Brian Chesky says AI helped him solve a problem many CEOs face: not knowing ‘what the hell's going on in our companies’
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said he used AI to build a "brain" that helps him run the company.
He said AI let him cut his meetings in half and still keep up with what's happening at Airbnb.
"I've cut my meetings in half," Chesky said.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky wants to let you in on a secret: many CEOs don't know what's happening inside their company.
That could explain why many big-time CEOs, including Chesky, have gone all-in on AI.
Speaking at the Skift Global Forum on Wednesday, Chesky said he's built an AI system that helps him run the company and reduce meeting time.
"Most of us CEOs of big companies don't really know what the hell's going on in our companies, and so we have these things called meetings, which are just for us to figure out what's going on, and well-intentioned people underneath us kind of manage us," Chesky said during a virtual appearance at the conference.
When asked whether he's personally shipping — releasing a finished product or update — Chesky said yes, but not for customers.
"My whole job was, 'how can I not need meetings to know what's going on inside the company?'" he said.
The Airbnb cofounder said he's used AI to develop a "brain" or "intelligence corpus" trained on 18,000 Keynote slides, 50,000 Google documents, and a ton of other company information.
He also said he's built a bunch of dashboards that help him understand what's going on inside his own company.
"This intelligence layer means I now have total information," he said, adding, "I've cut my meetings in half." Chesky's full-fledged embrace of AI aligns with his stated goal for Airbnb: to become an AI-native company.
He said Wednesday at the Skift forum that the company is "pretty much" there and that everyone on the executive team has been "AI-pilled." Chesky said he personally set a goal to be as native with AI as he would be if he had grown up with the technology.
"I never wanted to be this person that it passed me by," he said.
5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on www.businessinsider.com — the content belongs to Business Insider.
