Airbnb at Goldman Sachs Conference: AI Ambitions and Strategic Shifts

On Tuesday, 09 September 2025, Airbnb (NASDAQ:ABNB) outlined its ambitious vision at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025. CEO Brian Chesky detailed plans to transform the company from a short-term rental platform into a comprehensive travel and living service, driven by artificial intelligence (AI). While the company sees significant growth potential, it also faces challenges in integrating AI and expanding its community model.

Key Takeaways

• Airbnb aims to become a truly AI-native application, transforming its platform.
• The company plans to expand its services to include longer-term rentals, hotels, and other travel experiences.
• Chesky emphasized the importance of community building, shifting from a marketplace to a global community.
• Growth markets such as Mexico and Brazil are expanding at twice the rate of core markets.
• Airbnb’s monetization strategy includes offering promoted listings and host services.

Vision and Strategy

• Platform Evolution: Airbnb aims to be a one-stop platform for all travel and living needs, moving beyond just short-term rentals.
• AI Integration: Chesky envisions Airbnb as a fully AI-native app, enhancing supply management and customer service.
• Community Focus: The company is transitioning from a marketplace to a global community, emphasizing connection and real-world experiences.

Consumer Trends

• Demographic Shift: There’s a noticeable shift from younger couples to larger groups and families.
• Travel Patterns: Trends from the pandemic, such as longer stays and domestic travel, continue to persist.
• Social Media Influence: Travel is increasingly discovered through platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

Supply Dynamics

• Listings and Growth: Airbnb boasts about 10 million listings, with the majority of supply growing organically.
• Event Partnerships: Collaborations, such as with the World Cup, aim to boost supply.
• Co-host Network: 10 million nights have been booked through Airbnb’s co-host network.

AI Integration

• Current Landscape: Only a few apps are truly AI-native, and Airbnb aims to join this group.
• Applications: AI is set to revolutionize Airbnb’s operations, from property imagery to customer service.
• Supply Management: AI will help reduce friction in managing and listing properties.

Monetization Opportunities

• Host Services: Potential services include pricing, cleaning, and financial planning.
• Promoted Listings: These are seen as a promising monetization strategy.
• Under-Monetization: Airbnb is considered under-monetized, with room for increasing take rates.

Growth Markets

• Core Markets: The U.S., Canada, UK, France, and Australia currently make up 70% of the business.
• Emerging Markets: Countries like Mexico and Brazil are growing rapidly, driven by localized marketing strategies.

Strategic Priorities

• AI Transformation: Transitioning to an AI-native platform is a top priority.
• Community Building: Airbnb aims to create a global community for travel and living.
• Ecosystem Expansion: Plans include expanding from vacation rentals to a broader range of services and experiences.

In conclusion, Airbnb’s strategic shift towards AI and community building marks a significant evolution in its business model. For more detailed insights, readers are encouraged to refer to the full conference transcript.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025:

Unidentified speaker: Okay, I know we’re transitioning between sessions so people can find their seats. We’re going to keep the conversation going. Our next conversation is with Airbnb, and thanks very much to Brian Chesky, CEO, for being part of the conference for the second time in the last couple of years. Brian, it’s great to see you.

Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb: Thank you for having me here.

Unidentified speaker: Okay, I do have to read the safe harbor before we start. Airbnb would like to remind you that during the fireside chat today, they will make forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those statements. The company will also discuss both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Statements made today are effective only today and will not be updated to reflect subsequent events or circumstances that may arise. Thanks to everyone for sticking with me through that. Brian, great to see you.

Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb: Thank you.

Unidentified speaker: You as a company have been on a really interesting journey over the last couple of years. I think one way I want to sort of level set the conversation is talk about your broader vision for what you’re trying to build at Airbnb, and then we can maybe backsolve for how that sort of informs some of your strategic priorities.

Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb: Yeah, it’s a great question. First of all, thank you all for listening. You know, when people see Airbnb, they mostly see vacation rental homes you can get for typically a week at a time. I think that our vision is so much greater than that. You know, we basically did this really big launch recently in May, and we launched the services and we launched experiences. Basically, the observation we had is Airbnb is so ubiquitous now that it’s like a noun and a verb used all over the world. When people say Airbnb, they mean they want to get a home to rent. It’s like kind of a Kleenex. What if Kleenex wanted to offer more than Kleenex? We had to basically do a complete rebrand where we said now you can Airbnb more than Airbnb. The question is, what can you Airbnb? Of course, we relaunched experiences.

