Huge changes can happen I will come to Airbnb next year. During an interview at WIRED Even a big interview in San Francisco on Tuesday, co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky told global editorial director Katie Drummond that he hopes that in 2025 “people will be saying, ‘this was one of the biggest reinventions of the company in recent times.'”
While Chesky didn’t provide any details, he said the company hopes to rethink its solution Experiences a section that he thinks consumers really like, but he feels hasn’t 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 believes continues to outweigh most digital experiences, even in the age of artificial intelligence.
Trying to prove that even two years after the AI revolution, little has fundamentally changed for most people, Chesky challenged the room to look at the apps on phone home screens and consider how much any of them have been materially changed by generative AI. He says there are very few of them, including Airbnb, but he also sees change on the horizon, comparing the AI adolescence we live in to “the Internet in 1993, before search engines,” when what he called the “phone book” was used. . ” to find websites.
“Artificial intelligence is starting to change our digital world, but it hasn’t yet changed the most important part of our lives, the physical world,” Chesky said. At Airbnb, where the product is not the company’s app but the homes and experiences connected to it, this is still what is most valued. Chesky says that when AI really starts to change the physical world will be “when the apps on your phone will be completely different.”
“Ten years ago, everyone thought we would all be driving autonomous cars now,” Chesky said, noting that while there are plenty of them on his street, they haven’t spread to 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 artificial intelligence to penetrate the physical world, but when it does, I think it will change everything.”
Drummond also quizzed Chesky about his leadership style, which has become a buzz in Silicon Valley for phrases like “founder mode” (which, he noted, he didn’t actually make up) and the widely publicized notion that he no longer participates in 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 furlough about a third of the company, he has become much more involved in the day-to-day details of his employees’ work, telling Drummond that he thinks it’s vital to mentor people through work. Chesky says he monitors 75 to 80 projects at a time, devoting half of his 60-plus hour workweek to project reviews each week. While he may no longer have to hold periodic, scheduled one-on-one meetings, he says he makes a lot of one-on-one calls and enjoys participating in group meetings where he can meet with employees at multiple levels at once.