$95B Airbnb CEO: Do THIS to Become a TOP Performer in the AI Era

I think there's a lot of fear about AI outside of Silicon Valley. I understand why, because it's changing their job. It's displacing them. And some of that may be true, but I am saying that everyone has the power now.

AI is like an amplifier. It makes the good people better, and the people that weren't as good, it's less of a multiplier for them.

This is what I would do.

Hey, how you doing? Good to see you.

Oh, yes.

Of course. What airport was that?

Of course. Look at how well you're doing. And I'm so honored to be on your program.

I think it really just means modernizing every touch point of the app to be more intelligent, easier to use. And so I'll give you some examples. Let's say you were a guest. Before AI, you do a normal search. You type in a location and you get a bunch of results. Now with AI, starting today, you can hit a toggle and you can do AI search. It's very natural, very much natural language, like typing into a chatbot. And then it is a very intelligent search. So you can say, I want to go to Paris this weekend with this number of people. I want this kind of view and I want this kind of architecture. And it will not only serve up all the results, but it will also pre-filter everything for you because Airbnb is very much about filters and controls. You see, the chatbots aren't really great for shopping. Chatbots aren't really good for travel. And the reason why is they're text-based. They're very hard to compare. You want things to be very inspiration-based and browse-based. You want it to be fun and entertainment-oriented. It's multiplayer. So the average Airbnb people, it's three people traveling. So they have to be able to like share. You have to be able to message a host. You have to be able to have filters and you got to be able to see like if I turn this filter off, I get this home, but if I add this filter back, I get that home. So we had to find this interface that wasn't a chatbot, but that felt chat-like that you can start to have a conversation with, but you didn't take away the functionality people loved.

Then when you get to an Airbnb, we have these AI-generated highlights. So AI basically will summarize the listing for you. And these are really nice personalized snippets. They're personalized to you. So we can make the listing literally written for you, saying this is why you will like this listing. Then when you get to the bottom of the page, if you have a question, you don't even have to ask the host now. You can literally ask the page and the listing could answer things for you. You can still message the host, but now you can message. Then if you have a bunch of listings, you want to compare them. We've got an AI comparison feature tool which makes it really smart and easy. And one of the challenges people don't realize and one of the problems with chatbot is Airbnb is very much a comparison shopping problem. Okay, I like these 10 homes. This one's got a pool. This one's got a barbecue. This one's got really high ratings. This one's new. This one's a little more expensive. This one's in a really good location. How do I make decisions and how do I compare side by side and how do I call down? Then we have brand new maps where I can, starting in Paris, I can tap and see information about each neighborhood. Eventually, this is going to roll out to a thousand different cities around the world. And these are just some of the features we have in the guest side.

On the host side, we're going to make the app feel more and more like an agent that can be your coach, understand your goals, it can help you price your listing. So, I think the basic idea is that Airbnb is getting smarter. Airbnb's whole app is going to feel more like an agent. But when I say agent, I don't mean a chatbot. People when they hear agents and chatbots, they think they're the same thing. They're not. Agent is an evolution of an application. It's an application that is more intelligent and understands you and knows you and it leverages the power of AI. A chatbot is a user interface. And I think because most agents are chatbots, we conflate the two.

But they're not the same thing. And I think that a chatbot is not the right interface for travel. It's not the right interface for shopping, but agents are great. And I think the great thing about agents is they're interoperable. So one agent can talk to another agent.

Yeah. And chatbot feels like more like a reactive thing where agent is more proactive, knowing your interests.

