Airbnb plans AI-powered search and trip planning, CEO says

Airbnb is stepping up to build an AI-native app experience, making the app more than a search aggregator and turning it into an assistant for planning trips or hosting visitors.

CEO Brian Chesky said during the company’s fourth-quarter conference call that Airbnb is looking to expand the use of large language models to enhance customer experience, according to TechCrunch.

“We are building an AI-native experience where the app does not just search for you. It knows you. It will help guests plan their entire trip, help hosts better run their businesses, and help the company operate more efficiently at scale,” he said.

Chesky also highlighted the AI expertise of the company’s recent hire, CTO Ahmad Al-Dahle, who previously worked at Meta and is expected to play a significant role in developing the company’s AI features.

According to Chesky, Al-Dahle is “an expert at pairing massive technical scale with world-class design, which is exactly how we’re going to transform the Airbnb experience.”

Although Airbnb has taken a relatively measured approach to generative AI, a shareholder letter describes a new feature already in use – an AI search tool that is "focused on giving guests a more natural way to describe what they’re looking for, and ask questions about the listing and location."

“Over time, this will evolve into a more comprehensive and intuitive search experience that extends through the trip,” the letter says.

When asked about the addition of sponsored property slots to AI search, Chesky said that Airbnb is currently experimenting with the feature for a small number of users.

“AI search is live to a very small percentage of traffic right now. We are doing a lot of experimentation. Over time, we are gonna be experimenting with making AI search more conversational, integrating it into more than the trip, and, eventually, we will be looking at sponsor listings as a result of that,” Chesky said.

The shareholder letter adds that AI-powered customer support has been rolled out for English, French, and Spanish-speaking users across the US, Canada, and Mexico, with a third of issues now resolved without an agent. There has also been a notable reduction in resolution time, prompting the company to expand the rollout globally later this year.

Chesky added that if successful, “significantly more than 30% of tickets will be handled by a customer service agent, in many more languages, in all the languages where we have live agents,” making AI customer service not only chat but voice.

Additionally, the company expects to expand its internal AI usage from 80% of engineers to 100%.