We can talk a little bit more about that. I think if you look on Instagram or TikTok, you’re realizing that what young people really want aren’t goods. They want experiences more than anything else. They want to be able to share them. I think there’s going to be an entire economy built around experiences. It’s just the beginning. Then services. There really is no Amazon of services. Retail is huge. Increasingly, more and more, the economy is also shifting in the United States and around the world to services. There is no one-stop shop for services, especially hospitality-based services. We started with travel services. We think we can go much more. We’re not just limited to that. We have longer-term housing that we’re going into. I mean, housing, like short-term rentals, is a much smaller market than long-term rentals.

Even if we don’t get the same market share, there’s a huge opportunity for longer-term stays. Hotels is a big opportunity for Airbnb. We’ve been working on it for a time, but we’re getting much more serious. We have a huge amount of traffic. Airbnb is accessed by 1.6 billion devices a year. That means there’s a lot of opportunity. These businesses are really just the beginning. I think what we’ve been trying to do over the last five years is rebuild the company from the ground up. I studied Amazon, and they really started as a bookseller. They basically built the entire platform around ISBNs and how to build books. At some point, what they had to do was they had to abstract every part of Amazon. To abstract it, to be able to sell everything from like clothing to diapers to like outdoor barbecue equipment.

That’s really what we had to do. We knew this revolution on AI was coming. We knew that this was going to be a huge opportunity for us. Our vision is to go from a short-term rental platform to a platform for everything you need to travel and live around the world. Not just travel, but travel and live. I think this could involve dozens of businesses that we can expand. We want to be the first true AI-native application. We’ll talk a little bit more about that. ChatGPT is not an AI-native application. It uses AI, but its interface is an interface that would have existed before AI. What we’re doing is we’re putting jet... We’ve created the jet engine. We haven’t created the airplane yet. We want to create one of the first true AI-native interfaces built to support these strong models.

The most important thing we’re trying to do is not be a marketplace, but be a community. One of the things I’m noticing in the world today is more and more kids are spending more and more of their life on their phone. I think the average Gen Z is spending between four and five hours a day on their phone on social media. That is correlated with, I don’t know if it’s a cause, but certainly correlated with people going out less, hanging out less with friends, having record loneliness. I think it’s almost like people are looking at what’s happening right around the world as people are in home and they’re looking through the window at a party that they’re not a part of. I ultimately think that we’re talking a lot about AI at this conference, but what are we going to actually do with AI?

How are people’s daily lives going to actually change? Are our daily lives going to be glued to a device? Is that all we’re going to do? We’re going to be staring at a device for 10 hours a day? We’re going to have to live in the real world. The real question is, how do you take AI and this revolution and actually use it to change the daily life of consumers? Which I haven’t seen. There’s been a lot of development around the models. There’s been one hit application with ChatGPT. There’s been a lot of enterprise companies, but consumer applications, things that change daily life, have not penetrated yet. What we want to do is build this community, where we have one of the most robust profiles on the internet. We deeply understand you. We basically ask you, who are you? What are your goals?

The app is like the ultimate AI concierge that can give you anything you want to travel and live. That’s basically the idea. An Airbnb platform, a native AI app, and this community where we deeply know everyone.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. I do want to get into a lot on the AI side, and we’re going to get there. Maybe just looking at both sides of your business first and starting with the consumer. Just going backwards before we go forward. Obviously, the Airbnb consumer went on a bit of a journey from COVID, post-COVID, and where we are today. How has the consumer evolved as a user of your application and your platform? How does some of what you want to do on the consumer-facing side inform where you want to take consumer habits on Airbnb over the long term?

Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb: Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, we had one type of consumer base before the pandemic. They were typically younger. It was typically like a couple of travelers. It was a lot of cross-border travel. The pandemic totally changed everything. What we noticed is we started having larger groups traveling. That’s why the average ADR on Airbnb is up. It’s primarily because of larger group sizes. We’ve seen a huge shift to families using Airbnb. I think that’s partly because we’ve gotten a lot more vacation rentals, but also our young audience got a little older and started having families, and they didn’t leave Airbnb. They stuck with the platform. We started seeing a lot more domestic travel. We started seeing longer stays in Airbnb. All of those trends from the pandemic have stayed.

