increase in the company's cost per booking, per the letter. During a Thursday earnings call, Airbnb Chairman, CEO and Co-founder Brian Chesky said the company is at the very beginning of seeing how AI will change how everyone does their jobs, but he thinks of the technology as an accelerant to everything. "I think the No. 1 characteristic of AI is speed," Chesky said. "It just speeds every single thing up. I also think itrequires everyone to be more hands-on and requires everyone to be more nimble and more adaptive to change." With AI, Chesky said, there's not going to be much need for "30,000-feet, hands-off managers," there's going to be much more democratized access to data within companies, and it will eventually require teams to be structured in a new way. Chesky's comments came on the same day that BILL CEO and founder René Lacerte announced during an earnings call that his company will reduce its workforce by 30% by the end of the quarter as it accelerates the use of AI in its operations. Lacerte said when BILL deployed a quality assurance agent, the company found that the agent evaluates all customer interactions, rather than the 1% to 2% that an employee used to review, and that it provides real-time feedback and cues to support staff during calls. "Seeing this in action enables us to transition to completely new ways of operating," Lacerte said. Block CEO Jack Dorsey said during his company's Thursday earnings call that when Block undertook a sweeping organizational restructuring and staff reductions earlier this year, the company aimed to flatten processes and lean more heavily into AI tools across engineering, underwriting and commerce workflows. "One of the strongest outcomes of the action we took is just the speed of decision-making and the ability to act on that decision through the tools," Dorsey said. "Now that these AI tools are handling more of the mundane tasks and we're automating a lot more, we can focus on being a lot more creative and being a lot more innovative again."