But all that said, I don’t have a new long-term target. I’m just proud of the fact that we’ve been able to deliver the profitability we have as quickly as we have.
Tom Champion : Thank you both.
Brian Chesky: Thank you.
Operator: Next, we’ll move to Mark Mahaney at Evercore ISI.
Mark Mahaney: Okay, I wanted to ask Dave, I wanted to ask a financial question on the impact of AI and Gen AI. And I want to ask it this way, which is, as you think about the P&L impact of these investments over time and applications, do you think it’s more likely to lead to improved monetization or improved cost efficiencies? And I’m sure you’re going to answer it’s both, but if you would lean more on one way or the other, which one would it be? Thanks a lot.
David Stephenson: Thanks Mark. Yes, absolutely, it is both. I think it’s timing. I think in the near term, I mean, remember that we actually use a fair amount of AI right now on the product. Like we do it for our party prevention technology, a lot of our matching technologies, while the underlying technologies we have, actually AI driven, it’s not so much Gen AI, which is such a huge kind of future opportunity. I think we’ll see more leverage in our fixed cost space. So needing fewer people to do more work overall. And so I think that that’s going to help both on our fixed costs and some more variable costs. So you’ll see us be able to automate more customer service contacts over time. So in the near term, I think you’ll see, this is one of the things that we’re going to be able to benefit from on our fixed and variable cost leverage.
And then over more time, and I think it would be great to have Brian chime in on our future approach with Gen AI, would be how do we even make the service better for our guests and our hosts? I think there’s a huge unlock there, but it may take a little more time.
Brian Chesky: Yes, I’ll just share a few things. I mean, I think, obviously as Dave said, probably efficiency in the short term, growth in the long term. Before I talk about the long term, let me just double click on one part of the near term that Dave referred to, which is customer service. So customer service, the strength of Airbnb is that we’re one of a kind. We have seven million active listings, more than seven million listings, and everyone is unique, and that is really special. But the problem with Airbnb is it’s one of a kind, and sometimes you don’t know what you’re going to get. And so I think that if we can continue to increase reliability, and then if there’s something that goes unexpected, if customer service can quickly fix or mediate the issue, then I think there will be a tipping point where many people that don’t consider Airbnb and they only stand hotels would consider Airbnb.
And to give you a little more color about this customer service before I go to the future, there are so many more types of issues that could arise staying in Airbnb than a hotel. First of all, when you call a hotel, they’re usually one property and they’re aware of every room. We’re nearly every country in the world. Often guest host will call us, and they will even potentially speak a different language than the person on the other side, the host, the guest and host. There are nearly 70 different policies that you could be adjudicating. Many of these are 100 pages long. So imagine a customer service agent trying to quickly deal with an issue with somebody from two people from two different countries in a neighborhood that the agent may never even have heard of.
What AI can do, and we’re using a pilot to GPT-4, is AI can read all their policies. No human can ever quickly read all those policies. It can read the case history of both guests and hosts. It could summarize the case issue, and it can even recommend what the ruling should be based on our policies, and it can then write a macro that the customer service agent can basically adopt and amend. If we get all this right, it’s going to do things. And in your term, it’s going to actually make customer service a lot more effective, because agents will actually be able to handle a lot more tickets than many tickets. You’ll never even have to talk to an agent, but also the service to be more reliable, which will unlock more growth. Now, this of course leads to the bigger question.
What can we do with AI? And I just wanted to offer a minute or two of thoughts, and I’ve shared this last earnings, but it’s worth repeating. If you were to go to ChatGPT right now, and you ask it a question, and I were to go to chat GPT and ask it a question, we’re going to get mostly the same answer. And the reason why is it doesn’t know who you are, and it doesn’t know who I am, so it does really go with like a mutable truth, like how far’s the Earth, the Moon, or something like that. There’s no conditional answers to that. But it turns out in life, there’s a whole bunch of questions. And travel is one of these areas where the answer isn’t right for everyone. Where should I travel? Where should I stay? Who should I go with? What should I bring?
