Airbnb CEO credits AI after strong quarter sends stock up 15%

Shares of Airbnb climbed 15% Friday after the company reported one of its strongest growth quarters in years and raised its full-year outlook. CEO Brian Chesky is crediting artificial intelligence for the turnaround. In an interview after the earnings report, he said Airbnb will spend "a lot more" on AI tokens this year than it originally planned, because the cost of inference "pales in comparison" to the revenue and productivity the company is getting back.

Chesky said product-development time is down by roughly 60%, feature output is up about 80% year over year, and headcount is roughly flat even as AI spending rises sharply. "It's safe to say AI is the best thing to have happened to Airbnb," he said, adding that the company is becoming "AI-native." A year ago, he said the question inside Airbnb was whether AI was good or bad for the company.

Airbnb hired Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta's former head of generative AI, as chief technology officer in January. Chesky said Airbnb had been "maybe middle of the pack in AI" before Al-Dahle arrived. AI is now helping attract more bookings, making it easier for hosts to list and price homes, and lowering customer-service costs. In customer service, 45% of guests who interact with Airbnb's AI agent never need to speak with a human agent.

Internally, Airbnb tracks how employees use AI, including individual token usage, but Chesky said the company focuses more on team output. He said teams across engineering, product management, design, marketing, and creative services are significantly more productive. Headcount is roughly flat year to date, and Chesky expects revenue to grow "a lot faster" than staffing. "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."

Airbnb uses more than a dozen AI models internally, including Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, and limits access to slower, more expensive models when their extra capability is not needed. Chesky said consumers mostly do not need frontier models for most tasks, but he declined to name the open-source models Airbnb is using in consumer products.

As AI agents get better at planning travel, Chesky is skeptical that chatbots will replace Airbnb as the booking platform. Travel is visual, hard to compare through text alone, and often planned collaboratively, he said. "I do not believe the chat interface is the right interface for travel." He added that first-time bookers are growing at the fastest pace in four years, the U.S. business accelerated from the first quarter, and hotels are growing three times faster than the company's traditional home listings. "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."