Airbnb has appointed Ahmad Al-Dahle, the former head of generative artificial intelligence at Meta, as its new Chief Technology Officer. The previous CTO, Aristotle (Ari) Boobalan, stepped down in December after serving at the company for over seven years. Airbnb is currently undergoing a significant transformation, aiming to break free from its singular identity as a short-term rental platform.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky announced on Wednesday that the company has appointed Ahmad Al-Dahle, the former head of generative AI at Meta Platforms, Inc., as its new Chief Technology Officer. "We are incredibly excited about Al-Dahle joining because we have this amazing opportunity to build what is really the AI interface for travel, and for e-commerce," Chesky said in an interview with CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin. Al-Dahle was previously responsible for Meta's initial generative AI business unit. Subsequently, after the company's large language model, Llama 4, failed to gain traction among developers following its release, Meta restructured its AI units, and Al-Dahle was appointed co-head of AI product. Following this, Meta brought in Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang with a deal valued at $143 billion to bolster its AI strategic deployment. The former CTO, Ari Boobalan, joined Airbnb from Google in 2018 and stepped down last December after more than seven years with the company. Currently, Airbnb is in the midst of a major transformation, attempting to shed its entrenched label as a "short-term rental platform." In May of this year, Airbnb launched a comprehensive overhaul of its application, adding new features such as food services and private custom training, followed by the introduction of an instant messaging function and iterative upgrades to its AI-powered chatbot. "The AI is available 24/7, can communicate in any language, and learns and optimizes from the data of millions of user interactions to serve customers... Al-Dahle's arrival will help us expand our business upstream and enter the travel search arena," Chesky told Sorkin. "Imagine a future where one day, Airbnb becomes your personal travel concierge, a companion throughout your entire journey—that is the direction we are heading." Chesky has a close personal relationship with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and has previously expressed his vision of integrating ChatGPT into the Airbnb platform. However, in an interview with CNBC last October, he admitted that the chatbot's "performance is not yet stable or reliable enough." In a post he published, Chesky wrote that Al-Dahle's philosophy is highly aligned with the company's mission—Airbnb hopes to leverage the power of technology and artificial intelligence to foster connections between people. He stated: "Al-Dahle shares our belief that technology should serve people, not the other way around; the highest value of technology is to bring us closer together." Al-Dahle previously worked at Apple for 16 years, holding positions in special projects groups and the camera and sensor technology division. He is a graduate of the University of Waterloo in Canada. Chesky commented in a blog post: "He excels at combining grand vision with deep technology, places high value on design, and firmly believes that the engineering department should be a genuine strategic partner in all aspects of the company's business."
Comments