Airbnb announces 60% of new code is now written by AI

A large part of Airbnb’s Q1 2026 earnings call was dedicated to talking about how the company uses AI tools for coding, customer support, and search. Notably, the company claimed that 60% of the code its engineers created in the quarter was written by AI. This echoes comments from other companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Spotify that are talking about AI speeding up programming.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said the company believes AI will be particularly useful in building tools for API partners who use a variety of software to manage their properties.

“API partners are saying they want to be better hosts and they need better tools. AI brings great leverage. Where before it might have taken a team of 20 engineers, now engineers can spin up agents and do a lot of work under their supervision. Adopting AI tools gives us the leverage to build more software for API partners, accelerating work they previously didn’t have the resources to do,” Chesky said.

Airbnb has gradually expanded its use of AI in customer support over the past year, and Chesky said Thursday that its customer support AI bots can now handle 40% of issues without escalating them to a human agent, up from about 33% earlier this year. The travel company is also experimenting with using AI to enhance its search capabilities.

However, Chesky acknowledged the difficulty of truly adopting AI tools in the travel and e-commerce space and pointed out weaknesses in chatbot user interfaces.

“I don’t think anyone understands AI for travel or e-commerce yet. […] Chatbot designs as currently built do not work for travel or e-commerce. There are four problems. Too much text (most e-commerce is photo transfer). There is no direct interaction (you have to type everything in instead of adjusting sliders). Not enough comparisons (you can get lost trying to compare thousands of options in a thread). While most reservations are multiplayer, chatbots are primarily single-player and not map-native.

Airbnb said its first quarter net income rose 3.9% year over year to $160 million, and revenue rose 18% to $2.7 billion. The number of booked nights for the same period increased by 9% to 156.2 million nights. The company said its new “book now, pay later” feature attracted nearly 20% of total bookings in the quarter.