Airbnb says its custom-built AI agent now handles about a third of customer support issues in North America and is preparing to roll out the feature globally. If successful, the company believes that in a year, more than 30% of its customer support tickets will be handled through AI voice and chat in all languages, where it also employs a human customer service agent.
“We think it’s going to be massive because not only will it reduce the cost base of Airbnb’s customer service, but the quality of service will be a huge change,” CEO Brian Chesky said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call this week. This seems to indicate that they believe that AI would do a better job than its human counterparts at solving some problems.
The company also touted its recent hire of CTO Ahmad Al-Dahle, who was lured away from Meta for his AI expertise, and its plans to create an AI experience.
With his leadership, Chesky said Airbnb is poised to introduce an app that not only finds you, but that “knows” you.
“It will help guests plan their entire trip, help hosts better manage their businesses, and help the company operate more efficiently at scale,” Chesky explained, adding that’s why Airbnb brought Al-Dahle on board.
“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, which built Llama models. He is an expert at pairing massive technical scale with world-class design, which is exactly how we’re going to transform the Airbnb experience,” noted Chesky.
Like other businesses that are waiting to be disrupted by AI, Airbnb management is pushing the idea that it has a unique database and product that other AI chatbots can’t replicate.
“The chatbot doesn’t have our 200 million verified identities or our 500 million custom reviews, and it can’t message hosts, which 90% of our guests do,” Chesky told analysts during the earnings call. Instead, he proposed the idea of layering artificial intelligence on top of the Airbnb experience, which he argued would help accelerate growth.
The company predicts revenue growth will be in the “low double digits” this year, after reaching $2.78 billion in the fourth quarter, above estimates of $2.72 billion. It expects revenue of $2.59 billion to $2.63 billion for the quarter, beating Wall Street forecasts of $2.53 billion.
Investors still wanted to know if AI platforms could be a risk in the long term, assuming they move into the short-term rental market. But Chesky dismissed the idea, saying Airbnb isn’t just an app for consumers; it’s also the hosting application, the customer service, and the protections it offers, such as insurance and user verification.
“We’ve built it over 18 years. We process over $100 billion in payments through the platform,” he said.
Meanwhile, AI chatbots serve a search-like function in that they provide traffic at the beginning of the journey, he noted. That traffic is also converting at a higher rate than traffic from Google, Chesky pointed out, suggesting that the move to AI would benefit Airbnb.
The company already uses AI to power its search, with the feature now enabled for a “very small percentage” of Airbnb traffic while it experiments with making search conversational. Later, the company plans to integrate sponsored listings into search.
While Spotify told investors this week that its top developers haven’t written a single line of code since December, thanks to AI, Airbnb offered a higher-level metric for its own internal adoption of AI. The company said that 80% of its engineers are now using AI tools and it is working to reach 100% soon.