Airbnb says its custom-built AI agents currently handle about one-third of customer support issues in North America, and the company is preparing to roll out the feature globally. If successful, the company believes that in a year’s time more than 30% of all customer support tickets will be handled by AI voice and chat in all languages that also employ human customer service agents.
“We think this is going to be massive because it not only reduces the cost base of Airbnb’s customer service, but also changes the quality of service,” CEO Brian Chesky said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call this week. This seems to suggest that he believes AI will do a better job of solving some problems than its human counterparts.
The company also touted its recent hire of chief technology officer Ahmad Aldar, who was hired from Meta for AI expertise, and plans to create an AI-native experience.
Chesky said that with his guidance, Airbnb is ready to introduce an app that doesn’t just search for you, but “gets to know you.”
“It helps guests plan their entire trip, it helps hosts run their businesses more efficiently, and it helps companies run more efficiently at scale,” Chesky explained, adding that’s why Airbnb brought on Aldahl.
“Ahmad is one of the world’s leading AI experts. He spent 16 years at Apple and most recently led the generative AI team that built the llama model at Meta. He is an expert at combining massive technical scale with world-class design, and that’s exactly how we transform the Airbnb experience,” Chesky said.
Like other companies preparing for AI disruption, Airbnb’s management is pushing the idea that it has a unique database and product that other AI chatbots cannot imitate.
“Chatbots don’t have our 200 million verified IDs or our 500 million unique reviews. They also can’t send messages to hosts, which 90% of guests do,” Chesky told analysts on an earnings call. Instead, he proposed the idea of layering AI on top of the Airbnb experience, which he argued would help accelerate growth.
The company expects sales growth to be in the “low double digits” this year after posting $2.78 billion in the fourth quarter, beating expectations of $2.72 billion. Revenue for the quarter is expected to be between $2.59 billion and $2.63 billion, beating Wall Street’s estimate of $2.53 billion.
Investors still wanted to know whether AI platforms could be a long-term risk, assuming they enter the short-term rental market. But Chesky pushed back against that idea, saying Airbnb is more than just a consumer app. This also includes host apps, customer service, and protections such as insurance and user authentication.
“We’ve been building this for 18 years. We’ve processed over $100 billion in payments through this platform,” he said.
On the other hand, he noted that AI chatbots serve a similar function to search in that they deliver top-of-funnel traffic. That traffic also has a higher conversion rate than traffic from Google, Chesky noted, suggesting the move to AI will benefit Airbnb.
The company is already using AI to power search, a feature currently enabled on a “small portion” of Airbnb’s traffic, while experimenting with making search more conversational. After that, the company plans to integrate sponsored listings within search.
Spotify told investors this week that its best developers haven’t written a single line of code since December thanks to AI, but Airbnb provided more sophisticated metrics about its AI implementation. The company said that 80% of its engineers are currently using AI tools, and it is working to get that to 100% in the near future.
