What Will Airbnb Launch Beyond Its Travel Core?

25.08.2023 - 13:40 / skift.com / Brian Chesky / Rafat Ali / Jason Calacanis

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky was very open with me in the interview I did with him earlier this week, where he tantalizingly hinted at how Airbnb will change in the next year, much of it predicated on AI.

In it, here are the few long range things he talked about: “We’re going to launch a whole bunch of new things in the next couple years…Basically the short answer is next May you’re going to see a whole new Airbnb. AI’s going to be at the center of it…The real vision is what if there Airbnb app could be almost like the ultimate host, the ultimate concierge… Each thing is going to get bigger and bigger. November will be pretty big. A year from now will be huge, it’ll be really big.” He told me that in the short term, Airbnb will focus on improving customer service and summarizing reviews using AI, and by next year a conversational AI interface will come to the Airbnb app.

But what is coming beyond these somewhat obvious changes at Airbnb? Chesky elaborated on some of these in a podcast interview with Jason Calacanis on “This Week in Startups” including the hint that Airbnb is planning to move beyond its core of travel, in the next few years, though the timeline is fuzzy, at one time he said in the next year and later in the podcast he said next 3-5 years. Some extracts from the rough auto-transcript that leads me to believe the expansion of Airbnb beyond travel will be in the connection, matching and personalization realm, though exactly how is of course unclear for now.

“We have some big ideas coming. We have some really huge ideas that I think will expand Airbnb way beyond travel way beyond our core. It’s gonna launch next year…AI’s gonna unlock so many of them, but we don’t have permission to do new things things until people love our core service. So we’re gonna basically create a blueprint of every single thing people are complaining about.”

“The third, and this is more on the opportunity, is monthly stays. That’s a growing part of our business. People think of us as a travel company, but 20% of our businesses now housing and Airbnb, there’s a lot of problems with monthly stays.”

“And If you and I both ask ChatGPT a question, we mostly get the same answer and we mostly get the same answer because it doesn’t know who you or I am. And that’s great for some questions like what was the like, you know like how far is the moon from the sun or whatever. Like there’s one right answer, but if you ask like, where should I travel? Your answer and my answer are probably different. And so some problems are search problems, some problems are kind of matching and personalization preferences, problems….so what we wanna do is we wanna be one of the best companies for AI personalization. So we wanna develop really good