Airbnb says AI now writes 60% of its new code

Much of Airbnb’s Q1 2026 earnings call was dedicated to talking about how the company is using AI tools for coding, customer support and search. Notably, the company claimed that 60% of the code its engineers produced in the quarter was written by AI — echoing comments from others Google, Microsoft and Spotify, who have all talked about AI accelerating their programming.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky noted that the company finds AI particularly useful in building tools for its API partners, who manage their properties using different software.

“API partners say they want to be better hosts and need better tools. AI provides tremendous leverage—where you might have needed a team of 20 engineers before, one engineer can now create agents to do a lot of work under supervision. Adopting AI tools allows us to build more software for API partners, accelerating work we previously didn’t have the resources to do,” Chesky said.

Airbnb has slowly expanded its use of AI for customer support over the past year, and Chesky said Thursday that its customer support AI bot now handles 40% of issues without escalating to a human agent, up from about 33% earlier this year. The travel company has also experimented with using AI to power its search function.

However, Chesky acknowledged the difficulty of truly applying AI tools to the travel or e-commerce space, pointing to weaknesses in the chatbot user interface.

“I don’t think anyone has figured out AI for travel or e-commerce yet […] The design of a chatbot as currently constructed does not work for travel or e-commerce. There are four problems: too much text (most e-commerce is photo-forward); no direct manipulation (you have to type everything instead of adjusting the sliders); poor comparison (you can get lost trying to compare thousands of options in a thread); and most bookings are multiplayer, while chatbots are primarily single-player and not map-native.

Airbnb said net income rose 3.9% to $160 million in the first quarter, while revenue rose 18% to $2.7 billion compared with a year earlier. Booked nights increased 9% to DKK 156.2 million. during the period. The company said its new “Book Now, Pay Later” feature pulled in nearly 20% of its gross booking value in the quarter.