Airbnb Is Building a ‘Company Brain’ for AI Agents with Ahmad Al-Dahle

AI agents need the institutional knowledge experienced employees rely on: why a system works a certain way, which policies apply, and what never made it into the documentation. Capturing that knowledge is hard. Keeping it useful as people and agents add more may be harder. In this episode, Ahmad Al-Dahle, CTO of Airbnb, shares how his team is building Project Everest, a “company brain” that captures knowledge from employees’ workflows for AI agents. We explore stale information and context poisoning, why too much context can backfire, and how the team evaluates whether shared knowledge improves engineering work. We also discuss measuring AI productivity beyond token usage and PR counts, the limits of chat-based interfaces, and deploying support agents in a marketplace where resolving disputes means mediating between conflicting interests.