Airbnb has taken its time rolling out AI features within its app, but CEO Brian Chesky said Friday that the company now plans to build features based on a large-scale language model to help users search listings, plan trips, and hosts manage their properties.
On the company’s fourth quarter conference call, Chesky said the company wants to increase its use of large-scale language models for customer search, support and engineering.
“We’re building AI-powered experiences where apps know you, not just search for you. This will help guests plan their entire trip, help hosts run their businesses better, and help companies operate more efficiently at scale,” he said.
The company separately said it was testing a new feature that would allow users to search and ask questions about properties and locations using natural language queries.
Currently, Airbnb offers an LLM-based customer service bot for some personalization and communication. The new AI search feature is expected to “evolve into a more comprehensive and intuitive search experience throughout travel.”
In response to an analyst’s question about whether Airbnb will launch sponsored property slots within AI Search, Chesky said the company wants to get the design and user experience right first.
“Currently, AI search applies to a very small percentage of our traffic. We’re experimenting a lot. Over time, we’ll experiment with making AI search more conversational and integrating it into more than just travel, and eventually we’ll look at sponsored listings as a result of that,” Chesky said. Airbnb added that it will consider designing ad units to fit conversational search flows.
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Chesky said Airbnb plans to leverage the AI expertise of new CTO Ahmad Al-Dahle (he previously worked on Meta’s Llama model) to make the app more useful by leveraging its identity and review data.
Airbnb claims its AI-powered customer support bot, which launched in North America last year, now handles a third of customer issues without human intervention. Chesky noted that there are plans to allow customers to call an AI bot for assistance and expand language coverage to include customer support.
“If we’re successful in a year, a lot more tickets will be handled by personalized service agents in more languages, in every language we have live agents in. AI customer service will be voice, not just chat,” he said.
The company is also considering ways to increase the use of AI internally. Airbnb says 80% of its engineers use AI tools, but the goal is to reach 100%.
Airbnb reported better-than-expected revenue of $2.78 billion in the fourth quarter, up 12% from the year-ago quarter.