You know, it's so funny. I came to Silicon Valley 19 years ago. And when I came to Silicon Valley, there was this thing called a social network, and it was Facebook, and everyone was on Facebook, and it was mostly just your friends, and you could keep in touch with your friends, and they shared what they did. And now none of my friends are on Facebook. And Instagram is not social networking, it's social media. So it's basically Instagram, X, YouTube, TikTok. They're really not social networks. They're really performance platforms. They're broadcast platforms. And this is not, I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but I'm saying now there's no place in the internet for me to know not only what my friends are doing, but one of the things I used to like was knowing where people were traveling. People in my life, where have they traveled to? Where are they going? And so, here's a use case. Let's say I'm going to Chicago. I'm sure I have a bunch of friends been to Chicago, but I don't know which ones. And now, if I connect people on Airbnb, I can see all of my friends have been to Chicago, and I can see where they stayed. I might want to stay where they've stayed, but more importantly, I can ask them like, "Hey, what's good to do in Chicago?" Because what we found is increasingly people want recommendations for their friends and their family rather than from, you know, celebrities or writers. They increasingly want people who feel like they know them. Like you know me, you'll know what I like. But this is an unsolved problem because you don't know where everyone in your life has traveled.

Another thing about Airbnb is one of the best parts of it is meeting somebody new. It was hard to meet people today. I asked my parents, how did you meet people? They would go to a mall. They go to a theater. They go to physical spaces. Increasingly, people today are not in physical spaces. They're on their phones. And phones are really a way for you to talk to strangers online, but it's a really hard way to meet strangers offline. And so, we want to help solve this problem by making it easier to meet people in the real world and stay in touch with them. And so, if you travel, you stay in a home with somebody, you might meet them. If you go on experience with somebody, you can stay in touch with them. So, I think a lot of what we're trying to do is turn Airbnb from a kind of just a marketplace of homes to a little more of a travel community. And I think the travel graph is really cool. And if you go on Airbnb, you can basically add your friends, your family, and you can see where they're traveling. And this is a really cool use case. Wouldn't you be curious to know where all your friends are traveling this summer?

Now, you can know and you can decide, well, if they're going, we can go at the same time.

I think so. Yeah, we're launching, I think the stat is that we're like shipping 80% more features than a year ago. Most of it's because of AI. Obviously, AI is like this incredible superpower. You know, 10 years ago, even a few years ago, everything had to be coded by hand. Everything was so much harder to do. Now that you can ship things so much more quickly, we can ship features more quickly. It used to take us a year to ship like a new service, now we can do it in weeks. And so now, like for example, with services, one of the things we hear from guests a lot is, I love to stay in homes, but they don't have all the services of a hotel. And we thought, well, what if we could have not only all the service hotel, but even more services? So, we can have baby gear if you have kids. You know, sometimes hotels have cribs, but maybe they have two cribs or three cribs. And if they're out, you've got this is what we I don't have kids, but I hear from my friends who have kids, maybe you want laundry done. A hotel is laundry. Well, now Airbnb, you can get laundry. So, we just wanted to go down the list. Ski rental equipment. I'm going to go skiing. I don't want to I don't have my own ski equipment. So going to rent ski gear can be very, very, you know, it can be onerous, right? And you just get to a city, you're tired, you don't want to figure out how to get ski gear. We can have all the sizes waiting for you, all the equipment for you. So we're really trying to make everything as plug-and-play as possible so you're not just getting a home, you're kind of getting a full-service experience. So eventually I see adding dozens, even hundreds of services that can be plugged into the home so that when you book a home you can get everything you need for your trip.

Let's pretend I'm a masseuse. I'm a masseuse in Tulum, Mexico. I'm just making a random place up right now. How do I get business? I only get business from locals who know about me. But how would I, if a traveler, would I get business? I probably wouldn't be able to get business. Maybe I have to go work at a resort and they have to give me business. Now I can have my own business. I can broadcast on Airbnb and all the travelers coming to Tulum, if anyone wants a massage, they can go on Airbnb and they can book the massage with me. So, kind of like the original Airbnb where I had a home but no one knew about my home and we gave them a distribution platform and they could basically get an audience. Kind of like the way social media gives everyone an audience, we can give all these small business audiences and we give them a global audience of travelers. And so, this is really, really difficult for somebody. I'm a photographer in Paris and I take photos of families in front of the Eiffel Tower. A lot of people want to get their photos. How do you get your photo in front of the Eiffel Tower? If you're a parent, one of you is not in the photo.

