Airbnb says AI now handles a third of its customer support calls

AirBnB

• Airbnb's AI now resolves a third of North America support issues
• Global rollout planned, aiming for 30% of tickets handled by AI
• Q4 revenue hit $2.78B, beating expectations

Did our AI summary help?

Airbnb says its in-house AI agent is now resolving roughly a third of customer support issues in North America, and the company plans to roll the system out globally over the coming year.

Speaking during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, CEO Brian Chesky said Airbnb expects AI voice and chat tools to handle more than 30% of all customer support tickets worldwide within a year, across every language where it also employs human agents.

“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,” Chesky said, signalling that the company believes AI can outperform humans in resolving certain categories of support issues.

The expansion comes alongside Airbnb’s recent hire of CTO Ahmad Al-Dahle, who joined from Meta, where he led work on the Llama family of large language models. Chesky said the appointment positions Airbnb to rethink its app around AI from the ground up.

Rather than acting purely as a search tool, Chesky described a future Airbnb app that “knows you,” helping guests plan entire trips, assisting hosts with running their businesses, and improving internal operations at scale. Al-Dahle’s background, which also includes 16 years at Apple, was framed as key to balancing technical scale with product design.

As with other consumer platforms, Airbnb’s leadership is keen to argue that generic AI chatbots pose limited long-term threat to its core business. Chesky told analysts that third-party AI tools lack access to Airbnb’s 200 million verified identities, 500 million proprietary reviews, and its ability to directly message hosts, something around 90% of guests do.

The company also emphasised the operational complexity behind the scenes, including insurance, user verification, and payment processing. “We’ve built this over 18 years. We handle more than $100 billion in payments through the platform,” Chesky said.

Financially, Airbnb forecast revenue growth in the low double digits for the year ahead. The company reported $2.78 billion in fourth-quarter revenue, beating expectations of $2.72 billion, and expects between $2.59 billion and $2.63 billion in the current quarter, ahead of Wall Street forecasts.

Investors raised questions about whether AI platforms could eventually move into short-term rentals themselves. Chesky pushed back, arguing that AI chatbots function more like search engines, driving top-of-funnel traffic rather than replacing full-stack platforms. He added that traffic from AI tools already converts better than traffic from Google, suggesting the shift could benefit Airbnb.

Internally, Airbnb is also leaning further into AI. The company said 80% of its engineers now use AI tools, with a goal of reaching full adoption. Unlike Spotify, which recently claimed some developers have stopped writing code altogether thanks to AI, Airbnb offered a broader signal of uptake rather than dramatic anecdotes.