Brian Chesky hasn’t exactly been coy about Airbnb’s technical problems, even noting recently the need to fix the vacation rental platform’s “foundation.” (The company’s listings have been criticized for issues with reliability and consistency, among other complaints.) Now, the co-founder and CEO is eager to tell the world that he’s found a possible solution to these woes: artificial intelligence.
“I think that Airbnb has turned the corner,” Chesky told Fortune during an interview that took place last week after Airbnb unveiled a slew of new features, including an AI-powered tool that lets hosts automatically create photo tours of their homes.
Chesky is confident that Airbnb is on the right track, and that the newly-launched features–which also include “Guest Favorites,” a new category of the most-loved homes on the app–will help win over both hosts and guests. But the co-founder has much bigger ambitions for how AI could be used to more radically change Airbnb.
“The Holy Grail is becoming more like an AI travel agent that’s the ultimate agent that can learn about you, and understand you,” says Chesky. “It doesn’t just ask you, ‘where are you going’ or ‘when are you going’ but [understands] who you are and then can match you to anything you want, especially with your travel needs.”
To that end: On Tuesday, Airbnb announced its first acquisition as a public company, snapping up a stealth startup called GamePlanner.AI for a reported $200 million. Not much is known about the 12-person company, which combines expertise in “AI, design, and community,” according to a press release issued by Airbnb. But it’s clear that GamePlanner.AI’s team and technology will play a key role in ushering in a new era at Airbnb, reimagining the interface and features on the app with an AI-first approach.
“I think that we can be a leader in AI, a certain type of AI,” Chesky said in last week’s interview. “We’re not the infrastructure company. We’re not going to be a leader in AI research. And we’re not going to be developing large language models. But where we can be a leader is ‘applied AI.’”
What Chesky is referring to here is the application layers of AI. Prior to the announcement of the acquisition, the CEO shared some “hypotheticals” with Fortune–different ways that the company could use AI to create a new experience for its users.
“I think the first thing is that we want to build a more personalized AI-powered service,” said Chesky. That would mean building richer customer profiles with data that can feed into an AI system to present users with travel and booking suggestions, without necessarily having to enter information into a traditional search box. Chesky also said that the AI system could be trained on customer service data, and eventually bring in that knowledge into the search experience. (In other words: An AI-powered travel agent.)
To be sure, the new photo tours feature and the acquisition of GamePlanner.AI isn’t Airbnb’s first foray into artificial intelligence–the company has been working on AI-powered tools, computer vision, and machine learning for years. And it’s not clear just what Airbnb has in store for its new purchase. But it’s evident from talking to Chesky that he believes AI will be crucial in keeping Airbnb competitive in the future, and that re-positioning the company’s strategy around it presents a significant departure from the past, at least in the way users engage with the app.
Interestingly, the co-founder of GamePlanner.AI, Adam Cheyer, also co-founded Siri, which was acquired by Apple– a company Chesky, a former design student, has admired for years.
“To be a good consumer company, you have to be good at engineering and research and design and marketing and operations and sales, and you have to understand culture, and Apple was able to do that,” Chesky said in his recent interview with Fortune. “But by the time Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, they’d had 30 years to develop those skill sets. The challenge now is that AI is moving really fast, everything grows fast. And it’s really hard for companies to be good at every discipline… so I think that companies are going to have to pick lanes.”
At least for now, it appears that Chesky has picked that lane: An app that looks more like a supercharged travel agent than a search engine for vacation rentals, at least partially powered by a stealth startup called GamePlanner.AI.
