Airbnb Co-founder Brian Chesky at a River Cafe in LondonexclusiveIn an interview with Dezeen, he warned:DesignerMust participateAIUnless AI is developed, the future world will be designed without their participation. Chesky, a RISD graduate, reminded the design community,They may be repeating the mistakes of the past, when designers failed to fully exploit the potential of AI..
Chesky recalls that designers “were late to the digital game,” and predicts that if they were slow to embrace the changes in the AI world, “The world will be designed without them".
He continued: “I remember in the 90s, a lot of the most prestigious design jobs weren’t in the internet, they were in print design – people didn’t move to digital until much later.”
Chesky warned,If designers don’t adapt and adopt AI, they will end up being “subordinates” to engineers, similar to how most websites on the internet are created by “product managers” rather than designers..
Airbnb was founded in 2007 by Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia. Since then, it has grown into the world's largest home rental site.maximum, the short-term rental site with 1.5 billion stays booked on the site. The site now has 7 million listings in almost every country.
Chesky believes thatAI will have an impact on everyone, and companies need to consider what that impact will be.
“My lesson to everybody is that AI may have a short-term negative impact on your business. Probably not, I don’t know,” he said. “But unless you think it’s going to be abolished, if you think there’s going to be more AI in the future, then the genie is out of the bottle.”
Chesky said he believes design graduates should accept the inevitability of this emerging technology.
He said:I think AI will either replace many creative people or empower them with more capabilities."
In addition to benefits for these individuals’ careers, Chesky believes that greater involvement of designers and creatives in AI could reduce the potential negative impacts of the technology.
He said:mostThe opportunity is to allow the most creative people, the most humanistic people, to participate in the seemingly inevitable revolution..
Chesky explained that Airbnb is slowly adopting AI because he sees it as a tool to rethink what the company is doing. However, he doesn’t want the company to adopt the technology just to jump on the AI bandwagon, but only if it’s useful to customers.
After experiencing rapid growth, Airbnb is currently in the “second album conundrum” phase. Chesky explained that the company is planning to launch a second product in the near future, with the goal of replicating the success of multi-time entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos.
“There’s a new phase that’s waiting for Airbnb, and that’s probably what I’m going to do for the rest of my life at Airbnb, which is reinvent ourselves like all great companies do,” Chesky said.
But before that, Airbnb needs to improve its core product. Chesky explained that the platform has welcomed a large number of new users after the epidemic, and the company has been working hard to manage expectations.
Chesky remained coy about the upcoming product, but hinted that it will be a service based on people getting together and attending events together.
The product will be unveiled at a "surprise you" event, similar to Apple's past highly anticipated product launches.
“I’m very interested in business ideas that go beyond short-term home bookings,” Chesky said. “I’m thinking, take the assets that we have now, we have this trust system, we have identity, we have profiles, you’ve verified over 100 million profiles, we have a two-way reputation system.”
“We know you, we know what you want in life, and we can potentially match you with experiences in people and places around the world — that’s the conceptual space we’re playing with.”
In addition, Airbnb announced that it has acquired GamePlanner.AI, an artificial intelligence startup founded by the creator of Apple's voice assistant Siri.