Airbnb will spend ‘a lot more’ on AI as stock surges 15%

Airbnb shares surged 15% Friday after the company delivered one of its strongest growth quarters in years and raised its full-year outlook — a turnaround CEO Brian Chesky is directly crediting to artificial intelligence.

In an exclusive interview with CNBC after the earnings report, Chesky said Airbnb will spend “a lot more” on AI tokens this year than it originally forecast because the cost of inference “pales in comparison” to the revenue and productivity the company is getting back.

Airbnb is cutting product-development time by roughly 60%, shipping about 80% more features year over year and keeping headcount roughly flat even as AI spending rises sharply, Chesky said.

“I think now it’s safe to say AI is the best thing to have happened to Airbnb,” he said. “I think we’re becoming an AI-native company, and I think that is probably the number one explanation for our results.”

That conviction marks a sharp turn for Chesky. A year ago, Chesky said the question inside the company was essentially, “Is AI good for Airbnb or is AI bad for Airbnb?”

The shift is notable for a CEO who has long approached technology more like a designer than a traditional engineer.

Chesky went to the Rhode Island School of Design and studied industrial design before co-founding Airbnb. Years later, he would become close with former Apple design chief Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — and eventually introduce the two men, helping spark the relationship that led to their work together on AI hardware.

Now, Chesky is trying to bring that same design-first sensibility to Airbnb’s own AI overhaul.

The company hired Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta‘s former head of generative AI and a leader of its Llama work, as chief technology officer in January. Chesky said Airbnb had been “maybe middle of the pack in AI” before Al-Dahle arrived with a mandate to help make the company “AI-native.”

There are already measurable signs of that shift. Chesky said AI is helping Airbnb attract more bookings, make it easier for hosts to list and price homes, and lower customer-service costs.

The company is piloting AI-powered search, using AI to generate personalized listing highlights and answers for guests, and helping hosts create and price listings. In customer service, 45% of guests who interact with Airbnb’s AI agent never need to speak with a human agent.

“It’s really across the board: More demand, more supply, cheaper customer service,” Chesky said.

Internally, Airbnb is also closely tracking how employees use AI. Chesky said the company looks at individual token usage as one measure of adoption, but considers that a relatively crude metric and focuses more heavily on the output of teams.

“What we’re seeing is that across the board, teams are significantly more productive,” Chesky said. He said those gains began with engineers and have since spread to product management, design, marketing, and creative services. “I have so underestimated the impact of AI.”

That productivity is showing up in Airbnb’s…