Consumer AI is wide open @Bchesky (Brian Chesky), Co-Founder & CEO of @Airbnb, interviewed by @BrianSozzi (Brian Sozzi) (Power Players) Summary: Brian Chesky thinks Silicon Valley is mistaking today’s chatbots and coding agents for the finished product. Enterprise AI is crowded, while consumer AI—the products that actually change daily life—remains largely unbuilt. Airbnb is betting that its trust network, identity layer, preferences, payments, and travel marketplace can become an AI-native platform, while small elite teams use the tools to make a 17-year-old company move like a startup. [PS: I thought this was a particularly relevant podcast, given the massive number of new 11 personal AI assistants that have emerged on the scene over the past few weeks] 1. Growth can reaccelerate: Airbnb’s revenue grew 17% this quarter versus 10% last year. Chesky credits small elite teams, nearly twice as many feature releases, better quality, and aggressive AI adoption—proof that scale does not have to make growth obey gravity. 2. AI is an operating model: Airbnb is not treating AI as a feature team. Chesky hired a former leader of Meta’s Llama work as CTO, built internal AI tutors, and is pushing executives to run more of the company with AI. 3. The hard part is cultural: AI looked like a freezing pool until employees jumped in and discovered warm water. The tools can teach people how to use them; the real obstacle is a large company’s instinct to preserve familiar workflows. 4. Small teams regain leverage: Startups begin AI-native, but incumbents that overcome inertia can combine the speed of AI with the robustness, data, and distribution of a scaled company. That is the best-of-both-worlds prize Airbnb is chasing. 5. Every new category should strengthen the core: Fifty-five percent of guests who first book a hotel on Airbnb later book a home. Hotels add revenue and acquire customers for the core marketplace—the same flywheel that took Amazon from books to everything. 6. Aging users are an asset: Airbnb’s original 26-year-old customers are now 44, wealthier, and traveling with families, while new young cohorts keep arriving. The product can grow across Gen Z, Gen X, and boomers without choosing between retention and relevance. 7. Reinvention is chapter three: Chapter one was product-market fit and hypergrowth. Chapter two was surviving an 80% pandemic collapse and going public. Chapter three is turning a short-term rental marketplace into a trusted platform for traveling and living. 8. The platform starts with trust: Airbnb has more than 200 million verified identities. In an internet flooded with synthetic people and content, identity, remembered preferences, rich profiles, and payments can become more strategic than the booking interface itself. 9. Chat is not the final interface: Chesky believes agents are real but their current form is primitive. Consumer AI has barely touched voice, video, photos, or native interfaces, which is why most people’s daily lives have changed far less than the hype suggests. 10. Consumer AI is wide open: Of 175 companies in a recent YC batch, 159 were enterprise. Chesky sees the neglected opportunity in products regular people love—tools that make medicine, travel, and everyday services dramatically more accessible. 11. Starting is cheap; frontier scale is not: One person can now build an agent for almost nothing and may create a billion-dollar company. But frontier models can require thousands of GPUs, elite researchers, and more than a billion dollars. AI is democratizing creation while concentrating infrastructure. 12. Travel will move up the funnel: Chesky expects AI-native search, destination discovery, and customer service to transform travel in the next year. Chatbots may inspire the trip, but he does not expect them to own the reservation anytime soon.