On a Thursday earnings call, Airbnb $ABNB CEO Brian Chesky revealed that AI now accounts for nearly 60% of the code his engineers write, and warned that managers unwilling to engage in hands-on technical work have no place at the company.
"That means our teams are shipping more features and iterating more quickly," Chesky said on an earnings call.
He said the company has no tolerance for what he called "pure people managers" or "30,000 hands-off managers," adding that design and engineering leaders are picking up tools like Claude Code or returning to writing code themselves. Questions about whether the push would lead to managerial layoffs went unanswered; Chesky said only that it was "way too early to say" how team structures might ultimately change.
Airbnb's disclosure places it in a growing field of tech companies sharing AI coding metrics. Google $GOOGL has cited a figure of 75%, and Microsoft $MSFT and Spotify $SPOT have similarly highlighted AI's role in speeding up software development, according to TechCrunch. At a Tuesday earnings call, Shopify $SHOP president Harley Finkelstein put his company's AI-generated share of code at 50%, Business Insider reported.
On the customer service side, Chesky noted that the company's AI support tool now closes out 40% of inquiries on its own — meaning no handoff to a human agent — a jump from the roughly 33% rate recorded earlier in the year. He also pointed to AI as a way to build tools for the company's API partners — property managers who use third-party software — an area where resources had previously been limited.
"API partners say they want to be better hosts and need better tools. AI gives huge leverage — where you might have needed a team of 20 engineers before, an engineer can now spin up agents to do a lot of work under supervision," Chesky said.
Despite the expanded use of AI, Chesky acknowledged that the technology has not solved core challenges in travel and e-commerce. He ticked through four specific shortcomings of the chatbot model in those verticals: a text-heavy interface that clashes with the image-centric nature of travel and shopping; the lack of hands-on controls like sliders; an inability to handle side-by-side comparisons across many options; and a design built for solo users that breaks down when multiple people are planning a trip together.
"I do not think anyone has figured out AI for travel or e-commerce yet," he said.
For the first quarter, the company posted net income of $160 million, a 3.9% year-over-year gain, alongside an 18% revenue increase to $2.7 billion. Total nights booked reached 156.2 million, up 9% on the year. Airbnb also said its "Reserve now, pay later" option captured nearly 20% of gross booking value during the quarter.