Overview
- Airbnb says its custom-built agent now handles about a third of customer support tickets in the U.S. and Canada.
- The company plans a global rollout with more languages and voice support, aiming for well above 30% of tickets within a year if progress continues.
- An LLM-powered, conversational search is live for a very small share of users to enable natural-language queries and Q&A about listings and locations.
- Airbnb may introduce sponsored placements within conversational search, which leadership describes as a future experiment once the design is validated.
- New CTO Ahmad Al-Dahle, recruited from Meta, is leading the push as 80% of Airbnb engineers use AI tools, and the company reports Q4 revenue of $2.78 billion, up 12% year over year.