Vacation rentals marketplace Airbnb is embedding AI across its customer service operations and the broader platform, with its custom AI agent trained on millions of customer interactions now handling around a third of its support tickets in North America without needing a live specialist.
Airbnb’s CEO, Brian Chesky told CNBC in an interview:
“From a business standpoint, AI is the best thing that ever happened to Airbnb, at least from a technology shift.”
The company reports that its customer satisfaction has increased as AI has improved service quality and resolution times. And it expects that in a year’s time, more than 30 percent of tickets globally will be handled by AI chat and voice in all the languages where it has human agents. Chesky said on Airbnb’s quarterly earnings call:
“We think this is going to be massive because not only does this reduce the cost base of Airbnb customer service, but the quality of service is going to be a huge step change.”
The company is also building an AI-native experience into its apps that builds on its proprietary information from customers and hosts to help them better plan trips and run hosting businesses, as well as enabling Airbnb to operate more efficiently.
Customer service has long been one of Airbnb’s hardest operational problems, given the volume of bookings, languages, disputes and edge cases involved. Chesky emphasized that much of the company’s complexity lives behind the scenes rather than in the guest-facing app.
“Most of Airbnb’s business is not the app that a guest uses. It's the host app, it's the customer service, it's the payments. It's managing 5 million hosts and all the activity that happens on our platform and all the new businesses that we put together,” Chesky told CNBC.
That intelligence can also help the platform defend its business from AI tools that allow consumers to research and book travel directly, Chesky said.
“We're not a software-like layer that AI could potentially do more efficiently. Most of Airbnb’s business is in the real world.”
Chesky elaborated on the earnings call:
“This approach is also our strongest defense against disintermediation. A chatbot can give you a list of homes. But it cannot give you the unique points you find on Airbnb. A chatbot does not have our 200,000,000 verified identities, or our 500,000,000 proprietary review. And it cannot message the host, 90% of our guests do. It cannot provide global payment processing, customer support, or insurance.”