Big changes could I will come to Airbnb next year. In a conversation on WIRED Great interview even On Tuesday in San Francisco, the company’s co-founder and CEO, Brian Chesky, told global editorial director Katie Drummond that he expects that, by 2025, “people will say ‘that was one of the biggest reinventions of a company in recent memory’”.
Although Chesky kept few details, he said the company hopes to reinvent its Experiences section, which according to him consumers really like but which he does not believe has been as successful as it could be. The move appears to be an extension of Chesky’s belief in the value of physical experiences and physical community, which he still believes outperform most digital experiences, even in the age of AI.
In an effort to demonstrate that, even two years into the AI revolution, fundamentally very little has changed for most people, Chesky challenged the room to look at the apps on the home screens of their phones and think how much Each one of them has changed substantially. by generative AI. He maintains that there are very few, including Airbnb, but he also sees changes on the horizon, comparing the AI adolescence we are in to the “Internet of 1993, before search engines,” when what he called “a telephone directory.” ” to find websites.
“AI is starting to change our digital world, but it hasn’t yet changed the most important part of our lives, which is the physical world,” Chesky said. At Airbnb, where the product is not the company’s app but its connected homes and experiences, that is still what is valued most. When AI will really start to change the physical world, Chesky posits, will be “when the apps on your phone are totally different.”
“Ten years ago, everyone thought we’d all be in self-driving cars by now,” Chesky said, noting that while there are many on his street, they haven’t spread to the rest of the United States. “We overestimate how much technology can change in the short term, but we probably underestimate how much it will change in the long term. “It will take some time for AI to permeate the physical world, but once it does, I think it will change everything.”
Drummond also questioned Chesky about his leadership style, which has been talked about a lot in Silicon Valley for phrases like “founder mode” (which he noted he didn’t actually coin) and the much-publicized notion that he no longer accepts one-on-one meetings.
He said that since the pandemic, when Airbnb lost 80 percent of its business in eight weeks and was forced to lay off about a third of the company, he has been much more involved in the day-to-day details of what his staff does. , and tells Drummond that he thinks it’s important to guide people through work. Chesky says he monitors between 75 and 80 projects at a time, devoting half of his 60-plus workweeks to project reviews each week. While he may no longer hold regular, scheduled one-on-one meetings, he says he makes a lot of one-on-one phone calls and leans toward group meetings, where he can meet with multiple levels of staff at once.