Airbnb says its personalized AI agent now handles about a third of its 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 total customer support tickets will be handled by voice AI and chat in all languages where it also employs a human customer service agent.
“We think this is going to be huge because not only does it reduce the cost base of Airbnb’s customer service, but the quality of service is going to be a huge change,” CEO Brian Chesky said during the company’s presentation. fourth quarter earnings call this week. This seems to suggest that he believes AI would do a better job than its human counterparts at solving certain issues.
The company also highlighted the recent hiring of CTO Ahmad Al-Dahle, poacher from Meta for its AI expertise and plans to create a native AI experience.
With his guidance, Chesky said Airbnb was poised to introduce an app that doesn’t just look for you, but one that “knows you.”
“It will help guests plan their entire trip, help hosts run their businesses better, and help the company operate more efficiently at scale,” Chesky explained, adding that’s why Airbnb brought Al-Dahle on board.
“Ahmed is one of the world’s leading AI experts. He spent 16 years at Apple and most recently led the AI team at Meta that built the Llama models. He’s an expert at combining massive technical scale with world-class design, which is exactly how we’ll transform the Airbnb experience,” noted Chesky.
Like other businesses poised to be disrupted by AI, Airbnb’s leadership is promoting the idea that it has a unique database and product that other AI chatbots can’t replicate.
“A chatbot doesn’t have our 200 million verified identities or our 500 million proprietary reviews and can’t message hosts like 90% of our visitors,” Chesky told analysts during the earnings call. Instead, he floated the idea of layering artificial intelligence on top of the Airbnb experience, which he claimed would help accelerate growth.
The company forecast revenue growth to be in the “low double digits” this year after pulling in $2.78 billion in the fourth quarter, above estimates amounting to 2.72 billion dollars. This quarter, it expects revenue of $2.59 billion to $2.63 billion, topping Wall Street forecasts of $2.53 billion.
Investors still wanted to know whether AI platforms could pose a risk in the long term, assuming they move into the short-term rental market. Chesky, however, dismissed that idea, saying Airbnb isn’t just the consumer-facing app. It’s also the host app, the customer service and the protections it offers like insurance and user verifications.
“We’ve been building this for 18 years. We handle more than $100 billion in payments through the platform,” he said.
Meanwhile, AI chatbots serve a search-like function in that they deliver top traffic, he noted. That traffic also converts at a higher rate than traffic from Google, Chesky pointed out, suggesting that the shift to AI would benefit Airbnb.
The company is already using AI to power its search, with the potential now enabled for a “very small percentage” of Airbnb’s traffic, while it’s experimenting with making its search more conversational. Later, the company plans to integrate sponsored listings into search.
While Spotify this week told investors that its best developers hadn’t written a line of code since December thanks to AI, Airbnb offered a more high-level metric for its own internal AI adoption. The company said that 80% of its engineers now use AI tools and it is working to reach 100% soon.
