Airbnb shares surged 15% Friday after the company posted one of its strongest growth quarters in years and raised its full-year outlook, with CEO Brian Chesky crediting artificial intelligence for the turnaround.
Who Gets the Gains
Chesky told CNBC in an exclusive interview after the earnings report that Airbnb will spend “a lot more” on AI tokens this year than it first expected because the cost of inference “pales in comparison” to the revenue and productivity the company says it gets back. That’s the basic deal here: more money into machine systems, more output from the same workforce, and investors cheering while the payroll stays pinned down.
He said Airbnb is cutting product-development time by roughly 60%, shipping about 80% more features year over year and keeping headcount roughly flat even as AI spending rises sharply. The company’s own language makes the hierarchy plain. The people at the top get faster growth and higher returns. The people doing the work are expected to produce more, with less room to breathe.
“I think now it’s safe to say AI is the best thing to have happened to Airbnb,” Chesky said. “I think we’re becoming an AI-native company, and I think that is probably the number one explanation for our results.”
The New Management Logic
A year ago, Chesky said, the question inside the company was whether AI was good for Airbnb or bad for it. Now he’s selling the technology as the engine of the company’s next phase, and he’s doing it in the language of design, efficiency and control. Chesky studied industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design before co-founding Airbnb, later grew close with former Apple design chief Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and introduced the two men, helping spark the relationship that led to their work together on AI hardware.
Airbnb hired Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s former head of generative AI and a leader of its Llama work, as chief technology officer in January. Chesky said Airbnb had been “maybe middle of the pack in AI” before Al-Dahle arrived with a mandate to help make the company “AI-native.” The company didn’t just add a tool. It brought in a new layer of technical command.
Chesky said AI is already helping Airbnb attract more bookings, make it easier for hosts to list and price homes, and lower customer-service costs. The company is piloting AI-powered search, using AI to generate personalized listing highlights and answers for guests, and helping hosts create and price listings. In customer service, 45% of guests who interact with Airbnb’s AI agent never need to speak with a human agent.
“It’s really across the board: More demand, more supply, cheaper customer service,” Chesky said.
What the Platform Wants
Internally, Airbnb is tracking how employees use AI. Chesky said the company looks at individual token usage as one measure of adoption, though he called it a crude metric and said it focuses more heavily on team output. “What we’re seeing is that across the board, teams are significantly more productive,” he said. Those gains began with engineers and have spread to product management, design, marketing and creative services. “I have so underestimated the impact of AI.”
That productivity push is showing up in hiring plans too. Headcount is roughly flat year to date, even as spending on AI rises sharply, and Chesky said investors should expect revenue to grow “a lot faster” than staffing for the foreseeable future. “Our philosophy has been not necessarily to use AI to have fewer people, but to use AI to get more out of the people,” Chesky said. He added that revenue per employee should continue to rise.
That’s the clean corporate version of the story. More extraction from each worker. More output per person. More value for the company. The machine doesn’t need to say the quiet part out loud; the numbers do it for it.
Chesky said the economics are central to his increasingly bullish view of AI. While many consumer companies are still trying to figure out how to generate enough revenue to justify inference costs, he said Airbnb has an unusually favorable model. “One of the problems is a lot of people feel like they don’t know how to make money on consumer with AI,” Chesky said.
At Airbnb, he said, inference costs pale in comparison with “the amount of money we make on every booking” and the additional revenue generated by faster product development. “We are going to spend a lot more on AI tokens this year than we forecasted,” he said. “But that’s great because the ROI is there, and therefore our revenue is much higher.”
Airbnb is still trying to be selective about where it spends those tokens and is using more than a dozen AI models internally, Chesky said. Those include models like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. But it limits access to some slower and more expensive models when their additional capability is not necessary for the task.
Chesky said he is particularly bullish on open-source models for consumer-facing products and said frontier models remain important for the hardest problems, but most consumer tasks do not require the most expensive systems. “Consumers mostly do not need frontier models for most things,” Chesky said. “It’s a matter of throttling the right job for the right tool.” He declined to name the open-source models Airbnb is deploying in consumer products, saying the makeup of the company’s technology stack is becoming competitively sensitive.
Chesky said he does not believe chatbots will replace Airbnb as the transaction layer. Travel is visual, difficult to compare through text alone and often planned collaboratively, he said, and those are areas where the traditional chatbot interface remains weak. “I do not believe the chat interface is the right interface for travel,” Chesky said. He expects chatbots to become important for inspiration and itinerary building, but said he does not see them becoming major booking platforms “in the coming future.”
For now, Chesky said he is focused on using AI to extend Airbnb’s own growth runway. He told CNBC that first-time bookers are growing at the fastest pace in four years and said the U.S. business accelerated from the first quarter. Hotels, meanwhile, are growing three times faster than the company’s traditional home listings as Airbnb expands beyond the home-rental marketplace it built its name on.
“We are not a company whose best days were in the 2010s,” Chesky said. “We are a company where the best days are in front of us.”