Dive Brief:
- Airbnb’s AI assistant resolved over 40% of customer inquiries in the first quarter of the year, co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky said on Q1 2026 earnings call Thursday.
- That’s up from resolving about one-third of customer questions in the prior quarter, and resolution time “significantly” improved, according to Chesky.
- “We've seen the cost per booking decrease about 10% year over year in Q1, and we expect to see more of this as we improve AI customer support this year,” Chesky said on the call.
Dive Insight:
Airbnb rolled out its AI customer service assistant in April of last year. While many online travel agencies decided to implement AI in the top of the funnel with AI-powered search, Airbnb took a different strategy and started at the bottom of the funnel, Chesky told analysts.
“The reason we decided to start with this is we want to focus on the hardest problem in AI, which we thought was customer service,” Chesky said. “The reason why is the stakes are high, you cannot hallucinate, you have to answer things very, very quickly because they are calling and they have problems.”
Rolling out an AI assistant in customer service is no small feat, Chesky said. The AI assistant must be multilingual, as hosts and guests often don’t speak the same language, adjudicate difficult issues, and know when to pass the call to a live agent.
“You have to escalate to a human accurately, especially if it's timely or there's a trust and safety incident,” Chesky said. “And you have to deal with personally identifiable information that means that you have to be able to protect people's data, you have to be able to read and train based on nearly 100 policies, tens of thousands of evolving conversations, and look at like millions of data points of how a prior case was adjudicated to be able to answer correctly.”
Airbnb has also deployed AI to address such moments as when a customer views an Airbnb listing and its reviews. The company plans to roll out more AI features in the mid-funnel consideration phase on May 20.
“One of the things our guests told us is when they get to an Airbnb, it's great when they see like 100 reviews, it's awesome, but they don't have time to read all 100 reviews,” Chesky said. “So we now have AI summaries.”
The company is experimenting with deploying AI at the top of the funnel with AI search. This is where clean data matter more than ever.
“I think the first point I want to make is AI feels like magic, but of course, it's not magic,” Chesky said. “And when you bring AI under the hood, you realize that in order to be good at AI, you need to be really good at technology, foundational. You need to have really good data and infrastructure.”
The company has been preparing its data warehouse for the past few years, following the mantra that “your AI is only as good as your data,” Chesky said.
Airbnb is piloting a variety of ways to use AI in search, whether that's after a customer searches, interrupting search to offer suggestions, in the filter panel or after a customer books a trip.
