San Francisco-based Vacation rental company Airbnb made a significant move towards integrating AI and hospitality and has acquired an AI company for almost $200 million called “Gameplanner.ai” made by a Siri co-founder.
What is Gameplanner.ai?
Gameplanner is a stealth 12-person AI company led by Adam Cheyer and Siamak Hodjat. That has been developing in the shadows outside of the public’s eye. Airbnb did not share the exact price of the acquisition but a report by CNBC valued the deal just shy of $200 million.
What does Gameplanner.ai do?
It is unclear what exactly Gameplanner AI does but Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky has said “What makes GamePlanner.AI so special is that they combine expertise in AI, design, and community,”.
A big part of what attracted us to Airbnb was our shared commitment to using AI to enable human connection,” said Adam Cheyer, co-founder and CEO of GamePlanner.AI. “Like Brian, I believe that without great design and community-based intelligence, AI can only achieve a fraction of its potential. But with them, the sky’s the limit. The Airbnb team understands this better than anyone.”
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Airbnb on AI and Hospitality
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has also said that generative AI will radically change the platform and that he wants to use it as a “travel concierge” that learns about users over time and enhances their travel experiences — for example, matching users with the right rooms or homes.
And while Airbnb is already using AI across our service, including large language models, computer vision models, and machine learning – and most recently, an AI-powered Photo Tour tool. Adam and Siamak’s team will focus on accelerating select AI projects and integrating their tools into our platform.
Who are the founders of Gameplanner.ai?
Adam Cheyer co-founded Siri, which was acquired by Apple, and then led server-side engineering and AI for Siri while working alongside Steve Jobs. He later co-founded Viv Labs, which was acquired by Samsung which is now known as the company’s voice assistant Bixby. Adam was also on the founding team of Change.org, the world’s largest petition platform.
Alongside Adam, Siamak Hodjat led the natural language processing team for Siri at Apple and led the largest engineering team for Viv Labs at Samsung.