I mean, they reverted a little bit from the very peak of the pandemic, but they’ve pretty much been consistent. While travel has normalized, many of the trends we saw of larger group sizes, longer stays, and more domestic travel have endured and stayed the same. I also think, though, that travel is totally changing. You know, travel used to be dominated by intent-based travel on Google. If you think about it, before Google and the internet, how did you travel? You go to a travel agent. You go to the travel agent, and the travel agent would probably give you an idea of where to travel to. The real travel agent, I remember when I was a kid, I would go to a shopping mall. There was a travel agency. They had all these posters of different cities.

The travel agent would help you travel, figure out where to travel to. You often had no idea. When Google came around, people basically started searching on Google. It was very keyword-based. It was very high-intent-based. People basically had to do research elsewhere and then go to Google to find where to stay. What’s happening now, especially with the younger generation, is a lot of travel is being discovered on social media. What that means is travel is becoming more aspirational. Younger people are valuing experiences. They’re searching on social media. TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube collectively will take over from Google search as the predominant way that travel is starting. Some of it’s on ChatGPT, but text is not a great rich interface for travel. It’s got some limits. It’s good for like itinerary ideas. This is what we’re starting to see. People actually see prioritizing experiences.

They’re looking for a destination to figure out where to travel. One of the things we want to do is become a one-stop shop where you can come to Airbnb to figure out where to travel, not just what to do when you travel. These are some of the trends that we’re actually seeing from the consumer.

Unidentified speaker: Okay, great. Let’s go to the other side of the business and supply.

Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb: Yeah.

Unidentified speaker: You’ve been also on an evolutionary path with respect to supply. The type of supply growth you get, where you get it from. I think from our perspective, I think supply dynamic also ties into widening out the experiences that are bookable on the platform. Talk about the evolution of supply and what some of your key priorities are there to open up the aperture of more types of supply that are available.

Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb: Yeah, I think there’s been basically two trends of supply in Airbnb. We have about 10 million listings in Airbnb. For most of our history, we had the great fortune of most of the supply coming organically to Airbnb. The vast majority of supply in Airbnb still comes organically. This is a great characteristic of our business. My friends at Uber and other companies did not have quite that great fortune, so they had to really build out these supply machines and have a lot of driver referral programs. At the same time, we want to grow supply much faster than organic nature. We’ve done a number of things. We’ve worked also on host referrals. We built this thing called the co-host network. We observed something. We noticed there’s a whole bunch of people that have homes.

They would love for them to be rented out and make extra money, but they don’t have time to host. There’s a bunch of hosts that are making a lot of money, and they’d love to host more frequently, but they don’t have the capital to get another home. We thought we’re basically existing in a very narrow Venn diagram of people that have time to host and have a home. What if we actually created a marketplace to match those two together? We could unlock millions more listings. We did that, and it’s just early on. We’ve gotten 10 million nights booked through the co-host network. This has been a huge opportunity for us. We’ve also started really focusing a lot more on event. We just announced a partnership with the World Cup. The World Cup is coming here next year.

It will, I think, be the largest event in human history. It’s coming to the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Events are how we started Airbnb. It’s the best way to get supply. By the way, it’s a great way to get supply, also a great way to normalize relationships with policymakers, because this is the one time they’re reaching out to you, and it’s good news versus bad news. We have a lot of work to do on supply, basically making it easier to host, matching people, and building basically a whole ecosystem. What we imagine is an ecosystem where if you want to put your home on Airbnb, we can match you to somebody to manage your home, clean your place, do any type of service you need.

I think that can unlock tens of millions of more homes, and that can also be used for longer-term rentals as well.

Unidentified speaker: Okay, understood. You teased out a little earlier how AI can continue to evolve the platform overall. What are you most excited about in terms of AI deployment externally from the company into the ecosystem?

Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb: Totally. It’s a great question. I come from a unique lens. I’m friends with a lot of the people at the AI companies. I’m a designer by training, and I’m more of an application person. I’m a designer, product marketer, like application person. What I’ve noticed with AI is the following. ChatGPT launched about three years ago. Three years later, if you go to the App Store, the Apple App Store, and just go to the top 50 app rankings, and these are consumer apps. By the way, consumer is what I’m focused on. There’s been a lot of momentum on enterprise. You go to the consumer apps. I want you to count how many apps are truly AI apps. In the rankings today, one through 50, I think it’s two. ChatGPT is number one, and then sometimes Grok is in the top 50.

