Airbnb Tests AI Search After Automating 45% of Support

Airbnb is building artificial intelligence into nearly every step of a trip, not just the chatbot. The company’s AI customer-service assistant now resolves nearly 45% of user inquiries without a human agent, up from about a third at the end of last year, operating in more than 50 languages with voice-call support planned later this year, CEO Brian Chesky said, PYMNTS reported.

Chesky deliberately started there rather than with search, the part of the platform most competitors have prioritized first. “The reason we decided to start with this is we want to focus on the hardest problem in AI, which we thought was customer service,” Chesky told analysts, CX Dive reported.

Airbnb is now extending AI forward into the parts of the platform travelers see before they ever need support. The company is testing an AI search toggle that lets users type natural-language queries instead of relying on traditional filters, returning results with AI-generated, personalized listing highlights and titles that read closer to a conversation than a search results page. “The titles could actually be AI generated and they can be conversational as if you’re reading a chatbot, but more visual,” Chesky said, TechCrunch reported.

Airbnb also plans to launch AI-powered home comparison later this year, letting guests compare listings side by side before booking, and is applying AI to host-facing tools including faster listing onboarding, according to CX Dive.

AI Is Also Working Behind the Scenes

Some of Airbnb’s AI use cases never surface to a traveler at all. The company uses machine learning-powered “anti-party technology” to identify bookings at higher risk of turning into disruptive, unauthorized parties, blocking flagged reservations or redirecting guests to alternative accommodations, PYMNTS reported.

The system analyzes booking signals including listing type, stay duration, travel distance and last-minute timing, and only about 0.15% of global bookings get flagged as a potential risk, according to Airbnb’s own account of the technology. The support assistant resolves an issue before it escalates to a human. The party-prevention system flags risk before a booking is even confirmed.

That same logic extends into how Airbnb builds its own product. AI has cut the time from concept to feature launch by as much as 60%, and AI now writes roughly 60% of the company’s new code, according to Chesky, PYMNTS reported, a shift he has described not as replacing engineers but as letting the same team ship substantially more in the same amount of time.

That internal acceleration sits underneath features across sign-up, checkout and payments, meaning much of what a traveler experiences as a faster, smoother booking flow traces back to AI tools working inside Airbnb’s own engineering process rather than a chatbot the traveler interacts with directly.

Booking Holdings Bets the Platform Still Matters Most

Airbnb’s rival Booking Holdings is making a different argument about where AI’s real value sits in travel. Generative AI can recommend a hotel, assemble an itinerary or suggest a cheaper travel date, but it cannot independently guarantee a room, process a payment or resolve a dispute if something goes wrong, Daniel Marovitz, Booking Holdings’ chief technology officer, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in a recent interview.

Airbnb and Booking Holdings are converging on the same technology from opposite starting assumptions. Airbnb is betting that owning the AI experience at every step, support, search, discovery and safety, keeps the traveler inside its ecosystem from the first search to the final review. Booking Holdings is betting that even if an AI assistant becomes the way a trip gets planned, the platform that actually completes the transaction is where the real value, and the real risk, still lives.

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