Airbnb says AI now writes 60% of its new code

A large part of Airbnb’s Q1 2026 earnings call was dedicated to talking about how the company is using AI tools in booking, customer service, and search. In particular, the company said that 60% of the code its engineers created this quarter was written by AI – echoing the comments of others like. Google, Microsoftand Spotifywho all talked about AI accelerating their software.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said that the company finds AI very useful in building APIs that run its properties using various applications.

“API partners say they want to be better hosts and need better tools. AI offers a huge opportunity – where you may have needed a team of 20 engineers before, an engineer can now divert helpers to do more work under supervision. Taking AI tools gives us the opportunity to develop more programs for API partners, speeding up work that we previously did not have the resources for,” said Chesky.

Airbnb has been there slowly to expand its use of AI for customer support last year, and Chesky said Thursday that the customer support AI bot now handles 40% of issues without the rise of a human agent, up from about 33% earlier this year. The travel company has also tried to use it AI to boost its search function.

However, Chesky acknowledged that it is difficult to use AI tools in the travel or e-commerce environment, pointing to the limitations of the chatbot user interface.

“I don’t think anyone has found AI in travel or e-commerce (…) The design of chatbots, as they are currently designed, does not work in travel or e-commerce. There are four problems: too much text (most of e-commerce is graphics); no direct change (you have to write everything instead of changing the sliders); wrong comparison of many options (you can lose a lot of threads); unreadable comparison of threads and threads; you can lose a lot of information; many players, while chatbots are single player, not native.

Airbnb said net income rose 3.9% to $160 million in the first quarter, while revenue rose 18% to $2.7 billion, compared to a year ago. Nights booked rose 9% to 156.2 million during that period. The company said its new “Bring it now, pay later” The side earned about 20% of its booking value in this segment.