The browse surface

Brian Chesky did not guess. He tried Airbnb on the agents people are actually using.

On 1 October 2026 he told TechCrunch he has used Airbnb on Muse and Instinct.

And it doesn't work very well. I mean, even hotels don't work that well, but Airbnbs work even worse.

He has believed for a long time that

a chatbot isn't the right interface for e-commerce.

With Airbnb, people enjoy looking at the product. He does not want to "take the inspiration and the browsing and the library experience of dreaming away."

SBC Summit Lisbon, 29 September to 1 October 2026, participation only (not a speaker).

The rest of his point is about reach, not a nicer chat box. On the race to be the primary agent, he said: "The problem with that model is no one is developing a full operating system software developer kit." If the agent cannot get into the product people open the app to see, the chat sits beside the product.

Sports and iGaming have the same shape, and the pleasure is more specific than a fixture list.

Users still get excited to watch a football match. While it is on, they sift through tips, look at statistics for different players, and build their own bets and their own guesses on how the event turns out. That is the product. The match is the room. The tips, the player numbers, and the bet slip are how they move around inside it. They are not waiting for a paragraph that picks the winner. They want to look, compare, and assemble the view themselves.

Generative AI and chat-like interfaces are still thin on that surface. A chat tab on the sportsbook can answer a question about a player. It does not hold the match, the tips, the stats, and the slip in one place the way the product already does. Ask it who to back and it collapses the browsing into one reply. The excitement was in the sifting.

SBC Summit Lisbon, 29 September to 1 October 2026, participation only (not a speaker).

Retail has already measured a version of this. On 18 March 2026, Daniel Danker, who oversees design and product at Walmart, spoke to Wired about Instant Checkout, the flow that let some ChatGPT users buy a limited set of Walmart products without leaving the chat. Wired reports that, according to Danker, conversion was three times lower for items sold inside the chatbot than for items that required clicking out to Walmart. He called that consumer experience unsatisfying. Walmart's move was not to retire the site. It was to put Sparky, Walmart's own assistant, inside ChatGPT, with the basket still tied to Walmart. Danker does not think the looking goes away. He said:

This idea that it will all become automated might be a little bit far-fetched.

People do get excited about shopping for clothes, for their home, for their children.

Fashion says the same thing in product terms. On 20 May 2026, Melissa Lim, head of product at ASOS, said:

Customers are increasingly turning to AI for shopping and style inspiration, but the experience can still feel fragmented and hard to visualise.

ASOS Stylist answers inside ChatGPT with imagery and video, then sends the shopper to ASOS.com to look and buy. The picture is still the product.

SBC Summit Lisbon, 29 September to 1 October 2026, participation only (not a speaker).

The pattern is the same in travel, retail, fashion, and sports. People still want to look. An agent that cannot show the stay, the garment, or the fixture is a thinner interface than the one it is trying to stand in for. The work is to give the agent a real way into that surface, with the controls the product already has.

Sources

• Brian Chesky, TechCrunch, 1 October 2026
• Daniel Danker, Wired, 18 March 2026
• Melissa Lim, ASOS, 20 May 2026