Brian Chesky on his mission to transform Airbnb into an ‘everything’ platform

Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky is keyed in on three major priorities: artificial intelligence (AI), community and turning Airbnb into an “everything” platform.

Speaking with Goldman Sachs' managing director and U.S. internet analyst Eric Sheridan at the Communacopia & Technology Conference earlier this week, Chesky outlined the direction he wants the company to take moving forward.

“It's going to take time,” he said. “This is not going to be something that happens over two or three years. This is something that is going to happen over the next decade.”

Chesky has shared his vision for the company in the past—and spoken on its progress with marked steps, including Airbnb’s launch of Services in May. He’s also been open about his thoughts on AI over the past two years, first exploring implementation and then predicting that impending changes were likely to take longer than expected.

This week, he reiterated his excitement about the company’s future with these strategic priorities in mind.

“If we're truly successful, I think we're going to be one of the apps that people have the most emotional connection to,” Chesky said. “I think there [are] so many opportunities over the coming decade for Airbnb to be a defining part of people's lives.”

Chesky said he is hoping to “make the world a little bit smaller” by bridging technology and the physical world.

AI vision 

The first priority Chesky outlined is to “take Airbnb from a pre-AI app to the first, or one of the first, truly native AI applications.”

“ChatGPT is not an AI native application. It uses AI, but its interface is the interface that would have existed before AI,” Chesky said. “We've created the jet engine. We haven't created the airplane yet. So we want to create one of the first true AI native interfaces built to support these strong models.”

Airbnb aims to create the “ultimate” AI concierge for travel and for life. 

“We'll use the leading frontier models or the open source models,” he said, noting that the company won’t be building foundation models itself. 

According to Chesky, the technology will be as strong as any chatbot because Airbnb plans to use exact, existing technology. But he said it’s intended to be bespoke.

The CEO also said AI search will be integrated into the Airbnb app next year.

“We think we have one of the best AI customer service products already in the world, and we're continuing to improve that,” he said. “We're developing this really rich interface that's not a chatbot ... That's the first thing we're going to do.”

Airbnb as a community platform

Priority number two is “to shift Airbnb from a marketplace for vacation rentals to a global community where you can travel and live anywhere,” Chesky said. He noted that Airbnb is not trying to be a marketplace but a community.

“I would argue that [the] social network is the most successful product in human history that was invented and then uninvented,” he said. “Because in 2012, social networking became social media and your friends became your followers. Instead of connecting, you started performing. Suddenly, there's really no social networks anymore. There's no way to connect with people.”

Airbnb isn’t trying to build a social network in the traditional sense—think Facebook, for example.

Instead, Chesky is interested in creating something “like a social network in the real world” that can match users to people and communities as they seek products and services.

“To do that, we'd have to build one of the most definitive profiles on the internet, a really robust profile,” Chesky continued. “We have 200 million verified identities. I think that's more than the U.S. passports in circulation at this moment, by the way. And we're going to build out this really rich community.”

During its summer release in May, Airbnb shared that its rebuilt mobile app had social media-like capabilities. The app “travels with you,” Airbnb said at the time, meaning it can recommend applicable services and experiences once a home is booked, for example, and provides users with an itinerary and other relevant details. It also features an “Explore” tab that operates as a home page for inspiration and discovery.

Airbnb as the ‘everything’ platform

The third priority is to expand beyond Airbnb’s origins.

Chesky said his goal is for Airbnb “basically to shift from vacation rentals to becoming this entire ecosystem, like Amazon, where we can sell significantly more than vacation rentals, homes, services, experiences and many things we haven't yet announced.” 

Chesky has previously referenced Amazon and Apple’s trajectory while talking about Airbnb’s potential to explore other lines of business. The CEO is also learning directly from Amazon, stating that he and his team studied the company's progression from a bookseller to its current role as a one-stop-shop. 

Over the last five years, Chesky said Airbnb has done a great deal of work to transform from a vacation rental platform to a “platform for everything.” To do that, he said Airbnb has had to start from scratch.

“We had to rebuild our technology from the ground up, starting with [the] technology stack,” Chesky said in May. “We had to rewrite our application. We had to rethink how we do marketing. We had to build out entire new departments. We had to rethink how we recruit and work with our hosts to bring all this together. It was a massive effort.”

The launch of Airbnb’s Services and relaunch of its Experiences categories marked a formal entrance into this “everything” space.

Airbnb is accessed by 1.6 billion devices a year. That means there's a lot of opportunity, and these businesses are really just the beginning.

Brian Chesky, Airbnb

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“There is no one-stop shop for services, especially hospitality-based services. And we started with travel services; we think we can go much more,” Chesky said. “But we're not just limited to that. We have longer-term housing that we're going into. Housing like short-term rentals is a much smaller market than long-term rentals, and even if we don't get the same market share, there's a huge opportunity for longer-term stays.”

Chesky also earmarked hotels as an area of opportunity for Airbnb, something he mentioned on the company’s second quarter earnings call in August—and it's a mission that became even clearer with the company’s service fee shift announcement earlier this summer.

Overall, Chesky wants Airbnb to become a “platform for everything you need to travel and live around the world—not just travel—but travel and live.”

He also predicts it will involve “dozens” of businesses as things progress.

“Airbnb is accessed by 1.6 billion devices a year,” he said. “That means there's a lot of opportunity, and these businesses are really just the beginning.”

Airbnb may create, monetize ‘host ecosystem’

Airbnb’s ambitions go beyond its efforts to offer more to consumers, as Chesky also touched on what hosts want from the platform.

Hosts are looking for assistance with city registration, pricing, cleaning, marketing, finances and restocking of home item essentials—the list goes on.

“A lot of these people, they're not actually set up as businesses,” Chesky said. “They don't have accountants or CFOs. They're usually sole proprietors. So they need help with all those different things.”

Airbnb plans to satisfy those needs, and Chesky said the company sees the opportunity to build “an entire host ecosystem of services.”

That ecosystem would be monetized, he said, noting that the company would likely implement the equivalent of a larger take rate for hosts who use those services provided by Airbnb.

Additionally, they’re looking at promoted listings. 

“I don't think there has to be a trade-off between ads and a great user experience,” Chesky said. “I think with AI, the whole paradigm of an ad has to change. I think [of] the way Google did ads, and I think that's going to be different in a world of AI. Booking.com has done some really interesting things around the Genius program in loyalty, which essentially is a monetization program.”

Chesky said Airbnb isn’t just under-monetized but “isn’t really monetized,” so there is room for growth. 

“We have travel insurance that we offer, but we keep every year offering services for hosts for free, and they're telling us they want to pay for premium services,” he said. “I think a host ecosystem is a massive opportunity for monetization in the future.”