big changes may occur Will be on Airbnb next year. In conversation with WIRED big interview too In San Francisco on Tuesday, the company's co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky told global editorial director Katie Drummond that he hopes that, in 2025, “people will say 'This was one of the biggest reinventions of a company in recent memory.' Was.'”
Although Chesky kept details short, he said the company hopes to reimagine Experience A section that he says consumers really like, but he doesn't think has been as popular as it could have been. The move appears to be an extension of Chesky's belief in the value of physical experiences and physical community, which he still considers superior to most digital experiences even in the age of AI.
In an effort to prove that, even two years into the AI revolution, very little has changed fundamentally for most people, Chesky challenged the room to look at the apps on their phone's home screens and think about what they contained. How much has changed since then? By Generative AI. He believes this is too little, including Airbnb, but he also sees change on the horizon, comparing the AI adolescence we're in to “1993 before the Internet, before search engines,” when You used to call it “the phone book.” To find websites.
“AI is beginning to transform our digital world, but it has not yet transformed 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 the homes and experiences associated with it, it's still given the most importance. When AI will really begin to change the physical world, Chesky believes, “is when the apps on your phone will be completely different.”
“Ten years ago, everyone thought we'd all be in self-driving cars by this time,” Chesky said, noting that although there are plenty on his street, they haven't penetrated the rest of the US. “We overestimate how much technology may 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 enter the physical world but once it does, I think it will change everything.
Drummond also questioned Chesky about his leadership style, which is much talked about in Silicon Valley because of phrases like “installer mode” (which he noted he didn't actually coin) and the much-publicized notion that he no longer takes one-on-one meetings.
He said that since the pandemic, when Airbnb lost 80 percent of its business within eight weeks and was forced to close about a third of the company, he has been much more involved in the day-to-day details of his employees. Has been involved. , telling Drummond that he feels it is 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 review each week. Although he can no longer schedule frequent, one-on-one meetings, he says he makes a lot of personal phone calls and attends group meetings, where he can meet with multiple levels of employees at once. .