- AI is set to change how people work, and businesses are working to find the best uses for it.
- Airbnb cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky has said he thinks AI will significantly change Airbnb.
- Chesky said they are working to make an AI “concierge” that can learn about a user over time.
As businesses across the globe work to figure out the best way artificial intelligence can be used in their company, it might soon reshape the way people travel too.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said in June that the current iterations of viral chatbot ChatGPT and other AI chatbots are good for informational, factual questions. But a program that can be the “ultimate AI concierge” and learn about you over time is more valuable to Airbnb.
“Instead of Airbnb just asking you where are you going, and when are you going, we ask you some bigger questions like who are you, what do you want? Today, tomorrow, next year, in your life?'” Chesky said last month at Bloomberg’s Technology Summit. “The better we can understand you, the more we can be like the ultimate AI concierge pointing you to places, community, homes, experiences, and many more things.”
It’s not the first time Chesky has talked about the potential for AI to change the Airbnb experience, and what the company’s AI “concierge” will one day be able to do. Chesky has said the platform could be entirely reinvented by next May.
“Basically the short answer is next May you’re going to see a whole new Airbnb,” Chesky told travel site Skift in May. “We’ll do small things in November. But May, we’re basically rebuilding the entire app with AI at the center,” referring to Airbnb’s routine of releasing new features twice a year.
Chesky has said in interviews that he’s close with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which is behind ChatGPT that helped spark the current AI craze. The two met in Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator.
The Airbnb cofounder told Skift that his engineering team helped OpenAI design its plugins that were released in March, but decided to put off implementing anything into Airbnb until he felt it could benefit users.
One of the first planned infusions of AI with Airbnb is in customer service, which is an area where jobs have already started to be cut across the tech industry, with executives saying AI can replace the work humans do interacting with customers. Chesky told Skift they plan to launch AI-assisted customer service in the fall, but with an emphasis on AI helping customer service representatives work faster instead of replacing them.
He said Airbnb has over 70 different customer service policies like cancellations and discrimination, with some over 100 pages long because of various contingencies. Instead of an inexperienced customer service rep searching through those policies, an AI program could analyze a customer complaint and instantly pull the right policy, helping the human work much faster.
“Hopefully it’s going to make you just think, ‘Oh my God, their customer service is amazing,'” Chesky told Skift.
AI could also help summarize hundreds of reviews to give users the simplest description of what a particular rental is like, Chesky said, or could analyze pictures provided by the person listing a property and instantly identify amenities for the listing’s description.
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