Breaking news
Airbnb sees AI as its ticket out of the travel trade ghetto, and a passport to expanding its companies into other industries.
CFO David Stephenson outlined that planned plod on Tuesday for the duration of the brief-stay rental pioneer’s Q4 2023 earnings call.
Asked about AI, he told investors “Airbnb is now now not an infrastructure company. Infrastructure may perhaps be a large language mannequin or obviously, GPUs. So we’re now now not going to be investing in infrastructure.”
Fair satisfactory. Solid agencies know to stick to their core competencies, and Airbnb is clearly now now not constructed to become a chipmaker. But it is miles intensely great within the industry of establishing apps that satisfaction users – and Stephenson recommended that’s the place AI will make a disagreement.
“We can excel … on the application layer,” the CFO opined, “And I imagine that we can build certainly some of the leading and most innovative AI interfaces ever created.”
Doing so starts with recognition that AI-powered apps need to evolve beyond contemporary interface conventions.
“Maybe one way to make this real is – in case you had been to start, say, ChatGPT or Google, though the units are very extremely efficient, the interface is really now now not an AI interface,” he argued. “Or now now not it is miles the same interface as the 2000s or 2010s – it be a typical classical internet interface. So we really feel fancy the units in a sense, are probably underutilized.”
Airbnb’s interface is also traditional-faculty, he admitted. “We have a platform that was constructed for one vertical: non permanent space.” But he thinks generative AI may perhaps create interfaces that “provide abilities that’s so great extra personalized than anything you have ever seen before.
“Imagine an app that you are feeling fancy knows you,” he recommended. “Or now now not it is fancy the ultimate concierge – an interface that is adaptive and evolving and changing in real time, unlike no interface you have ever seen before.”
- Italy seizes from Airbnb $836M in alleged unpaid taxes
- Airbnb hosts less likely to accept bookings from Black folk than Whites
- Europe wants Airbnb and pals to cough up rental property logs
- Airbnb turns its anti-partying tech on American lodgers
The CFO said Airbnb is already engaged on AI interfaces, and teased “some very gargantuan announcements later this year” – nonetheless wouldn’t elaborate on how they’re going to be feeble.
He insisted that AI will assist Airbnb “lumber from a single vertical company to a lumber-vertical company.”
The CFO made that level because Airbnb management has noticed that the ideal tech players achieve extra than one market.
“We studied Amazon within the late ’90s, early 2000s when they went from books to all the issues, or Apple when they launched the App Store,” he recounted. “These really large technology companies are horizontal platforms.
“And I gain with AI and the work we’re doing around AI interfaces, I gain that’s what you may have to seek information from us.”
CEO Brian Chesky told investors Airbnb’s AI efforts will likely be “a multi-year plod.” He pointed to the November 2023 acquisition of GamePlanner.AI – a stealth AI startup led by Adam Cheyer, who developed Siri for Apple – as a key contributor to Airbnb’s AI plan.
Good day Brian, originate you already know Siri was extra or less a dud?
Airbnb earned $2.2 billion of income in Q4, from ninety 9 million bookings for “nights and experiences.” The income decide was up 17 p.c year over year and the bookings rose 12 facets – nonetheless that growth may perhaps now now not stop a $349 million salvage loss. The tubby year also produced a salvage loss, of $4.8 billion on income of $9.9 billion earned from 448.2 million bookings.
The series of hosts signed up to lease their properties by way of the service topped five million in Q4, a duration for the duration of which 55 p.c of faulty night bookings had been made on the Airbnb app – up 50 p.c from a year ago.
That decide is quickly, presumably, to upward thrust even larger and into extra markets as soon as Airbnb nails its AI concierge and goes horizontal – a task professionals repeatedly described as “perfecting our first service and expanding beyond the core.” ®
