Vacation rentals marketplace Airbnb is embedding AI across its customer service operations and the broader platform, with its custom AI agent trained on millions of customer interactions now handling around a third of its support tickets in North America without needing a live specialist.
Airbnb’s CEO, Brian Chesky told CNBC in an interview:
“From a business standpoint, AI is the best thing that ever happened to Airbnb, at least from a technology shift.”
The company reports that its customer satisfaction has increased as AI has improved service quality and resolution times. And it expects that in a year’s time, more than 30 percent of tickets globally will be handled by AI chat and voice in all the languages where it has human agents. Chesky said on Airbnb’s quarterly earnings call:
“We think this is going to be massive because not only does this reduce the cost base of Airbnb customer service, but the quality of service is going to be a huge step change.”
The company is also building an AI-native experience into its apps that builds on its proprietary information from customers and hosts to help them better plan trips and run hosting businesses, as well as enabling Airbnb to operate more efficiently.
Customer service has long been one of Airbnb’s hardest operational problems, given the volume of bookings, languages, disputes and edge cases involved. Chesky emphasized that much of the company’s complexity lives behind the scenes rather than in the guest-facing app.
“Most of Airbnb’s business is not the app that a guest uses. It’s the host app, it’s the customer service, it’s the payments. It’s managing 5 million hosts and all the activity that happens on our platform and all the new businesses that we put together,” Chesky told CNBC.
That intelligence can also help the platform defend its business from AI tools that allow consumers to research and book travel directly, Chesky said.
“We’re not a software-like layer that AI could potentially do more efficiently. Most of Airbnb’s business is in the real world.”
Chesky elaborated on the earnings call:
“This approach is also our strongest defense against disintermediation. A chatbot can give you a list of homes. But it cannot give you the unique points you find on Airbnb. A chatbot does not have our 200,000,000 verified identities, or our 500,000,000 proprietary review. And it cannot message the host, 90% of our guests do. It cannot provide global payment processing, customer support, or insurance.”
“By layering AI over the entire Airbnb experience, we believe we are building something that is impossible to replicate.”
“These chatbot platforms are going to be very similar to search, going to be good top-of-funnel discoveries,” Chesky said, adding, “What we see is that traffic that comes from chatbots converts at a higher rate than traffic that comes from Google.”
Airbnb will add more AI-based offerings over time, including throughout the booking and listing experience.
“AI search is live to a very small percent of traffic right now,” Chesky said. “We are doing a lot of experimentation. The way we do things with AI is much more rapid iteration, not big launches. And over time, we are going to be experimenting with making AI search more conversational, integrating it into more than trip, and, eventually, we will be looking at sponsor listings as a result of that. But we want to first nail AI search.”
“I cannot put a timeline on it because AI is obviously highly unpredictable, but we want to… be the first company in ecommerce that really nails conversational search.”
The company will need to be an innovator, as text-based chatbot interfaces are difficult to apply to ecommerce products that are visual and customers need to be able to compare options across tabs.
Airbnb Says Culture, Not Just Technology, Determines AI Success
The aim is for Airbnb to “build a team to make our company much more of an AI-native company,” Chesky said.
To that end, Ahmed Al-Dahle last month joined the company as Chief Technology Officer, having led the GenAI team at Meta that built the Llama large language model (LLM), and previously worked at Apple.
“This is a really big partnership that he and I have to really make sure Airbnb is on the frontier of companies leaning into AI,” Chesky told CNBC, framing the move as both a technical and cultural decision.
“The founder led companies, and the companies that are prepared to change and transform are the companies that are going to benefit from AI, because AI means everyone changes, and if you don’t change, you’re going to be disrupted. So if you don’t disrupt yourself, someone else will. And we’re not going to allow people to disrupt ourselves… We’re going to disrupt ourselves first.”
For CX leaders watching the space, Airbnb’s approach emphasizes the role of company culture in adapting to the changing currents of AI. If the rollout continues as planned, guests and hosts may soon find themselves interacting with AI as a default layer across the entire experience.
