Airbnb starts using A.I. to identify troublesome customers in advance

Brian Chesky, CEO of online booking platform Airbnb, revealed that it uses artificial intelligence (A.I.) to identify in advance customers who are likely to throw a party in the booked accommodation, Business Insider reports.

“We use machine learning techniques to look at the last 1.5 billion guest arrivals to see which [booking] resulted in a party and which didn’t,” he said in an interview the Bloomberg agency.

“If you try to do this through the lens of the human eye, you might not see any pattern, but the A.I. it can review over a billion data points, find numerous similarities and create a set of rules,” he added.

Chesky explained that if a booking request from platform users raises questions, “we either stop them or ask them for more information until we’re comfortable with you or we don’t become comfortable with you.”

The head of Airbnb also explained that artificial intelligence will also be used on the hosts’ side, to be used to check whether the photos of the location of the homes for rent are confirmed by satellite images. This measure aims to identify and eliminate false ads.

Airbnb temporarily banned parties at rental properties in November 2019 after a deadly incident in the United States. Airbnb announced last June that the ban would become permanent, saying that some guests “have chosen to take their bar and club behavior into homes, sometimes rented through our platform.”