Airbnb says its custom AI agents are currently handling about a third of customer support issues in North America, and it is preparing to roll out the feature globally. If successful, the company believes that within a year, more than 30% of all customer support tickets will be handled through AI voice and chat in every language for which it employs human customer service agents.
“We think this is going to be huge because it will not only reduce the underlying costs of Airbnb customer service, but it will also make a big difference in the quality of our service,” CEO Brian Chesky said during Airbnb’s fourth-quarter earnings call this week. This seems to suggest that he believes AI will do a better job than humans at solving some problems.
The company also recently hired CTO Ahmad Al-Dahle, brought in from Meta for his AI expertise, and touted plans to create AI-powered experiences.
Chesky said that under his guidance, Airbnb is ready to introduce apps that “know you” rather than just search for you.
“It will help guests plan their entire trip, it will help hosts run their businesses better, and it will help companies operate more efficiently at scale,” Chesky said, adding why Airbnb brought Al-Dahle here.
“Ahmad is one of the world’s leading AI experts. He spent 16 years at Apple and most recently led the generative AI team at Meta, where he built the Llama model. He is an expert at combining massive technical scale with world-class design. This is how we will transform the Airbnb experience,” said Chesky.
Like other companies poised to be disrupted by AI, Airbnb’s executives are pushing the idea of having a unique database and product that no other AI chatbot can replicate.
“Chatbots don’t have 200 million verified identities or 500 million exclusive reviews and can’t send messages to hosts, which is like 90% of guests messaging,” Chesky told analysts during the earnings call. Instead, he pitched the idea of layering AI on top of the Airbnb experience, which he argued would help accelerate growth.
The company said it expects revenue growth to be “low double digits” this year after generating $2.78 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter, ahead of expectations of $2.72 billion. For the current quarter, the company expects sales of $2.59 billion to $2.63 billion, ahead of Wall Street forecasts of $2.53 billion.
Investors still wanted to know whether AI platforms could pose a long-term risk, assuming they move into the short-term rental market. But Chesky rejected that idea, saying Airbnb isn’t just a consumer-facing app. It’s also the hosted app, customer service, and protections it provides, such as insurance and user verification.
“We’ve been building this over 18 years. We process more than $100 billion in payments through our platform,” he said.
Meanwhile, AI chatbots offer a similar function to search in that they deliver top-level traffic, he noted. Chesky suggested that the shift to AI will benefit Airbnb, noting that this traffic converts at a higher rate than traffic from Google.
The company is already using AI to power search, and is now experimenting with making search more conversational while enabling the feature for a “very small percentage” of Airbnb’s traffic. Later, the company plans to integrate sponsored listings within Search.
This week, Spotify told investors its top developers haven’t written a single line of code since December, but AI has given Airbnb a higher-level metric for its own internal AI adoption. The company says 80% of its engineers are currently using AI tools and is working to get this to 100% soon.
