(Bloomberg/Natalie Lung) — Airbnb Inc. has hired a former Meta Platforms Inc. executive as its new chief technology officer, as the short-term rental company is investing to include more artificial intelligence and personalization elements into its service this year.
Ahmad Al-Dahle, who most recently led generative AI at Meta and the team behind its Llama open-source models, joins the company Wednesday and will oversee its engineering and data science teams. Al-Dahle succeeds Ari Balogh, who stepped aside from his role in December after seven years at the company.
Balogh joined the company when it was “going through hypergrowth,” Chief Executive Officer Brian Chesky said of the transition in an interview. “This is a moment when now we’ve built a really strong foundation, but we’re in the midst of a technological revolution” that will play out over the next decade or longer, he said. “We thought this was a really good time to pass the baton.”
The key hire comes at a time when Airbnb is expanding its business beyond accommodations into tours, individual services and other products to drive new growth. The company is experimenting with boutique hotel bookings in several cities, as well as testing grocery delivery in a partnership with Instacart to let guests stock their kitchen ahead of check-in. After adding social features to encourage user connections and incorporating AI into its customer service tool last year, Chesky said he plans to launch AI search within the app in 2026 to help make better travel recommendations and mimic the interactive aspect of working with a human travel agent.
“What that means is moving away from an anonymous customer just searching, and making sure everyone’s search, everyone’s conversation is unique to them and that we take into account all prior conversations we ever had with you, all information we have.” he said. “It’s not going to look like old search, it’s not going to look like a chatbot. It’s going to have to marry the best of both worlds.” The interaction will be less text-based, with more visual components to help users more easily retrieve their preferred options from prior searches, he added.
Two years ago, Airbnb began laying the groundwork for personalization features by prompting hosts and guests to add more detail to their profile pages. Last year, it started letting users see other guest profiles before booking an experience, with the ability to message other participants during or after the activity to stay in touch.
In the future, Chesky said AI recommendations will use information from guidebooks the company’s hosts already put together for guests. “We think specialization allows us to make sure that the content is a bit more authentic, a bit more real and specific to Airbnb.”
Aside from AI-related changes to Airbnb’s consumer product, Al-Dahle is well-positioned to lend “fresh eyes” to how employees use AI tools, Chesky said. “We’re going to try to — without creating a lot of organizational churn — get people to adopt more and more of the tools,” he said. “It seems like a year ago maybe was the wrong time to push these tools aggressively because it might’ve been premature, but now is a really good time to make sure we’re using the latest and greatest tools.”
Chesky hailed Al-Dahle’s expertise in an emerging technology like AI and his experience building products that reach millions of users, while also understanding craft and design. The latter is especially important to Chesky, an industrial designer by training.
Al-Dahle began his technology career at Apple Inc., where he spent 16 years working on assignments including the iPhone’s display systems and the company’s self-driving car project. During Al-Dahle’s almost six years at Meta, he oversaw the social media giant’s generative AI research and products involving its large language models, including its Llama open-source model and the Meta AI chatbot.
“I’ve seen a lot of frontier teams and technologists fall into the trap of building technology and then searching for a use case,” Al-Dahle said in a joint interview with Chesky. “Part of my self-selection criteria in deciding what I wanted to do next was working at a culture that really put the customer first. And I think that’s very strong at Airbnb.”
Al-Dahle is the latest AI leader to exit Meta after a dramatic overhaul of the company’s team last year. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg restructured the group and went on an expensive hiring spree following disappointing results from its Llama 4 model released in April — a pivot that sidelined some of Meta’s existing AI leaders. Zuckerberg is also considering commercial AI models rather than open-source ones, and has prioritized AI product development over longer-term research. Yann LeCun, one of the godfathers of AI who had led long-term research initiatives, also departed in December, further signaling Meta’s evolving AI strategy.
Al-Dahle joins other Apple veterans in Airbnb’s C-suite. Chief Experience Officer Hiroki Asai, who oversees marketing, product, design and host education, spent close to two decades leading Apple’s various marketing campaigns. And Global Head of Operations Tara Bunch spent eight years leading the AppleCare program.
–With assistance from Kurt Wagner.
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