Chapter 1: What are Airbnb's plans for integrating AI features?
Welcome to the podcast today. Airbnb is planning to bake AI features into their search, into their discovery, into their support.
As someone that has done a lot of Airbnb in the past as a user, and I have been an Airbnb host for multiple properties before, and Jamie, who currently has a ton that he's doing actively with Airbnb, we wanted to cover this and give a bit of our perspective on where we think this is going, some opportunities for making money, how AI in this is going to change things around a bit.
But before we do that, I wanted to tell you about our AI Hustle school community. This week, we just recorded a video all outlining a new side hustle that I have outlined how to do, which is essentially using AI to scale up an Etsy shop and sell products there. So it's probably something I will be updating people on from time to time on a specific genre that I'm making Bible... versus t-shirts.
And I'll update you guys on how much money it is making and exactly the strategies. But if you want to see the breakdown of how I set up the store, how I run it, how much money it makes, and all that kind of insider info on it, go check out the AI Hustle School Community. There's a link in the description. It is $20 a month to get access to our community.
And we have all of our side hustles and all the ways we're using AI to grow and scale our businesses. So we're Go check that out. Okay. Coming over to Airbnb, Jamie, as someone that is an Airbnb master and you're actively working on Airbnbs, what are some of the features you're most excited for that they have announced here?
Yeah. So, you know, Airbnb has made lots of changes in the past year or two. You know, they're trying to adapt to, uh, first of all, a lot of the hate they've gotten for service fees and things like that, but also how they get customers and making it more of an experience based company. So they're not just looking to book places to stay for people. They want you to have an experience there.
So they, they kind of, uh, changed a lot of their algorithms and things to, um, you know, benefit properties that have more of an experience. So the more amenities you can offer, the more likely you are to get recommended on their platform. So these AI search features are kind of taking it to the next level. It sounds like they're going to be integrating them more.
But one of the problems I see with Airbnb is some of the search is a little bit more, it's a little clunky right now. You have to search by what city or location you want to be. You know, how many guests you have, things like that. And then the dates. I think where they're going with this is going to be instead of just where, when and who, what kind of place are you looking for?
Like, do you want to have, you know, I want to have a place that sleeps 15 people. I want there to be a pickleball court and a hot tub. And then it'll kind of look for properties that maybe fit what you're searching for rather than just the date and the location, if that makes sense. So I think this fits their model well. However, one thing I don't like about it as a host
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Chapter 2: How will AI impact user experience in Airbnb's search?
Over time, we're going to be experimenting with making AI search more conversational. integrating it with more than the trip. And eventually we'll be looking at sponsor listings as a result of that. Something else that I thought was interesting is they actually just recently got a new CTO over OpenAI. They hired Ahmed Al-Dal. He was working at Metaslama.com. training their model previously.
So they pulled him over. He's got a ton of experience in actual AI models. I think this is cool because if Airbnb can make any sort of custom AI in-house, like they have so much data for how these trips are being booked. I think they're a perfect person. So they have a new CTO that I think might do some really cool things there.
The one other thing that I think they're doing well for AI, using AI is in just customer support. If anyone has used Airbnb, you know that while 90% of the time it's phenomenal, 10% of the time you can have issues.
I mean, that's probably like a hotel too, but either as a user or as a host, you can have issues where someone comes and they trash your place, or maybe you're a guest and you go somewhere and the Airbnb listing ends up being like super dirty or bad, right? So like you could have either of those two experiences and usually they're mitigated by having reviews on both hosts and guests.
And so you can, you know, pick your poison if you choose to, host someone that has a terrible review, you know what you're getting yourself into. Or if you choose to go to an Airbnb that has bad reviews, you know what you're getting yourself into. But either way, there are issues and they have decided to tackle a lot of those with AI for their customer support.
I'm actually a big fan of AI for customer support, assuming it has the ability to like issue refunds and do things, um, and, and actually work through and resolve and come to resolutions. This is what blew me away though. They said, um, this is their CT, their CEO.
Again, he said a year from now, if we're successful, significantly more than 30% of tickets will be handled by a custom, uh, a custom service agent in many more languages in all the languages where we have live agents, AI customer service will not only be chat, it will be voice. Um, And then they said that they're going to be increasing AI usage internally. 80% of their engineers are using AI.
The goal is to get it to 100%. So yeah, I think Airbnb is doing great right now. They're trying to get 30% of all of their customer. So like basically a third of all of their customer support is just handled by AI chatbots. I've used a bunch of companies recently because I kind of have hated on this for a long time, but I've used a bunch of companies recently where
I've talked to like their customer support. I could tell it's an AI chatbot. I'm like, no. I'm like, please just give me a refund for this reason, for this thing, for this reason. It's like, perfect. And we should do a refund. And I'm like, the AI chatbot can do that? Great. I never want to have to wait in line for like, we'll get back to you in 12 hours with a real person. Like, sweet.
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