Airbnb says AI is helping it ship features faster

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1:39Airbnb says AI is helping it ship features faster. I'm Imran Shaikh and your Weekend Crunch featuring three big tech headlines starts right now. The Trump administration is paying another$1.2 billion to cancel an offshore wind lease. This time to German utility RWE. Now, the energy company said in an announcement that the wind farms would have been built off the coasts of California, Louisiana, and New York. Well, instead, RWE will spend$900 million to buy a small stake in a Louisiana liquid natural gas export terminal. The New York wind farm would have generated more than 3 gigawatts, according to Heatmap News.

2:19The remaining$300 million will go toward buying natural gas turbines to power 15 peaking power plants around the country. Now, peaking power plants are among the most expensive and most polluting natural gas power plants to operate. It's unclear when those will be completed. There's currently a backlog for new turbines stretching into the early 2030s. RWE isn't backing off its offshore wind investments elsewhere, though. The company said it bought 6.9 gigawatts of capacity in the UK's recent auction. The Trump administration has paid$3.93 billion for the 12 leases it's coaxed developers into abandoning.

2:59Well, looks like Tinder's not the only major dating app turning away from the swipe and toward real-world events to attract Gen Z users who've grown tired of traditional online dating. You see, on Wednesday, Bumble touted the early success of its newest app, Plans, designed to connect people IRL in low-pressure group settings, and spoke of what comes next for Bumble's flagship app after the swipe is dead. On its second quarter earnings call with investors, Bumble CEO Whitney Wolf Heard said Plans showed promising results in early tests over the past few months, and the company would lean more into real-life experiences going forward.

3:38Now, combined with Tinder's news this week that it too is doubling down on in-person events, it's clear there's a major shift happening in online dating. Simply put, the swipe era is, well, being swiped left on. The company first experimented with real-world platonic connections with Bumble BFF, an app for making friends which has shown some traction with Gen Z women. With plans, however, the idea is to give young people a way to meet up with others in their community to develop friendships over small group drinks and dinners at local spots, the company said when announcing the app last month.

4:13These meetups could later lead to deeper friendships or even romantic connections, Bumble believes. By not being primarily focused on dating, it can take the pressure off these first-time encounters. Though Bumble beat on earnings in Q2, it's still in a turnaround phase. The company's revenue was down 15.2 % to$210.5 million year over year, and its stock suffered over its Q3 forecast, which shows a decline in paying customers. Airbnb may be taking slow steps to roll out AI features to its consumer-facing interface, but the company is rapidly adopting the tech to build product. You see, earlier this year, the company said AI is writing 60 % of its code.

4:57In its latest earnings call, co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky said AI is helping Airbnb create features at a rapid rate. Chesky said that because of AI, the company's reduced time from conceptualization to finally shipping features by 60%. He pointed out that AI has helped the company in areas like search, sign-up, checkout, and payments. Airbnb has also released features designed to help hosts with things like quicker onboarding flow. Now, all that said, Airbnb's adoption of consumer-facing AI features has been slower and mostly isolated to features like review summaries and listing highlights.

5:32Until now, Chesky's maintained that just adopting a chatbot-like interface won't work for travel use cases. Instead, the company's focused on developing an AI for search, discovery, and support. On the back end, customer support is one area where Airbnb has heavily deployed AI. The company launched its AI-powered bot in North America in 2025, and this year it's expanded it to more than 50 languages, with plans to make it available for voice calls later this year. The company said that nearly 45 % of the customer issues that start with its AI agent are completed without any human intervention. Now, because of this, the company's support costs per booking is down 16 % year-over-year.

6:13Airbnb posted positive results for the quarter ended in June with revenue up 17 % year-over-year to$3.6 billion and adjusted EBITDA jumping 21 % to$1.3 billion. And folks, that's your Daily Crunch. Today's stories were reported by Lucas Ropec, Zora Perez, Ivan Mehta, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists. We'll see you here next week, and until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.

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