Brian Chesky: AI Agents Need Their Own Operating System

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky says the tech industry's rush to build consumer AI agents is running ahead of its foundations — and that what agents actually need is a true operating system built for AI, with intelligence running at the kernel level.

"The problem with that model [of trying to become primary agent] is no one is developing a full operating system software developer kit," Chesky said in an interview this week, referring to the industry-wide race to become the "quarterback" — the primary AI agent users rely on for everything. He pointed to OpenAI's early efforts as evidence: "ChatGPT, at the beginning of last year, tried to do their little app store. And I told Sam [Altman]: if you want to be an app store like the iPhone, you need to have a software developer kit and an operating system like the App Store. Otherwise, none of our functionality is going to exist. And of course, it didn't work very well."

His verdict on current agent products is blunt. "I've used Airbnb on Muse and Instinct," he said, naming two consumer AI agents that carry out tasks on a user's behalf. "And it doesn't work very well. I mean, even hotels don't work that well, but Airbnbs work even worse. So I don't think we've cracked consumer AI. And for consumer AI to be cracked, we have to crack at a lower substrate, and we need to make the agents- apps; all apps need to become agents; all must be interoperable; and all must have much richer user interfaces."

A new AI search, but not the endgame

Chesky's comments came in the same week Airbnb rolled out its new AI-powered search as part of its fall update — a significant step for a company that has been slow and deliberate about AI. Chesky has argued in the past that a chatbot-only interface is not fit for travel discovery, and he hasn't changed his mind.

Chatbots, he said, aren't good for browsing or shopping because they surface only a few options at a time and force users through multiple turns before reaching a result. He also doesn't see the current version of Airbnb's AI search as final. Its interface will evolve.

"I think that I've believed for a long time that a chatbot isn't the right interface for e-commerce. I think what you're seeing today is also not the endgame for e-commerce or for travel or shopping. I think that there's going to be some interface that is, you know, I don't want to call it a midpoint, but something between a chatbot and what you see in the first version we shipped," he said.

The stakes for Airbnb are specific. Travel is a category where users often enjoy the browsing itself, and Chesky argued an AI that collapses the shopping experience into a conversation would destroy value rather than add it.

"You know, a lot of people want some things people want to be fast and easy, like 'Book me a flight, I don't want to look at it.' With Airbnb, they enjoy looking at the product. Travel studies show that people actually derive more pleasure in planning and anticipating travel than they do traveling. So you don't want to take the inspiration and the browsing and the library experience of dreaming away," he said.

Chesky sees a second structural flaw in chatbots: they are built for one person. They aren't a collaborative interface, which matters for a product people often use with family and friends. Over the next three to six months, he said, Airbnb's task is to explore interfaces that enable "multiplayer" AI — AI that several people, such as a group planning a trip together, can use at once.

Airbnb isn't alone in rethinking what an AI interface should look like. Startups like Monogram and, more recently, Wabi are experimenting with "generative" interfaces — screens an AI builds on the fly rather than ones a designer fixed in advance. Chesky thinks users will end up with a mix of deterministic, pre-designed interfaces and generative ones.

Making Airbnb agent-friendly

On consumer AI agents like Instinct and Muse, Chesky said Airbnb needs robust software infrastructure on its end and wants to make itself more agent-friendly. In his view, agents could be good lead generators — a notable shift from earlier concerns in the industry that AI tools would cut companies like Airbnb out of the customer relationship. Chatbots, he said, have proven good at lead generation.

But he rejects the idea that apps will dissolve into data layers behind a single universal AI interface. "I don't necessarily know if I believe in a world that there's apps in the future, but I don't believe in a world where the apps become data layers of a universal simple UI because when you open your iPhone, there is a reason Airbnb's app is a different design than DoorDash, Shopify, and Amazon. Our interfaces should be adaptive to the utility and the function that we're doing. We want to make our app more agentic, and we want to build a lot more user interface controls," he said.

The practical problem is that a booking involves far more than a query. "If I have an agent, but I also want like really great browse functionality, if I want to be able to message the host like an Airbnb, if I want to be able to compare, if I want to be able to verify my identity, if I want to be able to use a map feature, if I want to then be able to add other items, then if I want to stay in the platform, then either the agent has to do a handoff or the agent application would need to build a bit more of, I think, a robust software developer kit to bring the app to you, so to speak," Chesky said.

Apps with faces

Chesky is also planning for agent-to-agent interactions through the platform — some within Airbnb, some with agents from other apps. His thesis: apps have historically not been interoperable unless companies struck a business deal, but agents are like "apps with faces," and when they talk to each other, all apps become interoperable.

"I think of the Airbnb app as one day becoming an agent, you know, where basically the explore tab has an agent, our customer service has an agent, we're developing another agent in another service area. Probably eventually there's going to be a macro Airbnb agent. And that will probably be interoperable with MCP [a standard that lets AI agents connect with other software] to other agents," Chesky said.

The kernel-level argument follows from there. Right now, developers are building AI apps for iOS, macOS, and Windows — operating systems that are not "AI operating systems." In Chesky's ideal world, AI would be operable at the kernel level, the core of an operating system, and all components like agents would interact with each other.

Two misconceptions and the Apple-Google gate

Chesky argued there are two misconceptions circulating in Silicon Valley. First, that the interface is going away and people will just talk and type. Second, that software will be completely generative. On the second point, his position is direct: a designer can prompt better software than a consumer can.

As long as the iPhone remains dominant and Apple and Google control the major platforms, apps will likely remain a central fixture, he said. "It's really up to Apple or Google, or somebody, to build a new platform for us to really make the true shift from apps to agents. Otherwise, we're going to have apps that have agents inside them, rather than the whole app being a robust agent that's interoperable with other agents," Chesky said.

That framing puts pressure squarely on the platform owners. For companies like Airbnb, the question is whether the shift to agents happens inside their own apps or underneath them.

Voice agents this fall

On voice — gaining ground as apps like Wispr Flow, Willow, and Superwhisper, a new wave of note-taking apps, and built-in dictation in AI tools get people talking to their devices more — Chesky thinks people will eventually speak to computers more than they type. Voice will play a key part for Airbnb in search and customer service, and the company plans to roll out voice agents this fall to help users.

Internally, Airbnb has been seeing big gains from using AI to ship features faster, Chesky said. On a personal level, AI has helped him get information faster and freed him from meetings.

"I think AI is reducing communication layers. One of my jobs as CEO is try to get information. And the way I used to get information was having meetings. Now, I can just ask my AI and I don't need to have as many," he said.

The near-term roadmap is now concrete: multiplayer AI interfaces within six months, voice agents this fall, and an increasingly agentic app built toward MCP interoperability — all while Chesky bets that whoever builds the first true AI operating system, not the flashiest agent, will decide how consumer AI finally works.