And it's just like an iPhone photo. Now you can have like amazing professional photos in 30 minutes. It's not too expensive and you will remember those photos forever. This photographer would never have known how to broadcast to all these guests from around the world. We really feel like there's a whole economy of service providers, whether there's masseuses, chefs, photographers, companies that deal with equipment or baby gear or laundry or cleaning service, car rental, welcome pickups, picking up the airport, anything you imagine. In other words, now you can Airbnb more than just a home. You can Airbnb anything.

For everything we launch, we're probably testing like many, many more things. And we have dozens of services underway. So like ski equipment. I'm not a giant skier, but I ski a little bit. I don't ski enough to have my own skis. I don't ski enough to have my own boots, my own helmet. So everywhere I go, I have to rent equipment. And it's always like I don't even know where to go. Do I go to the mountain to rent equipment? Do I have to wait in line? I have to wait for someone to size me. It's so much more convenient if I were to get to the Airbnb. They know my boot size, they know my ski size, and they just have everything for me. So, that is something that we're testing. I think the test is in Italy, but we're going to hopefully bring this to ski mountains all over the world. And there these ski rental companies, and they would love to be able to bring the equipment to you rather than you have to wait in line at the store, which is potentially really inconvenient. Surfing equipment. You know, a professional surfer probably will travel with their own surfboard, but it's pretty hard to bring a surfboard on an airplane, and a lot of people aren't going to travel the surfboard, and so they're going to have to rent this equipment. What if in the house waiting for you was this equipment or you knew exactly where to go to get the equipment? So, these are kind of the ideas. So, we're trying to test, you know, we usually do a test in one market, one city. If it works, then we bring it to other markets. And everything we announced today, we've been testing. So, we have a lot of other services coming. There's literally hundreds. By the way, the thing that's exciting is the long tail. It's like there's so many different services and no one service maybe is big enough to be a giant business that you've heard of that has an app. So, that's the challenge. Like ride sharing, there's an app. Uber food delivery, there's an app. Uber Eats, DoorDash. But most other services aren't big enough to have a global brand where you know where to go. And even if they do have an app, they're not integrated with Airbnb. And so it's pretty difficult. Like Instacart, they got an app, but now you can get groceries at your Airbnb. And you have an option where you can order the Instacart groceries through the Airbnb app. It already knows your address. It already knows how many guests and the food can be sent to the house and the host can open the door and have the food put in the fridge so it's stocked for you. Amazing. It's just much more convenient.

It's a great question. I mean, we started with the most popular services, the most common ones, Chef, masseuse, photography, car rental, airport pickup, luggage storage. But increasingly the power of Airbnb is the idea that we want you to be able to provide anything you can imagine. So my hope is anything you offer if it could be useful just to a couple people visiting your city then we would love to hear from you and I think just contact Airbnb. I think you can there's a contact button on the bottom of our page and we try to intake as many ideas as possible. So we have like a services platform. If you go to list, you know, you can go to become a host. There's a button you can basically apply to become a services host. We might tell you that this is coming soon, but we take every single lead. So, let's say you do like floral arrangements. This is a use case. People are on vacation. They're maybe on a romantic trip. They want to get flowers in the listing. Maybe they want flowers in the listing. They want to get flowers for the romantic significant other. That's a service we're launching. And people can apply. We don't have it in every city, but if you have this idea, if you have an idea like that, just apply. And if we aren't ready to launch it now, we will eventually. And so, it's just a matter of getting to them. But we want every idea. I wouldn't want to tell people what ideas to apply with because some of the best ideas are ones I don't even think of. But if you have something you think is valuable to somebody else, you just need an audience. And hopefully we can give you that audience.