Airbnb Launches AI Features Across Search, Discovery, and Support
“We are building an AI-native experience where the app does not just search for you. It knows you”
Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb announced during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on February 13, 2026, that Airbnb is significantly expanding its use of large language models across search, discovery, customer support, and internal operations.
“We are building an AI-native experience where the app does not just search for you. It knows you,” Chesky said. “It will help guests plan their entire trip, help hosts better run their businesses, and help the company operate more efficiently at scale.”
Chesky framed it and said that the app should not just search for users, it should “know” them, helping guests plan entire trips, helping hosts run their businesses, and making Airbnb itself more efficient.
To do that, the company plans to lean heavily on its new CTO, Ahmad Al‑Dahle, who previously worked on Meta’s Llama models and will help apply Airbnb’s deep pool of identity and review data to personalization.
Airbnb says that this update is a redesign of the core product around AI, layering intelligence over Airbnb’s existing marketplace rather than handing discovery over to third‑party assistants.
Brian argues that generic chatbots cannot replicate Airbnb. “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,” said Chesky.
AI-Powered Search and Natural-Language Discovery
The main highlight of this new update is an AI-powered search feature that lets users describe what they want in natural language, from “pet‑friendly cabin with a hot tub near Asheville under $250 a night” to questions about specific listings or neighborhoods.
The tool is currently live for only a “small percentage” of users as an experiment, but Airbnb says it will evolve into a more comprehensive and intuitive search experience that extends through the trip, not just the initial booking.
Early tests allow guests to ask follow‑up questions about accessibility, noise, local conditions, or amenities, reducing back‑and‑forth with hosts and helping travelers reach a confident short list faster.
Chesky also confirmed that the company is exploring sponsored listings inside AI search, but stressed that design and user experience will come first before any new ad units are rolled out.
“Over time, we are gonna be experimenting with making AI search more conversational, integrating it into more than the trip, and eventually, we will be looking at sponsored listings as a result of that,” said Chesky.
Scaling Customer Support
The company’s AI-powered customer support bot, launched in North America last year, now handles approximately one-third of customer inquiries without human intervention.
Chesky outlined expansion plans saying, “A year from now, if we are successful, significantly more than 30% of tickets will be handled by a customer service agent, in many more languages, in all the languages where we have live agents. AI customer service will not only be chat, it will be voice.”
This voice capability is particularly significant. While text-based chatbots have become commonplace, voice interactions require far more sophisticated natural language understanding and the ability to handle interruptions, accents, and conversational nuances.
The global language expansion is equally important. By offering AI support in every language where Airbnb currently provides human agents, the company can deliver consistent service quality regardless of location, a crucial advantage for a platform operating in over 220 countries and regions.
Airbnb plans to use AI to help hosts manage listings more effectively, improving description quality, answering routine guest questions, and potentially assisting with pricing and operations.
By normalizing inconsistent listing text and summarizing rules and amenities, AI could reduce friction for hosts while giving guests clearer, more comparable information.
Internally, the company says around 80% of its engineers already use AI tools, with a goal of reaching 100%. Airbnb is tying it directly to product velocity stating, the more repetitive engineering and data tasks AI can absorb, the faster it can ship new guest and host features on top of its marketplace.