Company expands in-house expertise with new CTO appointment
Life
Airbnb’s Dublin Office. Image: Donal Murphy
One in three travellers who put a question to Airbnb’s customer service are likely to have had an AI on the line.
In the course of 2026, Airbnb is expanding this way of working to all countries where it has human customer service agents. They suspect the so-called resolution rate will rise further.
Currently, it only involves help requests sent via written chat, but the travel company wants to be able to perform voice-based actions as well. In human terms, guests can call an AI agent, who will resolve their issue.
Specially to bake deep AI expertise into the organisation, the platform appointed new CTO Ahmad Al-Dahle who previously worked at Apple and Meta, among others.
Currently, small experiments are being conducted with AI search, while talking to the ‘lodging service’, travellers can be guided to suitable accommodation.
With the help of AI, travellers can be guided to suitable accommodation. CEO Brian Chesky said investment in AI would not have a material impact on the profit and loss account, nor on capital spending, as Airbnb is not building its own models or large data centres. They use existing models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Kimi and Qwen.
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