As Artificial Intelligence continues to replace human jobs around the world, Airbnb is also joining the trend. The company has revealed that its in-house AI agent now handles about a third of customer support requests in North America, with plans to expand this service to other countries soon.
During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, CEO Brian Chesky said that if the global launch of the feature goes well, then he expects that within a year, more than 30% of all customer support queries will be handled by AI through voice and chat, across all languages where Airbnb also employs human customer service agent.
“We think this is going to be massive because not only does this reduce the cost base of Airbnb customer service, but the quality of service is going to be a huge step change,” Chesky said, suggesting that AI bots are capable of doing a better job than its human counterparts in resolving certain issues.
Increasing use of AI to streamline tasks
Within the company, Airbnb is also increasingly using AI. The company said that around 80% of its engineers already use AI tools in their work, with a goal of the entire workforce adopting the technology.
Airbnb is not the only company who is betting on AI’s future. Just a day back, Spotify claimed that its most experienced software engineers have not written a single line of code in months. But interestingly, these workers were not laid off. Instead, they are acting as supervisors of the AI system, focusing on guiding, reviewing and refining the system’s output rather than writing code themselves.
With evolving technology, many companies are facing disruption by AI, however Airbnb’s top management believes that it has a special database and product that other AI chatbots can’t easily replicate. CEO Brian Chesky said that regular chatbots do not have access to Airbnb’s massive database of users and reviews, and they also can’t directly contact hosts, which is something most guests do.
“A chatbot doesn’t have our 200 million verified identities or our 500 million proprietary reviews, and it can’t message the hosts, which 90% of our guests do,” Chesky told analysts, adding that the company is instead working towards layering AI over the Airbnb experience. He claims that this move will only help to further accelerate the company’s growth.
Can AI system become a risk in longer run? Chesky weighs in
Despite the positive growth outlook with AI integration, investors of Airbnb remained cautious about the long-term impact of the technology. Some are worried that advanced AI platforms could eventually enter the short-term rentals market themselves, which could turn them into direct competitors.
Chesky, however, pushed back at that idea, noting that Airbnb is not just the consumer-facing app, it is also the host app. It provides customer service, as well as protection of consumers, like insurance and user verifications, which according to him, is hard to replace.
He further added that traffic from AI tools already converts better than traffic from Google, suggesting the shift could benefit Airbnb. The company is already using AI to improve how people search on its platform. Right now, this feature is available for a very small number of users, as the company experiments with making its search function more conversational, the company executive said.
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