Sometimes Gemini is in the top 50, not usually. Now, a whole bunch of other apps like TikTok and Instagram and us and others, we use AI. If you stripped all the AI out of all of our apps, the experience would be 90% the same. Basically, the daily life of most people has not yet been affected by AI, except for people using ChatGPT. They’re using it, and they’re using it very frequently. The thing about ChatGPT is the model we can use. There are many models that are very, very similar to ChatGPT-5. The kind of free or cheap open-source models are only months, not years, behind the frontier models. Whether the models and the intelligence become a commodity or not, I don’t know.

I think that it will, I think it will look more and more like a commodity, but it will be so big and ubiquitous it’s still a great business. You’ll use frontier models for frontier-type purposes. I do not think for 95% of daily life you need the very, very best model. Even ChatGPT is throttling the model based on the type of query you have. My basic framework to think about this is that everyone’s asking, like, when’s AI going to pay back? My view is AI pays back when it starts to infiltrate the entire consumer application land. Whether it’s apps or not, when it starts affecting the daily life of regular people is when AI truly pays back. The question is, when do those 50 apps become AI apps?

I think my instinct is over the next two or three years, there’s going to be a major turnover. A major turnover where all these apps are going to have to be AI-native apps. You could also argue we’re going to live in a post-app world. I think that is the next decade. I do not think we live in a post-application world this decade because I think the phone is so ubiquitous and it’s got such inertia that you would need a new device and a new operating system to live in a post-application world. We probably eventually do. This decade, I still think we live in an application world. I think every app that doesn’t become an AI-native app is probably at risk. All of us are scrambling not to put AI into our app, but to become a completely AI-native app.

The question is, what if apps never existed? What would they look like? I don’t think they look anything like the apps today. I think ChatGPT is amazing, but I think it’s incredibly limited. I do not think it’s an AI interface. It’s like a pre-AI interface with a jet engine behind it. What we’re looking at is what happens when every app has access to almost the same intelligence as ChatGPT. Suddenly, you’re going to have a competition between these models getting vertically integrated, trying to do everything, or applications that can just put AI in their apps and really specialize. I’m not an AI maximalist that believes that just a few models are going to be able to do every kind of business. I also think companies are going to have to be true technology companies to leverage AI.

I think we’re going to see a major shakeout of the consumer application landscape over the next three years. I think startups are going to disrupt. I think it’s going to be three things. The AI companies are going to expand their footprint. Startups are going to come in and disrupt. Some companies, we hope to be one of them, will turn over. The last thing I’ll just say on this is I think everything’s now back on the table. Businesses that Airbnb maybe had no business to get into because the industry is mature, it’s now a fair game again because you can completely reimagine the interface. What I’ve learned working with AI now is the model is just the beginning. You can’t do that much with just the model. It’s about the architecture, often of using many models. What’s the architecture of the models?

How do you tune the right data? For example, we did AI customer service. We tried to put Gemini or GPT-4 or some models like Alibaba’s model in. That was just the beginning. That was like 5% of the work. The real work was we had to tune 100,000 conversations and really refine the conversations, develop the right architecture, design the right tone of voice, have the right kind of context. I think that’s basically what’s going to happen. We are going through this huge change inside the company of making it a truly AI-native company. I hope this is going to coincide with us doing much more traveling, much more living, and designing hopefully one of the first AI-native applications.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. Maybe a nuts and bolts question, but just to close out this topic. When you think about the supply side of your marketplace, there’s still a lot of friction generally in growing and scaling supply in travel. How can AI maybe solve for issues that hosts have in terms of managing their supply, listing their supply? How can there be elements of friction reduced there?

Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb: I mean, it can completely transform everything. For example, I’ll just give you an example. We have thousands of professional photographers in our network. You can basically press a button, have a photographer show up and take photos of your home. The problem is you have to type out your listing and you have to add the number of bedrooms to describe your home. Now with AI and computer visioning, you can just basically take a bunch of photos. The photos can essentially, well, you can do anything with them. The photos can basically tag all the amenities. If we send a photographer there, we can make sure the photos are verified. The photos can essentially generate a description of your home. We can use AI to essentially write the right description of your neighborhood and your location.

