{"id":426207,"date":"2026-02-15T00:29:15","date_gmt":"2026-02-15T00:29:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/426207\/"},"modified":"2026-02-15T00:29:15","modified_gmt":"2026-02-15T00:29:15","slug":"airbnb-says-a-third-of-its-customer-support-is-now-handled-by-ai-in-the-us-and-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/426207\/","title":{"rendered":"Airbnb says a third of its customer support is now handled by AI in the US and Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"

Airbnb says its custom-built AI agent<\/a> is now handling roughly a third of its customer support issues in North America, and it\u2019s preparing to roll out the feature globally. If successful, the company believes that in a year\u2019s time, more than 30% of its total customer support tickets will be handled by AI voice and chat in all the languages where it also employs a human customer service agent.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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,\u201d CEO Brian Chesky said during the company\u2019s fourth-quarter earnings<\/a> call this week. This seems to suggest he believes the AI would do a better job than its human counterparts in resolving some issues.<\/p>\n

The company also touted its recent hire of CTO Ahmad Al-Dahle, poached from Meta<\/a> for his AI expertise, and its plans to create an AI-native experience.<\/p>\n

With his guidance, Chesky said that Airbnb was poised to introduce an app that doesn\u2019t just search for you, but one that \u201cknows you.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cIt will help guests plan their entire trip, help hosts better run their businesses, and help the company operate more efficiently at scale,\u201d Chesky explained, adding that\u2019s why Airbnb brought Al-Dahle on board. <\/p>\n

\u201cAhmad is one of the world\u2019s leading AI experts. He spent 16 years at Apple, and most recently led the generative AI team at Meta that built the Llama models. He\u2019s an expert at pairing massive technical scale with world-class design, which is exactly how we\u2019re going to transform the Airbnb experience,\u201d Chesky noted.<\/p>\n

Like other businesses poised for disruption by AI, Airbnb\u2019s leadership is pushing the idea that it has a unique database and product that other AI chatbots can\u2019t replicate. <\/p>\n

\u201cA chatbot doesn\u2019t have our 200 million verified identities or our 500 million proprietary reviews, and it can\u2019t message the hosts, which 90% of our guests do,\u201d Chesky told analysts during the earnings call. Instead, he pitched the idea of layering AI over the Airbnb experience, which he claimed would help to accelerate growth. <\/p>\n

The company forecast revenue growth would be in the \u201clow double digits\u201d this year, after pulling in $2.78 billion in the fourth quarter, above estimates <\/a>of $2.72 billion. This quarter, it expects revenue of $2.59 billion to $2.63 billion, above Wall Street forecasts of $2.53 billion.<\/p>\n

Investors still wanted to know if AI platforms could be a risk in the long-term, assuming they moved into the short-term rentals market. Chesky, however, pushed back at that idea, saying that Airbnb isn\u2019t just the consumer-facing app; it\u2019s also the host app, the customer service, and the protections it offers, like insurance and user verifications. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve built this over 18 years. We handle more than $100 billion in payments through the platform,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, AI chatbots serve a function similar to search, in that they deliver top-of-funnel traffic, he noted. That traffic also converts at a higher rate than traffic from Google, Chesky pointed out, suggesting that the shift to AI would benefit Airbnb.<\/p>\n

The company is already using AI to power its search, with the feature now enabled for a \u201cvery small percentage\u201d of Airbnb\u2019s traffic, while it experiments with making its search more conversational. Later, the company plans to integrate sponsored listings within search. <\/p>\n

While Spotify this week told investors its best developers hadn\u2019t written a single line of code<\/a> since December, thanks to AI, Airbnb offered a more high-level metric on its own internal AI adoption. The company said that 80% of its engineers now use AI tools, and it\u2019s working to get that to 100% soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Airbnb says its custom-built AI agent is now handling roughly a third of its customer support issues in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":426208,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,6175,156365,733,4308,7068,41722,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-426207","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-agent","10":"tag-airnb","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-artificialintelligence","13":"tag-commerce","14":"tag-marketplace","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=426207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426207\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/426208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=426207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=426207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=426207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}