Airbnb says a third of its customer support is now handled by AI in the US and Canada
Airbnb says its custom-built 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 within a year, more than 30% of its total customer support tickets will be handled by an AI voice and converse in all languages where it also hires a human customer service agent.
“We think this is going to be huge because not only is this going to reduce Airbnb’s customer service cost base, but the level of service is going to be a big game changer,” CEO Brian Chesky said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call this week. This seems to suggest that he believes that AI will do a better job than its human counterparts in solving certain problems.
The company also touted its recent hire of CTO Ahmad Al-Dahle, who was poached by Meta for his AI expertise, and its plans to create native AI experiences.
With his direction, Chesky said Airbnb is ready to launch an app that doesn’t just search, but “knows.”
“It will help guests plan their entire trip, help hosts run their businesses better, and help the company scale,” Chesky explained, adding that this is why Airbnb brought Al-Dahle on board.
“Ahmad is one of the world’s leading AI experts. He spent 16 years at Apple, and most recently led the AI production team at Meta that built the Llama models. He is a master at pairing large-scale technology with world-class design, which is exactly how we will transform what Airbnb does,” Chesky commented.
Like other businesses poised to be disrupted by AI, Airbnb’s leadership is pushing the idea that it has a unique website and product that other AI chatbots can’t replicate.
“The chatbot doesn’t have our 200 million verified IDs or our 500 million related reviews, and it can’t refer hosts, which is 90% of our visitors,” Chesky told analysts during an earnings call. Instead, he floated the idea of layering AI on top of Airbnb’s experience, which he said would help accelerate growth.
The company predicts revenue growth will be in the “low double digits” this year, after pulling in $2.78 billion in the fourth quarter, above estimates of $2.72 billion. For the quarter, it expects revenue of $2.59 billion to $2.63 billion, above Wall Street forecasts of $2.53 billion.
Investors still want to know if AI platforms can be dangerous in the long term, considering that they are moving into the short-term rental market. However, Chesky refuted that idea, saying that Airbnb is not just a consumer-facing app; it’s also the host’s operating system, customer service, and protection it offers, such as insurance and user verification.
“We have built this in 18 years. We manage more than $100 billion in payments through the platform,” he said.
At the time, AI chatbots were working similarly to search, because they brought in much higher traffic, he noted. That traffic also converts at a higher rate than traffic from Google, Chesky pointed out, suggesting that the shift to AI will benefit Airbnb.
The company already uses AI to power its search, a feature now enabled for a “very small percentage” of Airbnb’s traffic, as it tries to make its search more conversational. Later, the company plans to integrate sponsored listings within the search.
While Spotify this week told investors that its best developers haven’t written a single line of code since December, thanks to AI, Airbnb provided a high-level metric on its internal AI acquisition. The company said that 80% of its engineers are already using AI tools, and it is working to get that to 100% soon.