By the way, the photos eventually will be able to change for time of year. You could take a photo in Lake Tahoe in the summer. The photos eventually can become winter photos during the winter season. All of the listing process could be significantly more seamless. I think a lot of the revenue management, the pricing could be significantly better. The other thing I’ll just say about AI is, this is another point about Airbnb that I’m kind of excited about. We talk a lot about the jobs that won’t exist because of AI. I doubt humans are driving cars at some point in the future. All those drivers that are driving for money will probably have to do something else. When you use ChatGPT, it’s kind of clear that a lot of things that humans were doing, humans won’t do in the future.

I think a lot of services and hospitality are not going to be disrupted for quite a long time through AI. I still think when people go to Bordeaux and they drink a bottle of wine, I don’t think they want that to be an AI-driven experience. When they go to Lake Como, I don’t think they want a robot like answering the door for them. I do think that a lot of what we’re doing with hosting, I never want to say something’s impenetrable to AI over a 10 or 20-year period, but certainly over a 5 to 10-year period, I think a lot of it’s going to be still people-driven. I hope that if AI displaces a lot of jobs, we could be a place for at least some of those jobs to expand to. I think a lot of people are going to come to us.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. You talked earlier about the experiences and services push the company’s making. Let’s go backwards and then go forwards. Talk a little bit about what some of the key investments that need to be made to scale to get those experiences and some of those services onto the platform to where they’re available to the consumer side. What’s that journey look like right now? How do we think about what it does for the business over the long term in terms of revenue or yield or output from that transition?

Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb: Maybe I’ll start with the second question. I’ll do the first.

Unidentified speaker: Sure.

Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb: I won’t obviously put out any revenue projections for either business, but at least I can give you a framework. Let’s start with experiences. Experiences, there’s really, like to dig below the surface, there’s really three audiences. We found this out. Raise your hand if you’ve been to Paris. Most people, like half the room has been to Paris. We found that there’s about three audiences of people going to Paris. There’s people for whom it’s the first time they go to Paris. Then there’s people who’ve gone to Paris. They’re visiting, but they’ve been to Paris more than once or twice. They’re kind of regulars. The people in this room would be that audience. Then there’s locals, people that live in Paris. It turns out they all want to do different things. If it’s your first time to Paris, you want to see the Eiffel Tower.

You want to see Arc de Triomphe. You want to do the Louvre. That is basically GetYourGuide, Viator. These are nearly billion-dollar businesses. I think that is a, you know, if you believe them, that’s already a billion-dollar revenue opportunity. Maybe it could be a significantly larger opportunity. That is for a first time to a city, essentially landmark-driven travel. How do you see a landmark? Then you have all the people in this room that have been to Paris. Maybe you’ve seen the Eiffel Tower, but you want to do something a little bit more like cooler, off the beaten path. You’re on a business trip. You want to do something kind of interesting, like a history tour or see a cool show. That’s the second, third time. That’s a little bit more authentic. Then you have the people that live in the city.

Here in San Francisco, for those living here, you probably don’t want to go to Fisherman’s Wharf. You might want to do, like with your wife or kids, a cooking class here. If you’re a first time in San Francisco, you’re not going to do that. If you live here, you will. I think each market is probably a similar size opportunity. I think that each market, first time, repeat, and locals, are probably at least billion-dollar opportunities. I’m not saying that’s how big they’ll be. Maybe they’ll be much bigger. That’s what we’re going to do. With services, it’s probably a much bigger market. It’s probably a harder thing to execute because it’s more new.

We launch with like, you know, what if you could launch like Airbnb of or Uber of chefs and have a chef, you hit a button, and a chef comes and they make you food in your house. I mean, actually, a lot of people do this. A masseuse comes to your house, gives you a massage, has your nails done, your hair done. All this can come to your house. You can go to a location. We were going through this, and it turns out there’s dozens and dozens and dozens of services that you really can’t easily book online. There’s no review system. It’s not like instantly bookable. You don’t know what you’re actually getting. It’s interesting. The so-called sharing economy is mostly Airbnb’s ride-sharing and food delivery. There’s a whole economy that isn’t ride-sharing, food delivery, and Airbnb, basically DoorDash, Airbnb, Uber.

