Airbnb and AI: Brian Chesky Sees New Verticals — Like Amazon and Apple

14.02.2024 - 22:03 / skift.com / Brian Chesky / Dennis Schaal

On the back of its November acquisition of GamePlanner.AI, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said his company can create a new AI interface, and that it will help transform Airbnb into a “cross-vertical company” like Amazon or Apple.

As with several of Chesky’s previous statements about generative AI, this one was heavy on vision with no product launches yet. He pledged Tuesday “you will see some very big announcements later this year.”

Let’s break down what Chesky said:

Many companies in the travel sector, from Booking.com to Expedia and smaller companies, are adding consumer-facing apps that rely on generative AI. Most haven’t been massively adopted yet by travelers, and few if any have boasted that their applications will be the best on the planet.

Here’s the text of what Chesky said on the topic during Airbnb’s earnings call Tuesday in response to an analyst’s question:

“So I think, to talk about AI, it would be good to zoom out, just lay out the landscape. One way to think about AI is, let’s use a real-world metaphor. I mentioned we’re building a city. And in that city, we have infrastructure, like roads and bridges. And then on top of those roads and bridges, we have applications like cars.

“So Airbnb is not an infrastructure company. Infrastructure would be a large language model or, obviously, GPUs. So we’re not going to be investing in infrastructure. So we’re not going to be building a large language model. We’ll be relying on, obviously, OpenAI. Google makes – or creates a model, Meta creates models. So those are really infrastructure. They’re really developing infrastructure.

“But where we can excel is on the application layer. And I believe that we can build one of the leading and most innovative AI interfaces ever created. And maybe one way to make this real is if you were to open, say, ChatGPT or Google, though the models are very powerful, the interface is really not an AI interface. It’s the same interface as the 2000s, in a sense, the 2010s. It’s a typical classical web interface. So we feel like the models, in a sense, are probably underutilized.

“Here’s another way of saying it. Take your phone and look at all the icons on your phone. Most of those apps have not fundamentally changed since the advent of generative AI. So what I think AI represents is the ultimate platform shift. We had the internet. We had mobile. Airbnb really rose during the rise of mobile.

“And the thing about a platform shift, as you know, there is also a shift in power. There’s a shift of behavior. And so I think this is a 0-0 ball game, where Airbnb, we have a platform that was built for one vertical short-term space. And I think with AI – generative AI and developing a leading AI interface to provide an experience