Brian Chesky, the co-founder and chief executive of Airbnb, is stepping into artificial intelligence in a more serious way than ever before. According to people familiar with his plans, he’s setting up a brand-new AI lab.
The catch: it isn’t an Airbnb project. The lab will operate separately from the company, building AI models with an emphasis on how people actually interact with technology and how it’s designed. Chesky isn’t walking away from Airbnb to do it, either. He’ll stay on as CEO and won’t take an equivalent top role at the new lab, which is still in the early stages of raising money.
For someone who has spent two decades running one of the world’s biggest rental marketplaces, this marks his first real move into building AI rather than just using it. And he has been using it heavily. On an earnings call in May, Chesky said AI now handles close to 60 percent of his engineers’ coding work, which has let teams ship features faster and move more quickly. He’s also pushed his managers to get hands-on with AI tools, including Anthropic’s Claude, arguing that staying current is part of keeping their jobs.
Airbnb has rolled plenty of AI into the customer-facing side of its business, too. There’s a support chatbot that, by Chesky’s account, now resolves about 40 percent of inquiries without a human stepping in. Other features help travelers make sense of listings, such as a tool that pulls together review highlights so users can quickly gauge things like location, amenities, and how friendly a host is. The company is also experimenting with an AI companion to help build wish lists.
Chesky has been openly enthusiastic about what AI has done for the business, describing it as one of the best things to ever happen to the company. He’s pointed out that AI-powered customer service is already handling a sizable share of tickets in North America and leaving customers more satisfied. He’s also noted that referrals coming from chatbots have converted into more traffic than referrals from traditional search engines.
One thing Airbnb hasn’t done is team up with OpenAI to build a ChatGPT plugin. Chesky’s reasoning has been that the available tools simply aren’t reliable enough yet for the company to lean on them.
