Airbnb might be taking slow steps to roll out AI features to its consumer-facing interface, but the company is rapidly adopting the tech to build product. Earlier this year, the company said AI is writing 60% of its code. In its latest earnings call, co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky said AI is helping Airbnb create features at rapid rate.
Chesky said that because of AI, the company has reduced time from conceptualization to finally shopping features by 60%.
"Today, we're building, testing, and iterating faster than we could just a year ago. Across some of our key initiatives, we've reduced the time from concept to launch by as much as 60%. And compared to the same 6 months last year, we've increased the number of features and improvements we shipped this year by nearly 80%," he said during the company's second-quarter earnings call.
He pointed out that AI has helped the company in areas like search, sign-up, checkout, and payments. Airbnb has also released features designed to help hosts with features like quicker onboarding flow.
Airbnb's adoption of consumer-facing AI features has been slower, and mostly isolated to features like review summaries and listing highlights.
Until now, Chesky has maintained that just adopting a chatbot-like interface won't work for travel use cases. Instead, the company has focused on developing an AI for search, discovery, and support.
Chesky said during the earnings call that the company will finally start testing AI search. Even with the new test, Airbnb doesn't want to impose AI search on customers who are used to the current search and filter feature on the app. To accommodate that, Airbnb is adding a toggle that lets users switch to AI search, where they can type in natural language to get results, which would be in a visual format.
"The titles [in the answer] could actually be AI generated and they can be conversational as if you're reading a chatbot, but more visual. Then you get to the product description page and the highlights are AI generated in real-time and personalized to you," Chesky said.