Airbnb CEO Predicts AI Will Rewrite Job Descriptions

Airbnb is gaining innovation and efficiency through its use of artificial intelligence, the company said in a shareholder letter released Thursday (May 7).

The company’s engineers now coauthor 60% of the code they produce with AI, enabling teams to ship faster, iterate more quickly, and deliver more improvements to guests and hosts, according to the letter.

In Airbnb’s customer support operation, over 40% of the guests who contact its AI Assistant have their issues resolved without a human agent. That means faster resolution times and a 10% year-over-year increase in the company’s cost per booking, per the letter.

During a Thursday earnings call, Airbnb Chairman, CEO and Co-founder Brian Chesky said the company is at the very beginning of seeing how AI will change how everyone does their jobs, but he thinks of the technology as an accelerant to everything.

“I think the No. 1 characteristic of AI is speed,” Chesky said. “It just speeds every single thing up. I also think itrequires everyone to be more hands-on and requires everyone to be more nimble and more adaptive to change.”

With AI, Chesky said, there’s not going to be much need for “30,000-feet, hands-off managers,” there’s going to be much more democratized access to data within companies, and it will eventually require teams to be structured in a new way.

Chesky’s comments came on the same day that BILL CEO and founder René Lacerte announced during an earnings call that his company will reduce its workforce by 30% by the end of the quarter as it accelerates the use of AI in its operations.

Lacerte said when BILL deployed a quality assurance agent, the company found that the agent evaluates all customer interactions, rather than the 1% to 2% that an employee used to review, and that it provides real-time feedback and cues to support staff during calls.

“Seeing this in action enables us to transition to completely new ways of operating,” Lacerte said.

Block CEO Jack Dorsey said during his company’s Thursday earnings call that when Block undertook a sweeping organizational restructuring and staff reductions earlier this year, the company aimed to flatten processes and lean more heavily into AI tools across engineering, underwriting and commerce workflows.

“One of the strongest outcomes of the action we took is just the speed of decision-making and the ability to act on that decision through the tools,” Dorsey said. “Now that these AI tools are handling more of the mundane tasks and we’re automating a lot more, we can focus on being a lot more creative and being a lot more innovative again.”