• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, February 13, 2026

Airbnb's artificial intelligence (AI) team, led by a former Apple and Meta Platforms expert, is building a native AI experience for travel in which the technology goes beyond searching for the user -- it knows their likes and dislikes.

“We believe we're building something that's impossible to replicate,” Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky said during the company's most recent earnings call.

Chesky expects AI will help accelerate Airbnb's revenue growth to at least low double digits in 2026, and believes adjusted EBITDA margins will remain stable year-over-year.  He believes it will happen without committing billions or tens of billions of dollars, as Amazon and others have plans to do.

As many companies struggle to show performance and return on investments in AI, Raymond James Analyst John Beck noted that Airbnb is seeing success from agentic in customer service and software engineering applications.

“We are encouraged by signs of execution though we maintain our Market Perform rating as we look for improved visibility into the evolution of the agentic opportunity,” Beck wrote in a research note published this week.

Chesky described during the company's latest earnings call how AI has become “the experience” for those using its platform.

Baird Equity Research analysts noted that future loyalty and advertising products are still on the roadmap, but that management expects to integrate AI across the platform in “rapid iterations, still leading to an AI-powered concierge” services.

Airbnb recently reported its fourth-quarter 2025 earnings, with revenue rising 12% year-over-year to $2.78 billion -- surpassing analysts' expectations, despite missing estimates for earnings per share. It reported 56 cents versus 66 cents as expected.

Airbnb Introduced AI in customer service in May 2025. Now the technology helps the company resolve one-third of issues without live agents.

The company’s developers built a custom AI agent that trained on millions of its support interactions. It is live across North America, and the company plans to roll it out globally.

“That's just the beginning because we're building an AI-native experience where the app doesn't just search for you,” Chesky said. “It knows you.” This will help guests plan their entire trip.

Ahmad Al-Dahle in January joined Airbnb as the company’s CTO. Prior, he spent 16 years at Apple and most recently led the generative AI team at Meta that built Llama models.

Chesky said traffic that comes from chatbots converts at a higher rate than traffic that comes from Google. And that these models are not proprietary. The models in ChatGPT, the models in Gemini, the models in Claude and the models like Kiwi are available to every company.

“Pretty soon, every company becomes an AI platform if they make the shift,” Chesky said.

Airbnb, with Al-Dahle’s help, will have the ability to build everything everyone else will have if it uses their models, but specialization will win in travel because if somebody wants to find an Airbnb or have a trip, the company can take their model, the same model they use, and train it and tune it based on million interactions site visitors do.

“We can connect it to our customer support agents,” he said. “We can connect it to our host.”