Airbnb is quietly rolling out an AI customer service bot in the US

Airbnb started rolling out an AI-powered customer service bot in the U.S. last month, CEO Brian Chesky said during the firm’s first-quarter conference call on Thursday. Chesky said 50% of Airbnb’s U.S. users are already using the AI bot for customer service, adding that the company plans to roll out the feature to all its users in the country this month. “One thing I’ll say about AI [is that] it is definitely making the customer experience easier […] It has already led to a 15% reduction in people needing to contact live human agents,” he noted during the analyst call. Last year, the company told TechCrunch that it was testing the technology, but in a limited manner and only for certain queries. “I think there is a lot of potential for applying AI to the business. We think a lot about how AI is going to change the experience at the consumer layer over time,” Airbnb co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk told TechCrunch at that time. Unlike companies like OpenAI, Google, Perplexity and the ... Read full article.