Key Takeaways
- Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky was attending too many meetings.
- He used AI to create a “brain” or “intelligence corpus” trained on 18,000 Keynote presentations, 50,000 Google Docs and other company materials.
- Chesky said he has made it a personal priority to become fluent in AI.
Brian Chesky says AI helped him solve a persistent problem that plagues most CEOs — too many meetings.
The Airbnb CEO admitted earlier this week in an appearance at the Skift Global Forum that “most of us CEOs of big companies don’t really know what is going on in our companies.”
“So we have these things called meetings, which are just for us to figure out what’s going on, and well-intentioned people underneath us kind of manage us,” he said, per Business Insider.
Chesky revealed he is releasing a finished product for himself, not for customers. He has focused on building a way to stay informed about what is happening across Airbnb without relying on a constant stream of meetings.
“My whole job was: how can I not need meetings to know what’s going on inside the company?” he said.
To that end, the Airbnb co-founder said he has tapped into AI to create a “brain” or “intelligence corpus” trained on 18,000 Keynote presentations, 50,000 Google Docs and other company materials. He’s also built a suite of dashboards designed to give him a clearer, real-time view of what is happening across the company.
“This intelligence layer means I now have total information,” he said. “I’ve cut my meetings in half.”
An “AI-pilled” company
On a broader scale, Chesky is pushing to make Airbnb more AI-focused. At the Skift Global Forum, he mentioned that the company is “pretty much” AI-centered and that its executive team has been “AI-pilled,” meaning that there has been an internal shift toward using the technology across the business.
Chesky said he has made it a personal priority to become as fluent in AI as someone who grew up with it. “I never wanted to be this person that it passed me by,” he said.
AI skepticism remains
That mindset is increasingly common among corporate leaders, even as many remain skeptical of the near-term hype surrounding generative AI. In KPMG’s 2026 survey of 100 CEOs at large U.S. companies, 77% said generative AI may have been overhyped during the previous year.
The skepticism, however, has not slowed spending: nearly 80% of respondents said they planned to devote at least 5% of their 2026 capital budgets to AI initiatives, while 41% said AI would account for 10% or more of that spending.
An AI future
For Airbnb, Chesky maintains that AI is already producing concrete operational results. He said that this year, the company has shipped more than 600 features on the Airbnb site, including AI-powered customer support and AI search. That’s nearly double the total from last year, a jump he attributed in part to the executive team’s use of AI tools.
AI now handles close to half of Airbnb’s customer-service tickets across 50 languages, helping the company reduce support costs per booking by 16% year over year, according to Chesky.
The next test is whether Airbnb can turn those internal gains into a more compelling customer experience. Chesky said the company will launch its own AI agent in 2027, with an interface designed to be “much richer than a chatbot.”
Key Takeaways
- Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky was attending too many meetings.
- He used AI to create a “brain” or “intelligence corpus” trained on 18,000 Keynote presentations, 50,000 Google Docs and other company materials.
- Chesky said he has made it a personal priority to become fluent in AI.
Brian Chesky says AI helped him solve a persistent problem that plagues most CEOs — too many meetings.
The Airbnb CEO admitted earlier this week in an appearance at the Skift Global Forum that “most of us CEOs of big companies don’t really know what is going on in our companies.”
“So we have these things called meetings, which are just for us to figure out what’s going on, and well-intentioned people underneath us kind of manage us,” he said, per Business Insider.