Vacation rental market Airbnb is incorporating AI into its customer service operations and broader platform, with custom AI agents trained on millions of customer interactions now handling about a third of its support tickets in North America without the need for an on-site expert.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said in an interview with CNBC:
“From a business perspective, AI is the best thing that’s ever happened to Airbnb, at least in terms of technology change.”
The company reports improved customer satisfaction as AI improves service quality and resolution times. The company also predicts that within a year, more than 30% of tickets worldwide will be handled by AI chat and voice in every language where there is a human agent. Chesky said at Airbnb’s quarterly earnings conference:
“We think this is going to be massive because it not only reduces Airbnb’s customer service cost base, but also makes a huge difference to the quality of service.”
The company is also building AI-native experiences into the app based on proprietary information from customers and hosts to improve travel planning and hosting business operations, enabling Airbnb to operate more efficiently.
Customer service has long been one of Airbnb’s most difficult operational issues, given the volume of reservations, language, disputes, and edge cases. Chesky emphasized that much of the company’s complexity lies behind the scenes, not in the guest-facing apps.
“Most of Airbnb’s business is not the app that our guests use. It’s the host’s app, it’s customer service, it’s payments. Airbnb manages our 5 million hosts, all the activity that happens on our platform, and all the new business we put together,” Chesky told CNBC.
This intelligence also helps platforms protect businesses from AI tools that allow consumers to research and book travel directly, Chesky said.
“We’re not at a software-like layer where AI could potentially do things more efficiently. Most of Airbnb’s business is done in the real world.”
Mr. Chesky elaborated on the results conference as follows:
“This approach is also our strongest defense against disintermediation. Chatbots can provide home listings, but they can’t provide the unique points found on Airbnb. They don’t have our 200 million verified identities, or our 500 million unique reviews. They also can’t send messages to the host, which 90% of our guests have. They can’t provide global payment processing, customer support, or insurance.”
“By layering AI across the Airbnb experience, we believe we are building something that cannot be replicated.”
“These chatbot platforms are very similar to search and will be a great top-of-funnel discovery,” Chesky said, adding, “What we’re seeing is that traffic from chatbots converts at a higher rate than traffic from Google.”
Airbnb will continue to add more AI-based services, including the entire booking and listing experience.
“Currently, AI search is used for a very small percentage of traffic,” Chesky said. “We’re doing a lot of experimentation. The way we do things with AI is much more rapid iterations rather than big launches. And over time, we’ll be experimenting with making AI search more conversational and integrating it into things other than travel, and eventually we’ll be looking at sponsored listings as a result of that. But we want to perfect AI search first.”
“AI is obviously very unpredictable, so you can’t schedule it, but we want to be the first company in e-commerce to really bring conversational search to life.”
The company needs to be an innovator, as text-based chatbot interfaces are difficult to adapt to visual e-commerce products, and customers need to be able to compare options across tabs.
Airbnb says culture, not just technology, will determine AI success
Airbnb’s goal is to “build a team to make us a more AI-native company,” Chesky said.
To this end, Ahmed Aldar joined the company last month as Chief Technology Officer. He led Meta’s GenAI team, which built the Llama Large-Scale Language Model (LLM), and previously worked at Apple.
“This is a huge partnership for him and me, and we have to make sure Airbnb is at the forefront of companies leaning into AI,” Chesky told CNBC, calling the move a technological and cultural decision.
“Companies where founders lead companies and are ready to change and transform will benefit from AI, because AI means everyone changes, and if you don’t change, you’re going to be destroyed. So if you don’t destroy yourself, someone else will. And we’re not going to allow people to destroy themselves…We’re going to destroy ourselves first.”
For CX leaders focused on this space, Airbnb’s approach highlights the role of company culture in adapting to the changing AI landscape. If deployments continue as planned, guests and hosts may soon be interacting with AI as the default layer throughout the experience.
