Airbnb says AI now writes 60% of its new code

A ample portion of Airbnb’s Q1 2026 net telephone was dedicated to talking astir however the institution is utilizing AI tools for coding, lawsuit support, and search. Notably, the institution claimed that 60% of the codification its engineers produced successful the 4th was written by AI — echoing comments by different Google, Microsoft, and Spotify, which person each talked astir AI accelerating their programming.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky noted that the institution finds AI peculiarly adjuvant for gathering tools for its API partners who negociate their properties utilizing antithetic software.

“API partners accidental they privation to beryllium amended hosts and request amended tools. AI gives immense leverage — wherever you mightiness person needed a squad of 20 engineers before, an technologist tin present rotation up agents to bash a batch of enactment nether supervision. Adopting AI tools gives america leverage to physique much bundle for API partners, accelerating enactment we antecedently did not person resources for,” Chesky said.

Airbnb has been slowly expanding its usage of AI for lawsuit enactment implicit the past year, and Chesky said connected Thursday that its lawsuit enactment AI bot present handles 40% of issues without escalating to a quality agent, up from astir 33% earlier this year. The question institution has besides been experimenting with utilizing AI to powerfulness its hunt function.

However, Chesky acknowledged the trouble of genuinely employing AI tools successful the question oregon e-commerce spaces, pointing to weaknesses successful the chatbot idiosyncratic interface.

“I bash not deliberation anyone has figured retired AI for question oregon e-commerce yet […] The plan of a chatbot, arsenic presently constructed, does not enactment for question oregon e-commerce. There are 4 problems: excessively overmuch substance (most of e-commerce is photo-forward); nary nonstop manipulation (you person to benignant everything alternatively than set sliders); mediocre examination (you tin get mislaid trying to comparison thousands of options successful a thread); and astir bookings are multiplayer, portion chatbots are chiefly single-player, and not map-native.

Airbnb said nett income roseate 3.9% to $160 cardinal successful the archetypal quarter, portion gross accrued 18% to $2.7 billion, compared to a twelvemonth earlier. Nights booked went up 9% to 156.2 cardinal successful the period. The institution said its caller “Reserve now, wage later” diagnostic drew astir 20% of its gross booking worth successful the quarter.