Big changes could be made coming to Airbnb next year. In a conversation with WIRED’s Great interview though On Tuesday in San Francisco, the company’s co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky told global editorial director Katie Drummond that he hoped that, by 2025, “people will say ‘this was one of the greatest reinventions of a company in recent memory'”.
While Chesky kept details scarce, he said the company hopes to reimagine it experiences section, which he says consumers really like, but he doesn’t think it’s caught on as much as it could. The move appears to be an extension of Chesky’s belief in the value of physical experiences and physical community, which he still believes trump most digital experiences, even in the age of AI.
In an effort to show that even two years after the artificial intelligence revolution, very little has changed for most people, Chesky challenged the room to look at the applications on the screens of start your phone and think about how substantially any of them have changed. by generative AI. He guesses there are very few, including Airbnb, but he also sees change on the horizon, comparing the artificial intelligence adolescence we’re in to the “internet of 1993, before search engines” , when he used what he called “a phone book.” ” 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 isn’t the company’s app but its connected homes and experiences, that’s still what matters most. When AI will really start to change the physical world, Chesky posits, is “when the apps on your phone are totally different.”
“Ten years ago, everybody thought we’d all be in self-driving cars right now,” Chesky said, noting that while there are plenty of them right up his alley, they haven’t permeated the rest of America. “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 widely discussed in Silicon Valley for phrases such as “founder mode” (which he noted he didn’t actually coin) and the much-publicized notion that he no longer holds 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 become much more involved in the day-to-day details of what your staff is doing. , telling Drummond that he thinks it’s important to mentor people through work. Chesky says he oversees 75 to 80 projects at a time, devoting half of his 60-plus hour work week to project reviews each week. While it may no longer be one-on-one and recurring, he says he makes a lot of one-on-one phone calls and leans into group meetings, where he can meet with multiple levels of staff at once.
