Airbnb CEO: A New AI-Powered App Will Take 'Years'

07.08.2024 - 23:55 / skift.com / Brian Chesky / Justin Dawes / Sarah Kopit

Brian Chesky said it will take years to rebuild Airbnb into a fully AI-powered application. 

The long-term vision is that Airbnb will act as a digital travel concierge that learns and adapts to each individual user, Chesky explained during an earnings call this week.

“It’s going to take a number of years to develop this,” Chesky said. “And so it won’t be in the next year that this will happen.”

Last year, the Airbnb CEO told Skift CEO Rafat Ali the company would be “rebuilding the entire app with AI at the center” by May 2024. 

In a May interview with Skift Editor-in-Chief Sarah Kopit, he acknowledged that his plans would take longer than originally anticipated. “But I think I’m as bullish as ever about it,” he said.

While there’s been a lot of development with computer chips and generative AI models, there hasn’t been as much with applications. Today’s major apps were built before the latest generations of AI were released, so none are native to that new tech, Chesky explained. 

“If you look at your home screen, which of your apps are fundamentally different because of generative AI? Very little, especially even less in e-commerce or travel,” Chesky said this week.

“What we need to do is we need to actually develop AI applications that are native to the model. No one has done this yet.” 

Chesky still has big plans for the future of Airbnb. 

More than a simple chatbot, he envisions that the concierge will understand users well enough to make relevant suggestions about where and how to travel. 

And that, he said, will cover the end-to-end trip.

Airbnb already sells hotel rooms through HotelTonight, which it acquired in 2019 for $400 million. The plan is that the redeveloped Airbnb app could sell hotels from that inventory, plus other products. (Maybe it will include experiences, too, which Airbnb said it is relaunching next year.)

“There are opportunities down the road with this new interface to sell new things, including hotels and everything,” Chesky said.

Chesky recounted the collective excitement that the entire travel industry had with the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. Airbnb and others may have gotten a bit swept away:

“When [ChatGPT launched], I think we all got incredibly excited. It was kind of like the moment probably some of us first discovered the Internet or maybe when the iPhone was launched. And when it was launched, you had the feeling that everything was going to change,” Chesky said. “I think that’s still true. But I think one of the things we’ve learned over the last nearly two years since ChatGPT launched is that it’s going to take a lot longer than people think for applications to change.”