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Airbnb says that a custom-made AI assistant it now handles about one-third of customer service issues in North America, and plans to roll out the service globally. If successful, the company believes that within a year, more than 30% of all customer service tickets will be handled by AI voice chats in all languages ​​where they also use a human customer service representative.
“We think this will be huge because it will not only reduce costs for Airbnb customers, but the quality of the service will change dramatically,” said CEO Brian Chesky. fourth quarter payment call this week. This seems to indicate that they believe that AI can do a better job than their human counterparts in solving certain problems.
The company also announced its recent hire of CTO Ahmad Al-Dahle, removed from Meta for its AI expertise, and its plans to develop AI-based knowledge.
With his guidance, Chesky said Airbnb is on the verge of bringing an app that doesn’t just search, but “that gets to know you”.
“It will help guests plan their entire trip, help hosts manage their businesses, and help the company operate at scale,” Chesky explained, adding that this is why Airbnb brought Al-Dahle.
“Ahmad is one of the world’s leading AI experts. He spent 16 years at Apple, and most recently he led the AI ​​design team at Meta that built the Llama model. He is an expert in combining great technology with the best design in the world, which is how we can change the experience of Airbnb,” said Chesky.
Like other businesses on the verge of being disrupted by AI, Airbnb’s leadership is pushing the idea that it has a unique database and features that other AI chatbots can’t replicate.
“The chatbot doesn’t have our 200 million verified credentials or our 500 million comments, and it can’t send messages to those who have them, which 90% of our visitors do,” Chesky told analysts during the earnings call. Instead, he proposed putting AI into Airbnb’s operations, which he said would help spur growth.
The company predicted that revenue growth would be “double-dip” this year, after pulling in $2.78 billion in the fourth quarter, the above $2.72 billion. This quarter, it expects revenue of $2.59 billion to $2.63 billion, above Wall Street’s forecast of $2.53 billion.
Investors still want to know if AI platforms will be vulnerable in the long run, considering they have moved into the short-term rental market. Chesky, however, pushed back on the idea, saying that Airbnb is not a consumer-focused app; and the referral program, customer support, and security it provides, such as insurance and user verification.
“We’ve done this for 18 years. We give more than $100 billion through the platform,” he said.
Currently, AI chatbots perform a similar function to search, as they provide high-quality traffic, he said. Those traffic also convert at a higher rate than traffic from Google, Chesky noted, suggesting that AI improvements could benefit Airbnb.
The company is already using AI to power its search engine, with the feature now able to “significantly reduce” Airbnb’s traffic, as it tries to make its search engine more conversational. Later, the company plans to integrate search-supported listings.
While Spotify this week told its traders successful developers had never written a single line of code since December, thanks to AI, Airbnb has provided the highest metrics for its adoption of AI. The company said that 80% of its engineers are now using AI tools, and it is working to reach 100% soon.
