Person profile
Co-founder & CEO at Airbnb.
Tools Brian Chesky has publicly discussed or demonstrated using. Curated by Magpie's editorial team from podcasts, posts, and public stacks.
Brian Chesky is co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. Frequently cited as the canonical example of AI-first leadership at scale. Names specific tools used inside Airbnb across Acquired, Lenny's Podcast and the Tim Ferriss show.
Brian Chesky publicly endorsed Claude Code on Airbnb's Q1 2026 earnings call, saying many of his design and engineering leaders are 'going back to coding or using Claude Code' as AI now writes approximately 60% of Airbnb's code. He frames Claude Code as the layer that lets one engineer supervise the work that previously took a team of 20, and as the reason managers are getting hands-on with code again instead of pure people-management.
Brian Chesky names Alibaba's Qwen model as the workhorse inside Airbnb's customer-service AI stack. The system runs 13 different models in parallel but Chesky has publicly stated Qwen does the bulk of the heavy lifting in production because of its cost and latency profile, with OpenAI's models used more sparingly to balance quality and economics.
We're relying a lot on Alibaba's Qwen model. It's very good. It's also fast and cheap
Brian Chesky uses OpenAI's models inside Airbnb but is publicly measured about where they fit: he calls them too expensive and slow for production-scale customer service compared to Qwen, and has said ChatGPT's SDK 'wasn't quite robust enough' for an Airbnb-app integration as of late 2025. He still positions ChatGPT as part of the 13-model stack and as a meaningful inbound-referral channel where AI-chatbot traffic to Airbnb converts higher than Google search.
Brian Chesky publicly cites Perplexity alongside ChatGPT and Claude as AI-chatbot referral sources where the traffic converts to Airbnb bookings at higher rates than traditional Google search. He hasn't said he personally uses Perplexity, but he treats it as one of the meaningful new top-of-funnel channels for Airbnb's commercial strategy.
Last researched May 14, 2026
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