Airbnb has taken its time to roll out artificial intelligence features in the app, but CEO Brian Chesky said Friday that the company now plans to build features powered by big language models that will help users search for listings, plan trips and help hosts manage their properties.
Speaking on the company’s fourth-quarter conference call, Chesky said the company wants to increase its use of large language models for customer discovery, support and engineering.
“We’re creating an AI-native experience where the app doesn’t just look for you. It knows you. It will help guests plan their entire trip, help hosts run their businesses better, and help the company run more efficiently at scale,” he said.
The company said separately that it is testing a new feature that allows users to search for and ask questions about properties and locations using natural language queries.
Airbnb currently offers a customer service bot with an LLM, for personalization and communication. The new AI search feature is expected to “evolve into a more complete and intuitive search experience that spans the journey.”
Asked by the analyst if Airbnb will launch property-sponsored slots within AI search, Chesky said the company wants to get the design and user experience right first.
“AI search is live on a very small percentage of traffic right now. We’re doing a lot of experimentation. Over time, we’ll experiment with making AI search more conversational, integrating it into more of the journey, and eventually we’ll look at sponsored listings as a result of that,” Chesky said, adding that Airbnb will consider designing a chat section to go with the feed.
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Chesky said Airbnb plans to leverage the AI expertise of its new CTO, Ahmad Al-Dahle (he previously worked on Meta’s Llama models), to use its identity vault and audit data to make the app more useful.
Airbnb has claimed that its AI-powered customer support bot, launched in North America last year, now handles a third of customer issues without the need for human intervention. Chesky noted that there are plans to allow customers to call the AI bot for support and to expand language coverage to customer support as well.
“A year from now, if we’re successful, significantly more than 30% of tickets will be handled by a custom service agent, in many more languages, in all the languages where we have live agents. AI customer service won’t just be chat, it’ll be voice,” he said.
The company is also considering increasing its use of AI internally. Airbnb said 80% of its engineers use AI tools, but the goal is to reach 100%.
Airbnb reported better-than-expected revenue of $2.78 billion in the fourth quarter, up 12% from a year earlier.
