Airbnb's CEO says AI writes 60% of the company's code — and makes managers get their hands dirty
Gerald Matzka/Getty Images for Airbnb
- Airbnb's CEO Brian Chesky sees his company changing significantly with AI.
- He said nearly 60% of the company's code is now written by AI.
- He added that managers are also getting their hands dirty with coding or using Claude Code.
Airbnb wants its engineers, and increasingly its managers, to code and use AI.
During a Thursday earnings call, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said AI is changing operations at the company. Nearly 60% of the code the company's engineers produce is written by AI, he said.
"That means our teams are shipping more features and iterating more quickly," Chesky said.
Chesky is the latest CEO to flex about how much of his company's code is written with AI. Shopify's president, Harley Finkelstein, said in a Tuesday earnings call that 50% of the e-commerce company's code was AI-generated, while Google recently pegged its number at 75%.
Chesky added that managers will have to get their hands dirty with coding, and there is no room at Airbnb for "pure people managers" or "30,000 hands-off managers."
"I'm seeing, like many of our design managers and engineering managers, going back to coding or using Claude Code," he said.
However, he did not provide any details on whether Airbnb would be culling managerial roles, saying, "What the implications are about how we structure our teams in the future, it is way too early to say."
His comments on the diminishing relevance of pure people managers fall in line with those of other executives in recent years, who have worked to remove layers of management in favor of a flatter structure.
Consulting firms like McKinsey & Company recommend that companies use AI agents to streamline operations and reduce the need for managers.
Coinbase announced on Tuesday that the company would be reducing its head count by 14%, with CEO Brian Armstrong saying in an X post, "We are flattening our org structure to 5 layers max below CEO/COO."