"IA was the best thing that ever happened to Airbnb"

Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky explained in the presentation of financial results that the implementation of Artificial Intelligence tools helped the company accelerate the pace with which it develops new features.

10/08/2026
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A Airbnb recently presented the financial results for the second quarter, showing that revenue increased by 17% to USD 3.6 billion (€3.1 billion) and a net result of USD 816 million (706 million).

Moreover, Airbnb notes that users have booked 148.3 million nights in accommodation available on the platform – which concerns a 10% increase, thus exceeding analysts’ forecasts.

For Airbnb’s co-founder and CEO, Brian Chesky, the origin of the company’s success is related to the implementation of Artificial Intelligence – not only with regard to the speed with which new features are developed, but also to the responsiveness of its customer support tool.

“Artificial Intelligence was the best thing that ever happened to Airbnb”, said Chesky according to the The Wall Street Journal, noting that the company had to “rebuild from scratch to become a native artificial intelligence company”.

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It must be remembered that by May this year, Chesky had already advanced that Airbnb was ready to make a strong bet on Artificial Intelligence and stated up to 60% of the code that was produced by the company's engineers was already written using Artificial Intelligence.

“ API partners say they want better hosts and they need better tools”, noticed Chesky at the time, according to the techCrunch site. “Artificial Intelligence gives us a great advantage – if you previously needed a team of 20 engineers, an engineer can now instruct agents to do much more work under his supervision. Adopting Artificial Intelligence tools enables us to develop more software for API partners, accelerate the work for which we did not have the resources before.”.

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Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky seems to have intentions of launching his own laboratory dedicated to the development of Artificial Intelligence. The news was advanced by Bloomberg and subsequently confirmed techCrunch site.

This publication will, however, have obtained more details about Chesky's plans for this new Artificial Intelligence laboratory. Apparently, Chesky will not abandon the position of CEO of Airbnb and will only occupy the position of president of the new laboratory.

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It is not yet known who will take the place, but it is known that the initiative is born of Chesky's dissatisfaction with the current great language models.

Although Airbnb already has some artificial intelligence tools in the programming area, the company has not yet established a deeper partnership because Chesky considers that existing products do not yet have the quality level it wants.

Allegedly, this artificial intelligence lab created by Chesky will focus on user design and interactions.

Even with all this information, neither Chesky nor Airbnb officially commented on this news.