Airbnb says its custom 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 in a year, more than 30% of its total customer support tickets will be handled via AI voice and chat in all languages, while also employing a human customer service representative.
“We think this is going to be huge because it will not only reduce Airbnb’s customer service cost base, but it will also be a game changer in the quality of service,” CEO Brian Chesky said at the company’s meeting. fourth quarter profit call this week. This seems to indicate that he believes the AI would do a better job than its human counterparts in solving some problems.
The company also praised the recent appointment of CTO Ahmad Al-Dahle, poached from Meta for its AI expertise and its plans to create an AI-native experience.
Under his guidance, Chesky said Airbnb was about to introduce an app that not only searches for you, but one that “knows” you.
“It will help guests plan their entire trip, help hosts run their businesses better, and help the company operate more efficiently at scale,” Chesky explains, adding that 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 generative AI team at Meta that built the Llama models. He is an expert at combining massive technical scale with world-class design, and that’s exactly how we’re going to transform the Airbnb experience,” said Chesky.
Like other companies primed for AI disruption, Airbnb’s leadership emphasizes the idea that it has a unique database and product that other AI chatbots cannot replicate.
“A chatbot doesn’t have our 200 million verified identities or our 500 million native reviews, and it can’t message the hosts, which 90% of our guests do,” Chesky told analysts on the earnings call. Instead, he pitched the idea of combining AI with the Airbnb experience, which he said would help accelerate growth.
The company predicts revenue growth will be in the “low double digits” this year after bringing in $2.78 billion in the fourth quarter. above estimates of $2.72 billion. This quarter, the company expects revenue of $2.59 billion to $2.63 billion, higher than Wall Street forecasts of $2.53 billion.
Investors still wanted to know whether AI platforms could pose a risk in the long term, assuming they enter the short-term rental market. However, Chesky pushed back on that idea, saying Airbnb isn’t just the consumer-facing app; it’s also the host app, the customer service and the protections it offers, such as insurance and user verifications.
“We’ve built this over 18 years. We process over $100 billion in payments through the platform,” he said.
Meanwhile, AI chatbots perform a function similar to search in that they deliver top-of-the-funnel traffic, he noted. That traffic also converts faster than Google’s traffic, Chesky pointed out, suggesting the shift to AI would benefit Airbnb.
The company is already using AI to power its searches, with the feature now enabled for a “very small percentage” of Airbnb’s traffic as it experiments to make its search more conversational. Later, the company plans to integrate sponsored listings into search results.
While Spotify told investors this week that its top developers hadn’t written a single line of code since December, Airbnb offered a higher benchmark for its own internal AI adoption thanks to AI. The company said 80% of its engineers are now using AI tools, and it is working to bring this to 100% soon.
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