Airbnb leans on AI to automate customer support and search

Airbnb is currently handling roughly a third of its customer support via AI in the U.S. and Canada. If successful, the company believes that in a year’s time, it will handle more than 30% of its total customer support tickets globally using AI voice and chat in all languages where it employs human customer service agents. CEO Brian Chesky noted during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call this week that this shift will reduce the cost base of Airbnb’s customer service while delivering a significant step change in the quality of service.

Chesky positioned Airbnb’s data as a competitive advantage against generic AI chatbots. “A chatbot doesn’t have our 200 million verified identities or our 500 million proprietary reviews, and it can’t message the hosts, which 90% of our guests do,” Chesky said. He added that the company has built this over 18 years and handles more than $100 billion in payments through the platform. Airbnb is also using AI to power its search, experimenting with making search more conversational for a very small percentage of its traffic, with plans to later integrate sponsored listings.

To drive its transition toward an AI-native experience, Airbnb recently hired Ahmad Al-Dahle as CTO. Al-Dahle, who spent 16 years at Apple, most recently led the generative AI team at Meta that built the Llama models—Meta’s generative AI model family. Chesky explained that Al-Dahle’s guidance will help guests plan entire trips, help hosts better run their businesses, and help the company operate more efficiently at scale. Internally, Airbnb reported that 80% of its engineers currently use AI tools, with a goal of reaching 100% soon.

Financially, the company expects revenue growth to be in the low double digits for the year. Its fourth-quarter and upcoming first-quarter financial figures include:

• Fourth-quarter revenue reached $2.78 billion, beating estimates of $2.72 billion.
• Expected first-quarter revenue is forecast between $2.59 billion to $2.63 billion, above Wall Street forecasts of $2.53 billion.

Why it matters

Airbnb is attempting to turn its massive repository of verified user data into a competitive moat against generic AI search engines. Simultaneously, the company is leveraging AI integration to lower its operational costs and improve efficiency at scale.