Airbnb’s Brian Chesky recently spoke out about his company’s use (or lack thereof) of AI:
Instead of offering tools to help travelers plan or book their trips with the help of AI agents, Airbnb is planning to first introduce AI to its customer support system. […] In addition to customer service, the company reported some small productivity gains from using AI internally for engineering purposes. But here, too, the executive advised caution, saying, “I don’t think it’s flowing to a fundamental step-change in productivity yet.”
It’s a good recap of what we pretty consistently hear about the use of AI in enterprise settings – LLMs found their initial use case in coding and text-related tasks, but seem to struggle with many or most enterprise tasks, where reliability and predictability of outcomes are crucial (see also the interview with Chamath Palihapitiya we posted a few days ago).
“Here’s what I think about AI. I think it’s still really early,” Chesky said. “It’s probably similar to… the mid-to-late ’90s for the internet.”
