Here’s how Brian Chesky turned to technology for help with a common CEO struggle.

Brian Chesky says AI helped him solve a persistent problem that plagues most CEOs — too many meetings. 

The Airbnb CEO admitted earlier this week in an appearance at the Skift Global Forum that “most of us CEOs of big companies don’t really know what is going on in our companies.”

“So we have these things called meetings, which are just for us to figure out what’s going on, and well-intentioned people underneath us kind of manage us,” he said, per Business Insider. 

Chesky revealed he is releasing a finished product for himself, not for customers. He has focused on building a way to stay informed about what is happening across Airbnb without relying on a constant stream of meetings. 

“My whole job was: how can I not need meetings to know what’s going on inside the company?” he said.

To that end, the Airbnb co-founder said he has tapped into AI to create a “brain” or “intelligence corpus” trained on 18,000 Keynote presentations, 50,000 Google Docs and other company materials. He’s also built a suite of dashboards designed to give him a clearer, real-time view of what is happening across the company. 

“This intelligence layer means I now have total information,” he said. “I’ve cut my meetings in half.”

On a broader scale, Chesky is pushing to make Airbnb more AI-focused . At the Skift Global Forum, he mentioned that the company is “pretty much” AI-centered and that its executive team has been “AI-pilled,” meaning that there has been an internal shift toward using the technology across the business.

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