Hiroki Asai

Hiroki Asai joined Airbnb in 2020 as Global Head of Marketing and became the company’s first Chief Experience Officer in June 2025. He now oversees much of the end-to-end experience for guests and hosts across product, design, marketing, and community, drawing on a career that took him from graphic design to leading global marketing communications at Apple.

Asai brings a designer’s perspective to CX. He sees design as a way to understand how people behave, frame the right problems, and shape what gets built. He describes Airbnb’s approach as “outside-in,” beginning with the customer’s experience and working back from there. It gives him a wider lens on CX, one that follows the person across the journey instead of breaking the experience into separate functions.

He finds that digital technology and AI increasingly make things “perfect,” which makes the unpredictable, emotional, and serendipitous parts of an experience that much more valuable. 

As AI becomes more capable, Asai’s CX philosophy leaves plenty of room for automation, but keeps the technology in the role of a tool. The experience itself stays anchored in what he calls “human connection and a magical trip.”

For Asai, brand, interface design, booking, host behavior, in-trip discovery, social connection, and emerging technology all belong to the same journey. Rather than optimizing those pieces independently, he looks for the emotional and practical thread connecting them, then designs around it.