Airbnb, meanwhile, is preparing to supercharge its platform with sophisticated generative AI tools. This smart and inclusive initiative is being driven by the company’s new Chief Technology Officer, Ahmad Al-Dahle. Having played a key role in the development of Meta’s Llama models, Al-Dahle’s experience will be integral to Airbnb’s ambitious AI plans. To do this, it looks to leverage its extensive data on user identities and reviews. This way, they’ll be able to map out a more effective and easier-to-navigate experience.
During the recent fourth-quarter conference call, Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky outlined the strategic direction for incorporating AI into the app. The company plans to further leverage large language models as a way to enhance customers’ ability to discover, support, and technical engineer. By creating an AI search functionality that’s more conversational in nature, Airbnb is looking to change the way users engage with the service.
Chesky stated, “We are building an AI-native experience where the app does not just search for you. It knows you. It will help guests plan their entire trip, help hosts better run their businesses, and help the company operate more efficiently at scale.” This far-reaching vision provides a glimpse into Airbnb’s desire to keep their users increasingly engaged with smart, meaningful, and personalized interactions.
The impact of conversational AI search integration will reach far beyond trip planning. In the words of Chesky, “AI search… is live to a very small percent of traffic at this point. We are doing a lot of experimentation. We’ll continue to test ways to make AI search more conversational gradually. Ultimately we’ll roll it out to other sections outside of trips and explore adding sponsor listings too.
Beyond addressing user experience, Airbnb says it plans to better equip customer support employees with AI tools. The company aims to allow their customers’ customers to reach an AI triage chatbot for service in any language. Chesky said that in a year’s time, over 30 percent of customer support tickets will be processed through a proprietary service agent. This change will drastically increase the productivity of customer service. This new agent will be implemented in all languages that Airbnb currently supports through live agents, providing even greater accessibility to the users on their platform.
A year from now, if we are successful, significantly more than 30% of tickets will be handled by a custom service agent, in many more languages, in all the languages where we have live agents. AI customer service will not just be chat, it’s going to be voice too,” said Chesky, underscoring the point.
Airbnb, meanwhile, is aggressively adopting AI in order to enhance the customer experience. This action exemplifies a broader phenomenon within the tech industry, as enterprises deploy machine learning and natural language processing technologies to streamline workflows and increase customer happiness. If these innovations are any indication, Airbnb is primed to change the game on the way travelers find and interact with services that better suit their needs.
