Airbnb started rolling out an AI-powered customer service bot in the U.S. last month, CEO Brian Chesky said during the firm’s first-quarter conference call on Thursday.
Chesky said 50% of Airbnb’s U.S. users are already using the AI bot for customer service, adding that the company plans to roll out the feature to all its users in the country this month.
“One thing I’ll say about AI [is that] it is definitely making the customer experience easier … It has already led to a 15% reduction in people needing to contact live human agents,” he noted during the analyst call.
Last year, the company told TechCrunch that it was testing the technology, but in a limited manner and only for certain queries.
“I think there is a lot of potential for applying AI to the business. We think a lot about how AI is going to change the experience at the consumer layer over time,” Airbnb co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk told TechCrunch at that time.
Unlike companies like OpenAI, Google, Perplexity, and the slew of startups building AI agents (AI tools that can perform tasks on a user’s behalf), Airbnb seems to be taking a more measured approach with AI. Chesky said in February that the company would use AI for customer service before it started implementing it for other uses like travel planning or booking tickets, as he believes the technology is still in its early days.
Meanwhile, its competitors Expedia and Booking.com are investing heavily on the technology, launching AI features like building itineraries, trip planning, and real-time updates for travel.
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Airbnb’s reported a total revenue of $2.27 billion for the first quarter, up 6% from a year earlier. The company, however, forecast current-quarter revenue slightly below analysts’ expectations and indicated that it was expecting travel demand to slow down as the global tariff war hurts sentiment and discourages discretionary spending.
