Airbnb may be taking slow steps to roll out AI capabilities to its consumer interface, but the company is rapidly deploying the technology to build its products. The company announced earlier this year that 60% of its code is written by AI. Co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky said in the latest earnings call that AI is helping Airbnb create features quickly.
Chesky said that thanks to AI, the company was able to reduce the time from conceptualization to final feature release by 60%.
“We’re now building, testing, and iterating faster than we did just a year ago. We’ve reduced the time from concept to launch by as much as 60% on some of our key initiatives. We’ve also increased the number of features and improvements we’ve shipped this year by nearly 80% compared to the same six months last year,” he said during the company’s second-quarter earnings call.
He pointed out that AI has helped the company in areas such as search, sign-up, checkout and payments. Airbnb has also released features designed to help hosts, including a faster onboarding flow.
Airbnb has been slow to adopt consumer AI features, largely isolated to features like review summaries and listing highlights.
In the past, Chesky has argued that simply adopting a chatbot-like interface doesn’t work for travel use cases. Instead, the company has focused on developing AI for search, discovery, and support.
Chesky said during the earnings call that the company will finally begin testing AI search. Even with the new tests, Airbnb doesn’t want to impose AI searches on customers who are used to the app’s current search and filter features. To address this, Airbnb has added a toggle that allows users to switch to AI search, allowing them to enter natural language and get results in a visual format.
“The titles[in the answers]can actually be generated by AI, and they can be conversational, like if you’re reading a chatbot, but they can be more visual. Then when you go to the product description page, the highlights are generated by AI in real time and customized for you,” Chesky said.
On the backend, customer support is one area where Airbnb is implementing AI at scale. The company plans to launch the AI-powered bot in North America in 2025, expand to more than 50 languages this year, and make voice calls available later this year.
According to the company, approximately 45% of customer issues that begin with an AI agent are completed without human intervention. As a result, the company’s support costs per booking decreased by 16% year over year.
Airbnb reported strong results for the quarter ended June, with revenue up 17% year over year to $3.6 billion and adjusted EBITDA up 21% to $1.3 billion.
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