Airbnb shares surged 15% on Friday after the company reported one of its strongest growth quarters in years and raised its full-year outlook, with CEO Brian Chesky saying artificial intelligence has become a major driver of the company’s accelerating performance.
In an interview with CNBC following the earnings release, Chesky said Airbnb will spend “a lot more” on AI tokens this year than originally planned because the returns from AI-powered productivity and revenue growth have far exceeded expectations.
The comments mark a significant shift in tone from Chesky, who only a year ago said Airbnb was still trying to determine whether AI would ultimately help or hurt the business.
AI Is Now Central to Airbnb’s Strategy
Chesky said Airbnb is increasingly operating like an “AI-native company,” arguing that the technology is improving nearly every part of the business.
According to the CEO, AI has helped Airbnb:
- cut product-development time by roughly 60%,
- ship about 80% more features year over year,
- keep headcount roughly flat despite rising AI investment,
- attract more bookings,
- make it easier for hosts to create and price listings, and
- reduce customer-service costs.
“I think now it’s safe to say AI is the best thing to have happened to Airbnb,” Chesky said.
The company is currently piloting AI-powered search, using AI to generate personalized listing highlights and guest answers, and helping hosts automatically create and optimize listings.
Customer Service Is Seeing Major Efficiency Gains
One of the clearest operational benefits is emerging in customer support.
Chesky said 45% of guests who interact with Airbnb’s AI customer-service agent never need to speak with a human representative.
That has allowed the company to reduce support costs while maintaining service levels, creating a meaningful economic benefit as booking volumes continue to grow.
“It’s really across the board: More demand, more supply, cheaper customer service,” Chesky said.
Hiring Remains Flat Despite Higher AI Spending
Airbnb’s growing use of AI is also affecting how the company thinks about staffing.
Headcount has remained roughly flat year to date, even as spending on AI infrastructure and inference has increased significantly.
Chesky emphasized that Airbnb is not using AI primarily to eliminate jobs. Instead, the goal is to increase the output of existing teams.
“Our philosophy has been not necessarily to use AI to have fewer people, but to use AI to get more out of the people,” he said.
The company expects revenue per employee to continue rising, and Chesky suggested that Airbnb’s revenue growth should outpace staffing growth for the foreseeable future.
A Design-First CEO Embraces AI
The enthusiasm is notable given Chesky’s background.
Unlike many technology CEOs, he was trained as an industrial designer at the Rhode Island School of Design rather than as an engineer. He later developed close relationships with former Apple design chief Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and he has been associated with the broader movement to bring design-focused thinking to AI products.
Chesky is now attempting to apply that same design-first philosophy to Airbnb’s AI transformation.
Meta’s Former Generative AI Leader Joins Airbnb
A key part of that transformation has been the arrival of Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s former head of generative AI and a leader of its Llama project, who joined Airbnb as chief technology officer in January.
Chesky acknowledged that Airbnb had previously been “middle of the pack in AI” before hiring Al-Dahle with a mandate to help make the company truly AI-native.
The company is now using more than a dozen AI models internally, including systems such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex.
Chesky said Airbnb is deliberately selective about which models are used for specific tasks, limiting access to slower and more expensive frontier models when their additional capabilities are unnecessary.
“It’s a matter of throttling the right job for the right tool,” he said.
Open-Source Models Could Play a Bigger Role
Interestingly, Chesky expressed particular enthusiasm for open-source AI models in consumer-facing applications.
While he said frontier models remain important for the most complex problems, he argued that most consumer tasks do not require the most expensive AI systems.
He declined to identify the specific open-source models Airbnb is deploying, saying the company’s AI technology stack has become competitively sensitive.
The approach suggests Airbnb is trying to balance AI performance with inference costs, an issue that has become increasingly important across the technology industry.
Why Airbnb Thinks AI Economics Work
Chesky argued that Airbnb has a significant advantage over many other consumer internet companies when it comes to AI economics.
For businesses with low transaction values, the cost of AI inference can be difficult to justify. Airbnb, however, earns substantial revenue from each booking, making the economics much more attractive.
“The amount of money we make on every booking” far outweighs the cost of the AI required to improve the experience, Chesky said.
As a result, Airbnb is increasing its AI token spending beyond its original budget because management believes the return on investment is clearly positive.
Can AI Agents Replace Airbnb?
The longer-term strategic question is whether AI could eventually change how travelers discover and book accommodations.
As AI agents become more capable of planning trips and assembling itineraries, companies such as OpenAI and Alphabet could theoretically become the primary interface through which consumers search for travel options.
Chesky is skeptical of that outcome.
He argues that travel is highly visual, collaborative, and difficult to compare through a text-only chatbot interface.
“I do not believe the chat interface is the right interface for travel,” he said.
Chesky expects AI chatbots to become useful for travel inspiration and itinerary planning, but he does not currently see them replacing platforms such as Airbnb as the transaction and booking layer.
Growth Is Accelerating Again
Beyond the AI story, Airbnb’s underlying business appears to be gaining momentum.
Chesky told CNBC that:
- first-time bookers are growing at the fastest pace in four years,
- the U.S. business accelerated from the first quarter, and
- Airbnb’s hotel business is growing three times faster than its traditional home-rental business.
The hotel expansion is particularly significant because it shows Airbnb is increasingly evolving beyond the home-sharing marketplace that originally made it famous.
A New Growth Narrative for Airbnb
For years, many investors viewed Airbnb as a mature platform whose strongest growth had occurred during the 2010s.
Chesky is now trying to reshape that narrative by positioning AI as a new growth engine capable of driving faster product innovation, higher efficiency, and broader market expansion.
“We are not a company whose best days were in the 2010s,” he said. “We are a company where the best days are in front of us.”
The market’s reaction suggests investors are beginning to believe that argument. A 15% surge in Airbnb shares following the earnings report indicates that Wall Street sees the combination of accelerating growth, improving profitability, and AI-driven productivity gains as potentially transformative for the company’s next phase of expansion.
Source: CNBC interview with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, Airbnb Q2 2026 earnings report, and company statements
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