I think that entire economy, we’re not going to roll that all up and own it ourselves. I think there’s dozens and dozens of services. What we’ve noticed, a big surprise I’ve had is already 10% of bookings for services are locals without marketing. For our Airbnb Originals, which are these like special experiences, 40% of bookings are locals. We’re starting to see locals book these, even though we’re not marketing to them. I think that is a pretty big opportunity for us. Now, what it takes to scale them, it doesn’t take a lot of money. It’s really about balancing supply and demand. It’s not like other businesses where you have to deal with this huge capital investment. The way it is, it’s kind of chicken and egg. You add a little bit of supply, and you get the demand for supply.

You’ll add a little more supply, get a little more demand for supply. You have to kind of build the network in balance. Because you’re building the network in balance, you’re never making a single big one-time investment. You’re kind of going city by city. We think the vast majority of supply is going to be inbound supply that we vet. We’ll have to be marketing Airbnb. We’re not going to do a lot of independent marketing of service and experiences. We’re running an ad campaign now where we’re basically promoting home service and experiences in one ad. We’re trying to basically do as much as we can as a platform. What we build for one business, we extend to all businesses. We market all businesses. We’re one app, we’re one brand, we’re one P&L, and we try to do everything as a platform.

That hopefully makes it much more capital-light.

Unidentified speaker: Okay, understood. The other element of growth that you’ve talked very openly about is expanding into new markets, formalizing your approach to certain geographies. Talk a little bit about that roadmap. How should investors think about where you want to go in the world? Where do you want to build scale from a geographic footprint, and what that looks like in the coming years?

Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb: Yeah, it’s kind of crazy. Like we’re a travel company. We’re one of the most international companies in the world. We’re in 220 countries and regions. Yet, 70% of our business is basically five countries: the U.S., Canada, UK, France, and Australia. We’ve identified, you know, a whole bunch of countries we want to go really big in: Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Germany, Italy, Korea, Japan. These are essentially growth markets and emerging markets. What we’ve noticed is these growth and emerging markets are growing at twice the rate of our core markets. They’ve been growing at that rate for about six quarters. Basically, we’re going to go double down on these markets. We think the company could be significantly larger if we now expand to these big geographies. Now, how do you do that? Basically, it’s three things. It’s product, it’s marketing, and supply. You got to localize the marketing.

Last year, we rolled out basically, we started rolling out brand campaigns in Tokyo and all over Japan. We noticed our awareness in Japan is very, very small, as much as Airbnb is ubiquitous in the United States. We’re doing a lot of localized marketing. The next thing is localized product. For example, in Brazil, it’s really hard to pay. We offer new payment instruments in Brazil, and the growth rate was very, very healthy because of that. Then making sure you have supply. People in, you know, people in like Germany like to travel to all sorts of areas of Europe, and you need to make sure you have supply in the corridors. We’re developing a bit of a playbook, going country by country. I think over the next couple of years, we’re going to see hopefully a lot of growth in these markets.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. When it comes to the supply side or the host side, we get a lot of questions about when you might eventually launch promoted listings or ads or things like that. Let’s broaden out the question for a little bit. In terms of the ask of you as a platform from hosts, how are there elements of services you can do for hosts over time, maybe including promoted listings that are sort of on their wish list on the host side of the app?

Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb: Yeah, we have so many things they want us to do. I mean, they want help with pricing. They want help with hosting. They want help with parts of hosting, like help me register with the city, help me clean my apartment, help me get my place photographed. They want material, like their house restocked with items that we could recommend to them. They want financial help with doing their taxes and essentially financial planning because these are essentially small businesses. A lot of these people, they’re not actually set up as businesses. They don’t have accountants or CFOs. They’re usually sole proprietors. They need help with all those different things. They want help to expand their business, add more properties. They want help to promote their listings. Essentially, what we’re seeing is the opportunity to build an entire host ecosystem of services.

I think this can manifest in what we might call monetization, right? The way we would charge for this is probably the equivalent of a larger take rate if you use these services. I think promoted listings is really, really interesting. We’ve looked a lot at this. I don’t think it has to be a trade-off between ads and a great user experience. I think with AI, the whole paradigm of an ad has to change. I think 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 and loyalty, which essentially is a monetization program. I think this company is not only under-monetized, it almost isn’t really monetized, essentially. We have travel insurance that we offer, but we keep every year offering services for hosts for free.

