Airbnb says AI has cut its feature-shipping time by 60% as it tests AI search

Airbnb has moved cautiously on AI features for the consumer-facing app, but it’s rapidly adopting the technology to build product. Earlier this year, the company said AI is writing 60% of its code. On its latest earnings call, Chesky said AI has cut the time from concept to shipping a feature by as much as 60% across some of the company’s key initiatives, and that compared with the same six months last year, Airbnb has shipped nearly 80% more features and improvements this year. He pointed to search, sign-up, checkout, and payments as areas where AI has helped, along with features meant to speed up host onboarding.

Airbnb’s consumer-facing AI adoption has been slower and mostly limited to features like review summaries and listing highlights. Chesky has maintained that a chatbot-style interface doesn’t work well for travel, so the company has instead focused on AI for search, discovery, and support. On the earnings call, he said Airbnb will finally begin testing AI search — with a toggle that lets users switch into it rather than replacing the existing search-and-filter interface, so users can type natural-language queries and get results in a visual format. “The titles [in the answer] could actually be AI-generated and they can be conversational as if you’re reading a chatbot, but more visual,” Chesky said, adding that the highlights on a listing’s description page would also be AI-generated in real time and personalized to the user.

On the back end, customer support is where Airbnb has deployed AI most heavily. The company launched its AI-powered support bot in North America in 2025 and has since expanded it to more than 50 languages, with plans to bring it to voice calls later this year. Nearly 45% of customer issues that start with the AI agent are now resolved without any human involvement, which Airbnb says has driven its support cost per booking down 16% year-over-year. The company posted revenue up 17% year-over-year to $3.6 billion for the quarter ended in June, with adjusted EBITDA up 21% to $1.3 billion.

Why it matters

Airbnb is treating AI as an internal productivity lever before a customer-facing one — a sequencing bet that its cautious rollout of AI search, rather than a full chatbot pivot, will avoid alienating users while still capturing the speed gains AI has already delivered inside the company.