Airbnb wants engineers, and increasingly managers, to code and use AI.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said during an earnings call Thursday that AI is changing the way the company operates. He said nearly 60% of the code generated by the company’s engineers is written by AI.
“This means our team is releasing more features and iterating faster,” Chesky said.
Chesky is the latest CEO to start thinking more flexibly about how much of their company’s code is written with AI. Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said on Tuesday’s earnings call that 50% of the company’s code was AI-generated, but Google recently pegged that number at 75%.
Chesky added that managers have to learn to code themselves and that Airbnb doesn’t have room for “purely human managers” or “30,000 hands-off managers.”
“Like a lot of design and engineering managers, I think I might go back to coding and using Claude code,” he said.
But he didn’t go into details about whether Airbnb would cut management positions, saying, “It’s too early to say what that will mean for how we structure our team in the future.”
His comments about the diminishing importance of pure talent managers echo those of other executives in recent years who have sought to remove layers of management in favor of flatter structures.
Consulting firms like McKinsey & Company recommend that companies use AI agents to streamline operations and reduce the need for managers.
Coinbase announced on Tuesday that it will reduce its workforce by 14%, with CEO Brian Armstrong saying in an