They’re telling us they want to pay for premium services. I think a host ecosystem is a massive opportunity for monetization in the future.

Unidentified speaker: Maybe just one more on this. How do you think about the second order effect of reducing any churn among hosts or supply? As you layer services dynamically to the business, not only are you driving an extra layer of monetization, but you also could reduce churn.

Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb: Yeah, I mean, number one, take a guess what the number one reason someone stops hosting is. It’s too much work.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb: If you could help people host and reduce the burden of hosting, then not only do you create more hosts, you’ll monetize your listing better, and they’ll be less likely to churn. The churn is something that is probably even more important than supply acquisition. Absolutely, as you add more services, more people come to the platform, they stick longer, they don’t churn, and they pay you more.

Unidentified speaker: Okay, understood. We only have a few minutes left before I got to let you go. We’ve talked a lot about where the platform and where the company is going over the next couple of years. If you were to crystallize that into one answer, what are your key two to three strategic priorities that you’re the most focused on executing on in the next couple of years that you think set Airbnb up for its next sort of chapter as a company?

Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb: Three priorities. Number one, take Airbnb from a pre-AI app to the first or one of the first truly native AI applications. The second priority is to shift Airbnb from a marketplace for vacation rentals to a global community where you can travel and live anywhere. The third one is 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. I’ll round out the answer just a little bit more.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, sure.

Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb: You know, with AI, we’re not going to build foundation models. That’s not our superpower. I think that we have one of the best product design and application development teams in the world. You think about the core backend technology, and then you have the frontend interface, where Airbnb really shines at the consumer level, the interface. I think that we can basically create the ultimate AI travel and living concierge. We’re going to use the models, we’ll use the leading frontier models or the open source models. As far as the consumer is concerned, the technology will be as strong as any chatbot because we’re going to use the same exact technology, but it’s going to be designed and bespoke. We’re going to be launching AI search into our app next year, for example.

We think we have one of the best AI customer service products already in the world, and we’re continuing to improve that. We’re really developing this really rich interface that’s not a chatbot, but it’s just this really rich user interface. That’s the first thing we’re going to do. The second thing I said is to build a real community. It’s actually, this is a really funny thing, but Facebook, the original Facebook app that I used in 2005 when I was just came out of college, was a social network. There may not be a social network today. I mean, maybe Facebook, but a lot of younger people don’t use Facebook. I would argue the social network is the most successful product in human history that was invented and then uninvented. 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. We’re not trying to build a social network, but I’d love to build something like a social network in the real world, where we can match you to people and communities all over the world to do all these products and services. To do that, we’d have to build one of the most definitive profiles on the internet, a really robust profile. We have 200 million verified identities. I think that’s more than there are U.S. passports in circulation at this moment, by the way. We’re going to build out this really rich community. That’s the second priority. The third is pretty straightforward: a platform vacation rentals to a platform for everything. That is why the last five years, we’ve done so much work.

Sometimes it feels like we’ve only launched a couple of things. We had to essentially rebuild the company from the ground up to take a vacation rental app, giving them a platform to eventually do everything. The final thing I just want to say is it’s going to take time. 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. I’m really, really excited about it. If we’re truly successful, I think we’re going to be one of the apps that people have the most emotional connection to.

When you travel, when you live in a city, if you want to figure out how to get a service to your home, where to live for a night to a year, if you want to figure out something fun to do, and anything in between, if you want to find people to meet in a city, to hang out with, people to travel with, people to live with, I think there’s so many opportunities over the coming decade for Airbnb to be a defining part of people’s lives. I think you can start to answer this question: what can we do with AI? There’s so many things. I think the most magical things we’re going to do are going to be in the physical world. The real world is what we focus on. How do we take technology and make it a bridge, a gateway to the physical world?

If we’re truly successful, I hope we just make the world feel a little bit smaller. I do not like, you know, remember the movie Wall-E, that Pixar movie Wall-E, where everyone was on these self-driving pods, and they’re like real blobs, and they’re looking at screens all day. I hope we also get off the screens and live in the real world. That’s what we’re trying to do.

Unidentified speaker: Brian, I always appreciate when you take some time to come have the conversation. It’s going to be super exciting to watch in the years ahead. Hopefully, we get another chance next year at the conference. Please join me and Beck and Airbnb for being part of the convention.

Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb: Will do.

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