Airbnb out with a redesign app that puts a great emphasis on services, on one of the kind experiences. But this is as of course, anxiety remains about consumer sentiment, about our desire to travel abroad. Right now, let's get through all of that with Airbnb's plans. We're John by CEO, Brian Chesky, Brian Welcome and airbmb more than a home. You want to be sort of an Airbnb for the world and for services.
Tell us the revenue drivers here.
Why is more experiences, more services going to lead to a bigger business and investable opportunity.
Well, I mean as big as the Verbnb is, and we do around ninety billion dollars a year in bookings. There's so much greater opportunity for people to monetize the biggest.
Asset in their life. And it's not their home, it's their time.
And so what if all the people's skills, all the people's passion, their expertise could be monetized. A huge percent of the jobs in the United States around the world are becoming essentially services jobs. And there is no Amazon for services. You know, people say Amazon's the everything stored It's kind of the everything in a cardboard box store.
But there's this whole other world. It requires trust, It requires.
Two people to have an exchange between one another. I think that's where airbyscore competency is. What we built is an extensible platform that's not limited to homes.
What's interesting is the chefs, the massages, the other key at services that you're offering do have to be vetted? Yes, that's when you get the scale. How are you going to scale that if you're doing this on a person to person basis, How much does mL then take over?
Yeah?
I mean, I mean a lot of what we do, and I think a lot of what everyone in technology does is you start things by hand, You learn the rules, and you train the technology, and the technology takes over either does it or augments the people.
And that's exactly what it was like here.
We start very much by hand, and then we build tools to automate the task that people are doing.
Brian, I started using Airbnb in the UK around twenty ten eleven when I went to college, right, and that was before Uber even launched in the UK. And when I think about the development of platforms and app technologies like yours, one point of difference than Airbnb has versus n Uber is that you don't yet have advertising, whereas you look at Uber's ad growth now for them on the investor side, it's a really big thing.
How do you think about that? I think it's a huge opportunity. You know, one of the frameworks I really like around how to invest is you want to invest in the most perishable opportunities first, and so we think a really perishable opportunity is, you know, launching services and experiences.
The timing is right.
We think advertising is a huge opportunity for us. It's an inevitable opportunity for us, but we don't think it's the most parishal opportunity, so it hasn't been something we've prioritized in our near term roadmap. I also think it's really good to first extend our platform from homes to services, experiences.
In beyond, so when we build things, we can build.
Them as a horizontal platform inevitable.
That's that's really interesting. You've got a lot of credit this week for the relaunch of the app and its ability to give you some long term growth. I'd just be grateful to hear how you think it will drive long term growth. I think from the streets perspective, that's more about revenue growth and profit, but maybe scale of the platform as well.
I think there's three things.
Number one, there's a whole bunch of people who don't book Airbnbs because they don't come with services.
They go to hotels.
So what if you get affer all the services of a hotel and more in a Airbnb. So that's one way we actually could grow is to get a lot more customers. The second way we can grow is a lot of people use Airbnb, but the only book one thing on the reservation home, so we can essentially get a greater share of wallet on the trip. The third
and the longest term opportunity is local demand. We think a lot of these services and experiences that we're initially building out for travel consumers are eventually going to be things. Are going to want a book in your own city, and that is an even significantly greater market. So there's really these three types of horizons.
Coast playing with Megandee Stallion, learning volleyball within Olympian in Rio. How did you get these one off experiences? I mean, is this making some phone calls?
Yeah?
I mean like, well a year ago we launched icons We're sure these extraordinary experiences hosted by the biggest names and culture we had. You know, we've made the uphouse float in the sky, and we did all these really cool experiences, and then we started thinking to ourselves, how do we bring that magic to experiences? And we built this network of really interesting celebrities and global icons. And one of the things that we found is they a lot of them heard about what we're doing.
They reached out to us.
I think a lot of these global celebrities want to connect direct with their fans. They don't just want to have a parasocial relationship on social media. And I think the more we talk about AI, the more we start to realize that we are accelerating our life living in
a digital realm. We're spending more and more time on devices, and we want to be the kind of company they're getting people off devices into the real world just as a balance, and I think that could be a very exciting proposition for the future.
As you can imagine, this show's been talking about AI relentlessly for the last three years, but we took a pause, started talking about taris and the economy relentlessly. You said, now it's the perfect moment to be launching these services and experiences. Why in this environment where you saw consumer sentiment today is woefully low.
I mean, well, number one, we reported really really good growth within travel, So I think people are still traveling, and I think when the consumer sentiment is and steady, they still want to travel, but they often want to find more affordable options.
Airbombs a great way to do that.
But beyond that, this is a very long term bet that we're making over the next five years, and I think this will endure across any kind of economy.
It's just good to remind people.
Airboby started during the Great recession of two thousand and eight, and so I think a lot of the great businesses are starting during you know, kind of a weekend economy.
Brian, you're pivoting to founder mode, right, Yeah, how's that going to help Airbnb navigate the world that it's in right now?
I think founder mode basically just means like running a large company with the hands on approach, where you're in the details, your leaders in the details, and everyone's rolling in the same direction like a startup. I think those principles are more important now than ever with this new technological revolution.
That's in front of us.
You need people that are able to basically have their hands on the steering wheel and not be in essentially a self driving car, which is you know how more professional managers typically run things. So I think this is the perfect time to lean into the future, to put the pederal the metal, put your hand in the steering wheel, and really drive transformation. And I think a lot of the great companies in history have been led that way.
With that in mind.
Airbnb the technology company, what's its call competency? What are your people really good at that other companies are not?
I think a few things all probably a few, but I'll highlight just two on the right now.
The first is our application.
I think we have one of the most beautifully well designed and build apps in the world. We're able to show it is incredibly intuitive. I know we I believe we're one of the best design teams in the world. So we have really rate applications and so take AI. There's a lot of development on the application, the on the large language model layer, but the applications haven't seen a lot of development. If you pick up your phone, almost every app looks exactly like it did before. Generative
AI came on the scene. So that's the first thing. The second is probably even more important the offline world. We're really good at building apps, but I think we're even better at designing the system of trust between two strangers to live together. I mean, nearly four million people a day live together in Airbnb and nearly every country
in the world. Think about all the ways you need to keep people safe, handle their issues, match supply and demand, facilitate money, you know, make sure they're having great experiences. There's so much more the offline world the Airbnb. When people Seebnb, they see an app, and the app is just to scratch the surface of our community.
I love that you're.
Talking online and offline. Briefly, when you're thinking about Karna, having to decide that actually, all the AI focus has to be unwound a little bit.
Customers of this.
Is not working as they want to bring people back. You're bringing AI to customer service. How's that going? And how much do you have to rely on people's stuff.
We still have to rely a lot on people.
I think it's going incredibly well. We launched a customer service agent in the United States to all English speaking users. Where now if you need help, you can reach out to an AI customer service agent.
It's a front line.
It's been trained on, you know, hundreds of millions of customer trips to be able to be twenty four to seven and be an escalation point to humans or.
Be able to answer the question themselves.
But I think the key lesson here is you don't want to rush into a trend. I think that people got really really excited AI be invitably thought it's the future. It's going to do all these tasks in the future. All that's true, but you can't skip steps and people want things to work, and so, you know, we didn't
want it to be an AI lab. We wanted to be something people could trust, and so we've been very very careful about focusing on solving real problems responsibly with a model that doesn't hallucinate.
And I think that's what we're doing
At BNBC, you know, and co founder Branchester, it's great to have you back on Bloombog technology.