Airbnb says a third of its customer support is now handled by artificial intelligence in the US and Canada

Airbnb says its custom-built AI agent now handles nearly a third of customer support issues in North America, and is preparing to roll out the feature globally. If successful, the company believes that within a year, more than 30% of total customer support tickets will be handled through AI-powered voice and chat in all languages ​​as it also employs a human customer service agent.

“We think this is going to be huge because not only will it reduce Airbnb’s customer service cost base, but the quality of service is going to be a game changer,” CEO Brian Chesky said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call this week. This seems to indicate that he believes AI will do a better job than its human counterparts at solving some problems.

The company also touted its recent hiring of CTO Ahmed Al Dahla, who was poached from Meta for his AI expertise, and its plans to create a native AI experience.

Under his direction, Chesky said Airbnb is preparing to offer an app that doesn’t just find you, but one that “knows you.”

“This will help guests plan their entire trip, help hosts manage their business better, and help the company operate more efficiently at scale,” Chesky explained, adding that this is why Airbnb brought on board Al Dahl.

“Ahmed is one of the world’s leading AI experts,” Chesky noted. “He spent 16 years at Apple, and most recently led the generative AI team at Meta that built Llama models. He is an expert at pairing massive technical scale with world-class design, which is exactly what we will be working on to transform the Airbnb experience.”

Like other companies vulnerable to disruption by AI, Airbnb’s leadership touts the idea that it has a unique database and product that other AI-powered chatbots can’t replicate.

“The chatbot doesn’t have our 200 million verified identities or our 500 million reviews, and it can’t send messages to hosts, which 90% of our guests do,” Chesky told analysts during the earnings call. Instead, he floated the idea of ​​putting AI on top of the Airbnb experience, which he claimed would help accelerate growth.

The company expected revenue growth to be in the “low double digits” this year, after generating $2.78 billion in the fourth quarter, higher than estimates of $2.72 billion. This quarter, the company expects revenue of $2.59 billion to $2.63 billion, higher than Wall Street’s forecast of $2.53 billion.

Investors still want to know whether AI platforms could pose a long-term risk, assuming they move into the short-term rental market. However, Chesky rejected this idea, saying that Airbnb is not just a consumer-facing app; It’s also the host application, customer service, and protections it offers, such as security and user verification.

“We’ve built this over 18 years. We handle over $100 billion in payments through the platform,” he said.

Meanwhile, AI chatbots perform a similar function to search, in that they provide top-of-funnel traffic. This traffic also converts at a higher rate than traffic from Google, suggesting that the shift to AI will benefit Airbnb, Chesky noted.

The company is already using AI to power its search, with the feature now enabled for a “very small percentage” of Airbnb traffic, as it tries to make its search more conversational. Later, the company plans to integrate sponsored listings into search.

While Spotify told investors this week that its top developers haven’t written a single line of code since December, thanks to AI, Airbnb provided a higher-level measure of the adoption of its own internal AI. The company said that 80% of its engineers now use artificial intelligence tools, and it is working to reach 100% soon.