Listen and subscribe to Power Players with Brian Sozzi on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

Airbnb (ABNB) co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky is still keeping plans for a new AI lab under wraps, but for the first time, he has publicly acknowledged that he is even working on one.

“I’ve never actually publicly even confirmed that this exists. I can confirm it exists, but I’m going to not say anything more about it right now,” Chesky said in a new episode of the Power Players with Brian Sozzi podcast (video above; listen in below).

Spoken like a tech entrepreneur that is about to enter yet another chapter in what has been a storied career.

In late 2007, design graduates and roommates Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia were struggling to pay rent on their San Francisco apartment when they noticed local hotels were fully booked for an incoming design conference. Seizing the opportunity, they placed three air mattresses on their living room floor, created a basic website called “Air Bed & Breakfast,” and hosted three guests for $80 per night, including home-cooked breakfast.

Alongside third co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk, Chesky turned that original necessity-driven experiment into a global hospitality empire that has since hosted more than 2 billion guest arrivals worldwide.

Today, Chesky is hard at work transforming Airbnb into a super app where you can book a rental car or hotel room for a vacation.

And driving a business with a lot of momentum.

Airbnb delivered strong second quarter 2026 financial results, beating Wall Street expectations as revenue climbed 17% year over year to $3.6 billion. Adjusted operating profits rose 21% to $1.3 billion.

Sales were driven by a 10% acceleration in nights and seats booked to 148.3 million, pushing total gross booking value up 16% to $27.2 billion.

Profitability was further supported by operational gains, with AI-powered customer service tools resolving nearly 45% of user inquiries without human intervention and reducing support costs per booking by 16%.

Yahoo Finance talked with Chesky on the Power Players podcast about a range of topics. Here are several excerpts.

Chesky on AI agents

“I think we’re in the beginning of a thousand-year journey on AI, so to speak. So I think like Claude Code is amazing. I think ChatGPT is very useful, but it’s kind of still being used for most people as an interactive search product. And I think we’ve barely scratched the surface for what’s possible with AI. And as I’ve spent more time with AI, I’ve been shocked that everything people say about AI is an understatement about its possibility. Because I think everything we’re saying with AI is limited to the current form factors of large language models and coding agents. We’ve made very little progress on video. We’ve made very little progress in photos in people’s daily life. We’ve made very little progress on a completely new native AI interface. We’ve made very little progress with voice command. Most people talk, and yet they’re entirely typing on their computer. So I still think this is really early.

“Maybe a simple way of saying it is we’re getting really, really deep on enterprise, but there’s been very little progress on consumer AI. I think ChatGPT is about what we’ve seen, and I think that’s the beginning. So I’m a huge proponent in agents, but I think the current construction of agents has been pretty limited. And I think that’s why daily life hasn’t really changed, right? Like, as big as AI is, very few people’s lives are that different than when ChatGPT launched or before Claude launched.

“So the real question is: The internet has changed our daily life, the iPhone has changed our daily life — when does AI change our daily life? And I can’t say for sure, because we’re not going to be necessarily the ones to do that. We’ll participate, but my prediction is the next two, three years, you’re going to see a renaissance around consumer AI that is going to begin to change daily life.”

Chesky on achieving super app status

“We’re just getting started. We haven’t achieved it, and I think we’re a year or two out from achieving it, if it’s even achievable. First of all, it’s unclear if a super app in the United States is possible. They exist in China. WeChat, most notably, maybe Apple’s (AAPL) App Store is the super app. And the question is, could there be another? I do think that we’re probably a year to 18 months … away from Airbnb becoming a fundamentally bigger service area. I don’t know if it ever deserves the title super app. That’s a very, very tall mountain.”

Chesky on the future of travel

“I think chatbots continue to grow and become important for destination discovery and maybe itinerary generation. I do not see a near-term path for chatbots to be a place where people are reserving travel. I think a year from now, you’re going to see it be very AI-native, and Airbnb is going to be a completely different search paradigm. I think you’ll see AI search coming. I think we’ll be moving up funnel to destination discovery. And I can’t speak for the rest of the industry, but I would assume that they’re all going to have to follow.”

Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance’s Executive Editor, host of the Power Players with Brian Sozzi podcast, and a member of Yahoo Finance’s editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.

Click here for in-depth analysis of the latest stock market news and events moving stock prices

Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance