ChatGPT is rapidly changing the world. The process is already happening, and it’s only going to accelerate as the technology improves, as more people gain access to it, and as more learn how to use it. What’s shocking is just how many tasks ChatGPT is already capable of managing for you. While the naysayers may still look down their noses at the potential of AI assistants, I’ve been using it to handle all kinds of menial tasks for me. Here are my favorite examples. Further reading: This tiny ChatGPT feature helps me tackle my days more productively Write your emails for you Dave Parrack / Foundry We’ve all been faced with the tricky task of writing an email—whether personal or professional—but not knowing quite how to word it. ChatGPT can do the heavy lifting for you, penning the (hopefully) perfect email based on whatever information you feed it. Let’s assume the email you need to write is of a professional nature, and wording it poorly could negatively affect your career. By directing ChatGPT to write the email with a particular structure, content, and tone of voice, you can give yourself a huge head start. A winning tip for this is to never accept ChatGPT’s first attempt. Always read through it and look for areas of improvement, then request tweaks to ensure you get the best possible email. You can (and should) also rewrite the email in your own voice. Learn more about how ChatGPT coached my colleague to write better emails. Generate itineraries and schedules Dave Parrack / Foundry If you’re going on a trip but you’re the type of person who hates planning trips, then you should utilize ChatGPT’s ability to generate trip itineraries. The results can be customized to the nth degree depending on how much detail and instruction you’re willing to provide. As someone who likes to get away at least once a year but also wants to make the most of every trip, leaning on ChatGPT for an itinerary is essential for me. I’ll provide the location and the kinds of things I want to see and do, then let it handle the rest. Instead of spending days researching everything myself, ChatGPT does 80 percent of it for me. As with all of these tasks, you don’t need to accept ChatGPT’s first effort. Use different prompts to force the AI chatbot to shape the itinerary closer to what you want. You’d be surprised at how many cool ideas you’ll encounter this way—simply nix the ones you don’t like. Break down difficult concepts Dave Parrack / Foundry One of the best tasks to assign to ChatGPT is the explanation of difficult concepts. Ask ChatGPT to explain any concept you can think of and it will deliver more often than not. You can tailor the level of explanation you need, and even have it include visual elements. Let’s say, for example, that a higher-up at work regularly lectures everyone about the importance of networking. But maybe they never go into detail about what they mean, just constantly pushing the why without explaining the what. Well, just ask ChatGPT to explain networking! Okay, most of us know what “networking” is and the concept isn’t very hard to grasp. But you can do this with anything. Ask ChatGPT to explain augmented reality, multi-threaded processing, blockchain, large language models, what have you. It will provide you with a clear and simple breakdown, maybe even with analogies and images. Analyze and make tough decisions Dave Parrack / Foundry We all face tough decisions every so often. The next time you find yourself wrestling with a particularly tough one—and you just can’t decide one way or the other—try asking ChatGPT for guidance and advice. It may sound strange to trust any kind of decision to artificial intelligence, let alone an important one that has you stumped, but doing so actually makes a lot of sense. While human judgment can be clouded by emotions, AI can set that aside and prioritize logic. It should go without saying: you don’t have to accept ChatGPT’s answers. Use the AI to weigh the pros and cons, to help you understand what’s most important to you, and to suggest a direction. Who knows? If you find yourself not liking the answer given, that in itself might clarify what you actually want—and the right answer for you. This is the kind of stuff ChatGPT can do to improve your life. Plan complex projects and strategies Dave Parrack / Foundry Most jobs come with some level of project planning and management. Even I, as a freelance writer, need to plan tasks to get projects completed on time. And that’s where ChatGPT can prove invaluable, breaking projects up into smaller, more manageable parts. ChatGPT needs to know the nature of the project, the end goal, any constraints you may have, and what you have done so far. With that information, it can then break the project up with a step-by-step plan, and break it down further into phases (if required). If ChatGPT doesn’t initially split your project up in a way that suits you, try again. Change up the prompts and make the AI chatbot tune in to exactly what you’re looking for. It takes a bit of back and forth, but it can shorten your planning time from hours to mere minutes. Compile research notes Dave Parrack / Foundry If you need to research a given topic of interest, ChatGPT can save you the hassle of compiling that research. For example, ahead of a trip to Croatia, I wanted to know more about the Croatian War of Independence, so I asked ChatGPT to provide me with a brief summary of the conflict with bullet points to help me understand how it happened. After absorbing all that information, I asked ChatGPT to add a timeline of the major events, further helping me to understand how the conflict played out. ChatGPT then offered to provide me with battle maps and/or summaries, plus profiles of the main players. You can go even deeper with ChatGPT’s Deep Research feature, which is now available to free users, up to 5 Deep Research tasks per month. With Deep Research, ChatGPT conducts multi-step research to generate comprehensive reports (with citations!) based on large amounts of information across the internet. A Deep Research task can take up to 30 minutes to complete, but it’ll save you hours or even days. Summarize articles, meetings, and more Dave Parrack / Foundry There are only so many hours in the day, yet so many new articles published on the web day in and day out. When you come across extra-long reads, it can be helpful to run them through ChatGPT for a quick summary. Then, if the summary is lacking in any way, you can go back and plow through the article proper. As an example, I ran one of my own PCWorld articles (where I compared Bluesky and Threads as alternatives to X) through ChatGPT, which provided a brief summary of my points and broke down the best X alternative based on my reasons given. Interestingly, it also pulled elements from other articles. (Hmph.) If you don’t want that, you can tell ChatGPT to limit its summary to the contents of the link. This is a great trick to use for other long-form, text-heavy content that you just don’t have the time to crunch through. Think transcripts for interviews, lectures, videos, and Zoom meetings. The only caveat is to never share private details with ChatGPT, like company-specific data that’s protected by NDAs and the like. Create Q&A flashcards for learning Dave Parrack / Foundry Flashcards can be extremely useful for drilling a lot of information into your brain, such as when studying for an exam, onboarding in a new role, prepping for an interview, etc. And with ChatGPT, you no longer have to painstakingly create those flashcards yourself. All you have to do is tell the AI the details of what you’re studying. You can specify the format (such as Q&A or multiple choice), as well as various other elements. You can also choose to keep things broad or target specific sub-topics or concepts you want to focus on. You can even upload your own notes for ChatGPT to reference. You can also use Google’s NotebookLM app in a similar way. Provide interview practice Dave Parrack / Foundry Whether you’re a first-time jobseeker or have plenty of experience under your belt, it’s always a good idea to practice for your interviews when making career moves. Years ago, you might’ve had to ask a friend or family member to act as your mock interviewer. These days, ChatGPT can do it for you—and do it more effectively. Inform ChatGPT of the job title, industry, and level of position you’re interviewing for, what kind of interview it’ll be (e.g., screener, technical assessment, group/panel, one-on-one with CEO), and anything else you want it to take into consideration. ChatGPT will then conduct a mock interview with you, providing feedback along the way. When I tried this out myself, I was shocked by how capable ChatGPT can be at pretending to be a human in this context. And the feedback it provides for each answer you give is invaluable for knocking off your rough edges and improving your chances of success when you’re interviewed by a real hiring manager. Further reading: Non-gimmicky AI apps I actually use every day

Memorial Day Weekend is upon us, marking the unofficial start of the summer vacation season in America. Yet, a recent Bankrate survey from late April found that only 46% of Americans plan to travel domestically or internationally this summer, with costs cited as the primary concern. Dwindling U.S. consumer confidence may lead some individuals to reconsider spending their precious discretionary dollars on travel. Still, you may have more travel options within your budget than you thought. For those determined to get away, there’s an excellent Google Flights hack that reveals options within a certain budget. Some Google Flights aficionados know this as the “anywhere” hack. Here’s how to use it. The Google Flights “anywhere” hack Google Flights is one of the best aggregators out there for finding airline tickets between any two cities on Earth. It works very simply: visit www.google.com/travel/flights, enter your departure and destination cities along with your desired departure and return dates, and click the search button. Google Flights will then reveal the best options for your selected destination across numerous airlines. However, if you’re trying to stay within a certain budget, this traditional method of using Google Flights can be exhausting, because you have to check individual cities manually. For example, if your airline ticket budget is $1200, it can be tedious to enter cities one by one on Google Flights (“São Paulo,” then “Paris,” then “Osaka”) only to find that tickets don’t fit within your budget anyway. Sticking to this method may also mean you completely overlook interesting destinations you’d never considered before. That’s where the excellent Google Flights “anywhere” hack comes in. It’s perfect for people who are more flexible in terms of their destination and put a greater priority on staying within a certain budget. Here’s how it works: Go to Google Flights as normal and enter your departure city in the “Where from?” field. Fill out your departure and return dates, as well, in the respective fields. But then, instead of entering a specific destination in the “Where to?” field, type in “anywhere” and click the search button. Now, on the results screen, you will see a global map displaying all the options available to you from your departure city to destinations around the world for the selected dates. By default, these options will cover all price ranges. However, you can narrow the results to show only tickets that fit within your budget by clicking the price filter dropdown menu and dragging the slider to your maximum preferred price. The results will then show you where in the world you can fly while staying within your budget.  And keep in mind that the Google Flights results map is as interactive as regular Google Maps—so be sure to zoom in and pan around on the map, and you’ll see additional flight options appear. Click on any one of them to get more details about the selected itinerary. Find even more options with the “flexible date” hack The “anywhere” Google Flights hack can help you quickly discover destinations you can travel to within your budget. But another simple hack may reveal even more destinations you can afford. That’s because you may actually be able to discover more locations within your budget if your dates are flexible, too. Route prices aren’t set in stone, and they vary wildly depending on the date you want to fly. To reveal these potential new options, click on the date field from the search results screen. In the drop-down menu that appears, click on the “Flexible Dates” tab, select any one or all of the next six months, and indicate how long you want your trip to be: for the weekend, or for one or two weeks. Google Flights will then scour the internet to find you the destinations you can go to within your budget and across the periods you selected. This “flexible date” hack frequently yields even more results than the “anywhere” hack alone because there are often significant savings to be had on routes flown during periods of lower travel demand. Just one final thing to keep in mind: While you may be able to find new destinations you can afford to explore using these Google Flights hacks, remember that once you arrive, Google Maps may not actually be the best way to navigate—so be sure to pack your phone with the apps that are.

This week, we published Power Hungry, a package all about AI and energy. At the center of this package is the most comprehensive look yet at AI’s growing power demand, if I do say so myself.  This data-heavy story is the result of over six months of reporting by me and my colleague James O’Donnell (and the work of many others on our team). Over that time, with the help of leading researchers, we quantified the energy and emissions impacts of individual queries to AI models and tallied what it all adds up to, both right now and for the years ahead.  There’s a lot of data to dig through, and I hope you’ll take the time to explore the whole story. But in the meantime, here are three of my biggest takeaways from working on this project.  1. The energy demands of AI are anything but constant.  If you’ve heard estimates of AI’s toll, it’s probably a single number associated with a query, likely to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. One popular estimate is that writing an email with ChatGPT uses 500 milliliters (or roughly a bottle) of water. But as we started reporting, I was surprised to learn just how much the details of a query can affect its energy demand. No two queries are the same—for several reasons, including their complexity and the particulars of the model being queried. One key caveat here is that we don’t know much about “closed source” models—for these, companies hold back the details of how they work. (OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are examples.) Instead, we worked with researchers who measured the energy it takes to run open-source AI models, for which the source code is publicly available.  But using open-source models, it’s possible to directly measure the energy used to respond to a query rather than just guess. We worked with researchers who generated text, images, and video and measured the energy required for the chips the models are based on to perform the task.   Even just within the text responses, there was a pretty large range of energy needs. A complicated travel itinerary consumed nearly 10 times as much energy as a simple request for a few jokes, for example. An even bigger difference comes from the size of the model used. Larger models with more parameters used up to 70 times more energy than smaller ones for the same prompts.  As you might imagine, there’s also a big difference between text, images, or video. Videos generally took hundreds of times more energy to generate than text responses.  2. What’s powering the grid will greatly affect the climate toll of AI’s energy use.  As the resident climate reporter on this project, I was excited to take the expected energy toll and translate it into an expected emissions burden.  Powering a data center with a nuclear reactor or a whole bunch of solar panels and batteries will not affect our planet the same way as burning mountains of coal. To quantify this idea, we used a figure called carbon intensity, a measure of how dirty a unit of electricity is on a given grid.  We found that the same exact query, with the same exact energy demand, will have a very different climate impact depending on what the data center is powered by, and that depends on the location and the time of day. For example, querying a data center in West Virginia could cause nearly twice the emissions of querying one in California, according to calculations based on average data from 2024. This point shows why it matters where tech giants are building data centers, what the grid looks like in their chosen locations, and how that might change with more demand from the new infrastructure.  3. There is still so much that we don't know when it comes to AI and energy.  Our reporting resulted in estimates that are some of the most specific and comprehensive out there. But ultimately, we still have no idea what many of the biggest, most influential models are adding up to in terms of energy and emissions. None of the companies we reached out to were willing to provide numbers during our reporting. Not one. Adding up our estimates can only go so far, in part because AI is increasingly everywhere. While today you might generally have to go to a dedicated site and type in questions, in the future AI could be stitched into the fabric of our interactions with technology. (See my colleague Will Douglas Heaven’s new story on Google’s I/O showcase: “By putting AI into everything, Google wants to make it invisible.”) AI could be one of the major forces that shape our society, our work, and our power grid. Knowing more about its consequences could be crucial to planning our future.  To dig into our reporting, give the main story a read. And if you’re looking for more details on how we came up with our numbers, you can check out this behind-the-scenes piece. There are also some great related stories in this package, including one from James Temple on the data center boom in the Nevada desert, one from David Rotman about how AI’s rise could entrench natural gas, and one from Will Douglas Heaven on a few technical innovations that could help make AI more efficient. Oh, and I also have a piece on why nuclear isn’t the easy answer some think it is.  Find them, and the rest of the stories in the package, here.  This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Gmail’s Smart Replies are going beyond responses like “Will do,” “Thank you,” and “Apologies.” With the help of Gemini, you will soon be able to compose fully fledged responses that match your tone and context.Called Personalized Smart Replies, the feature will pull information from your previous emails and Google Drive to provide suggestions “with specific details that are more relevant and on point, eliminating the need to dig through your inbox and files yourself,” Google says.In a pre-recorded demo at I/O, Google CEO Sundar Pichai is seen responding to a friend who asked for tips on a road trip from Colorado to Utah. Before composing the reply, Pichai says, Gemini went through his notes in Drive and previous bookings in Gmail to find an itinerary for his trip to Zion National Park in Utah. Gemini then used the gathered information, such as drive time and stops taken along the way, and matched it with Pichai’s writing style to come up with three detailed responses. He picked one, modified it, and hit send.Recommended by Our EditorsOf course, not everyone will be comfortable with Google peeping into their emails and Drive content to mimic their writing style. That probably explains why Pichai emphasized that the feature only works "with your permission."Gmail’s Personalized Smart Replies will be available for all Gemini subscribers this summer.There are two other Gemini features coming to Gmail next quarter. An “inbox cleanup” function will let you automate your inbox management. For example, you can ask Gemini to delete messages from a contact at regular intervals. There’s also a feature that lets you schedule appointments without leaving your draft. You can click on the calendar icon and let Gemini suggest your next available time for an appointment.For more, check out our rundown of everything Google announced at I/O day one.

Google’s AI models have a secret ingredient that’s giving the company a leg up on competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. That ingredient is your data, and it’s only just scratched the surface in terms of how it can use your information to “personalize” Gemini’s responses.Google first started letting users opt in to its “Gemini with personalization” feature earlier this year, which lets the AI model tap into your search history “to provide responses that are uniquely insightful and directly address your needs.” But now, Google is taking things a step further by unlocking access to even more of your information — all in the name of providing you with more personalized, AI-generated responses.During Google I/O on Tuesday, Google introduced something called “personal context,” which will allow Gemini models to pull relevant information from across Google’s apps, as long as it has your permission. One way Google is doing this is through Gmail’s personalized smart replies — the AI-generated messages that you can use to quickly reply to emails.The new smart replies let you choose a response based on previous emails and files in Drive. Image: GoogleTo make these AI responses sound “authentically like you,” Gemini will pore over your previous emails and even your Google Drive files to craft a reply tailored to your conversation. The response will even incorporate your tone, the greeting you use the most, and even “favorite word choices,” according to Google.As an example, Google says if you’re chatting with a friend about road trip advice, Gemini can search through your emails and files, allowing it to find hotel reservations and an itinerary you put together. It can then suggest a response that incorporates relevant information. That, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during the keynote, may even help you “be a better friend.”It seems Google plans on bringing personal context outside Gemini, too, as its blog post announcing the feature says, “You can imagine how helpful personal context will be across Search, Gemini and more.” Google said in March that it will eventually let users connect their YouTube history and Photos library to Gemini, too.The breadth of data that Google has access to could put Gemini far ahead of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which starts with a blank slate when it encounters a new user. Instead of having an idea of where someone might like to shop, their favorite foods, or how they typically compose their emails, ChatGPT will have to field several responses before it can start referring to its memories and old conversations. The same is true for other AI chatbots without Google’s vast swaths of data, such as Anthropic’s Claude.If it’s given permission, Gemini can have access to all of this information — and more — right out the gate. That sets it up to be an even more helpful AI assistant that you don’t even need to have a previous interaction with for it to “know” you.See More:

14 May, 2025 In London and Los Angeles, Rob Alderson speaks with Teo Connor about Airbnb's new direction, her career, and the enduring influence of the girl guides. About an hour after CEO Brian Chesky unveiled the new Airbnb app to the world, Teo Connor, the company’s VP of design, takes a moment to reflect on the 18-month project. It’s a key move for Airbnb, which is beefing up its experiences and adding services, so people can book a private chef or a massage through the app. And it was an enormous design challenge for Connor and her team, who had to introduce a dizzying new array of options and information into the UX. “Yeah it was a bit nuts,” she laughs. “But I am really proud that we have been able to make something that feels both familiar and new. It feels magical to pull these three things into an app that people are used to using for one thing.” Teo Connor A big piece of the puzzle was to create the right building blocks that would work for both users and hosts – unglamorous but vital work to create scalable design structures. But for a company that has design woven in its DNA – both Chesky and co-founder Joe Gebbia studied at the Rhode Island School of Design – they also had to create something that looked great too. “We had to be able to condense all this information into three new tabs on the homescreen without it becoming overwhelming,” Connor explains. “How do you do that at scale, and at such density? But also with beauty – we had a lot of conversations about that.” Sitting through Chesky’s presentation on a massive high-definition screen, every pixel of the new app was blown up for everyone to scrutinise. But Connor is clearly satisfied with what she, and everyone else, saw. “We are having to educate people and change their behaviour, so that is a huge challenge,” she says. “But what I love is that when you look at it, it sort of feels inevitable.” We’re changing travel again Rewind a couple of hours and Brian Chesky strides onto the stage to the strains of Ini Kamoze’s Here Comes the Hotstepper. Airbnb has pioneered a way of working that focuses the whole company on a single product calendar, and the summer release is the moment when its new additions are shared with the public. In the past, these changes and updates have been smaller, and sometimes very technical. But this announcement fundamentally changes what Airbnb is, and does. The tagline used in the official release is, “Now you can Airbnb more than an Airbnb.” The audience in Los Angeles includes journalists, influencers, a phalanx of Airbnb staff and a smattering of celebrities (who a nice lady from People magazine identifies for me). Chesky – whom it feels relevant to note is ripped – speaks for about an hour, explaining the company’s origin story, and the travails of the pandemic, when they lost 80% of their business in eight weeks (“Is this the end of Airbnb?” asked Wired in 2020). This context sets up the company’s new direction. “17 years ago we changed the way people travel, and today we are changing travel again,” he explains. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/All-new-app-demo-2025-Summer-Release-Digital.mp4 While Airbnb was launched as a more interesting alternative to bland hotels, he acknowledges that hotels provide a range of useful things that people need when they are travelling, from haircuts to massages. Airbnb Services is an attempt to replicate those offerings on the app – the icon is a bell like those you find on hotel reception desks. It launched across 260 cities with ten categories – chefs, prepared meals, catering, photography, personal training, massages, spa treatments, hair styling, make-up and nails. Airbnb Experiences, which first launched in 2016, has been “reimagined from the ground up” to offer people local experiences “hosted” by people who know their cities best. It launched across 650 cities with five categories – history and culture, food and drink, nature and outdoors, art and design, and fitness and wellness. They are also rolling out Airbnb Originals – one-off events often with a celebrity host (Megan Thee Stallion, Sabrina Carpenter and American football star Patrick Mahomes are all signed up to host their own experiences). One of the biggest shifts is that Airbnb wants these new categories to be used by people in their own cities as well as visitors, heralding a move from being a travel app to an experience, or community, platform. And all of this needs a whole new design system, which is where Connor and her team of 200 designers come in. A series of design challenges There was an overarching design challenge – to bring these new elements into the Airbnb ecosystem in a way that felt integrated and exciting, but didn’t overshadow the accommodation offering, on which the company has built an $85 billion business. But below that, there were a series of “really fun design challenges” to create the spaces and interfaces that would support this new direction. These included the new homescreen, a new profile page, a new itinerary page (which now had to incorporate timelines broken into hours as well as days) and product description pages, or PDPs, which capture these myriad experiences, from historic tours to wine tasting, and bring them to life in a clear and engaging way. “Brian really wanted the PDPs to tell a story, so you could go from the top to the bottom and really quickly discern what this thing was about,” Connor explains. “For a really long time we were talking about having video. But you have to sit back and watch a video, and it can be quite passive.” The solution was a 2×2 grid which quickly communicates the key information, and then a design structure that allows for scanning. Elsewhere, carousels are used to help users browse the broader range of things they can get via the app. The new Experiences flow in the app The designs needed to strike a fine a balance – to demonstrate breadth and abundance, without sacrificing ease-of-use. “We want people to get the information they need and then get back to doing life,” Connor says. “That’s a big thing for us when we’re designing.” That begins, she explains, with an obsession with simplicity that underpins every design review. “We are constantly asking, do people need this? Do they want it? If no, then take it away.” But the team also thinks a lot about the platform’s personality, “using craft and care to make the experience feel delightful.” Chesky talked in his presentation of bringing more depth and vibrancy back to the app, moving away from the flat, and sometimes soulless, big tech experience. (One commenter praised the new design’s “Web 1.0” sensibility). There are lots of nice touches – when you press the hot air balloon icon for Experiences it belches fire, when you hit the Services bell it shakes as if summoning a concierge. “It’s not about creating pretty things just because we can,” Connor says. “The delightful moments always have a utility behind them.” So on the itinerary page, the check-in time has an icon showing an open door with the lights on behind; the check-out time is accompanied by a closed door with a darkened space behind it. How did this happen? Rewind again, and I sit down with Connor in Airbnb’s London office about six weeks before the new app goes live. You wouldn’t know that they are at the business end of such a huge project; Connor is calm and self-reflective. I first met her back in the early 2010s, when she ran her own graphic design studio in London. She joined Apple in 2016 as a human interface designer, and moved to Airbnb in 2021. Was this – working for some of the biggest design-led companies in technology – always the plan? “Not at all,” she laughs. “It’s surprising and magical to me that this small-time graphic designer from London ended up here. I often ask myself – how did this happen?” The answer, she says, involves luck and timing. But it also speaks to her willingness to say yes to new opportunities, an approach she adopted after once saying no. During an internship at a London ad agency, someone offered Connor the chance to design flyers for a local club night. “I got totally freaked out and ghosted the opportunity,” she says. “I’ve always regretted that, not just saying yes and seeing how it went.” She’d always been interested in creativity, often being taken as a kid to London’s museums where she would happily sketch for hours. “I loved and admired artists,” she says. “But deep inside I knew I wasn’t one. I was a bit of a girl scout, a bit practical. I liked making things, and solving things, and helping people.” https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/Trips-itinerary-demo-2025-Summer-Release-Digital.mp4 Connor says her career has been a mix of “going with the flow and wanting to drive the flow.” She did an art foundation course because someone she worked with doing Saturday shifts in a supermarket was doing one, and she thought it sounded interesting. The course was “a real awakening” and introduced her to graphic design, which she’d go on to study at the University of Middlesex. “I did bumble through life a bit, but I am driven to be good at what I’m doing,” she says. “So even though I might fall into something, once I fall into it, I want to do it the best I can.” She admits to being “bamboozled” when Apple first got in touch. “The email felt like spam,” she laughs, “it was from hello@apple or something.” The new Guest Profile page While she had worked on websites before, she wasn’t a digital product designer. And she was happy in London, running her own studio amid the strong creative community that blossomed in the city at that time. “There were all these small agencies doing really cool work and sharing resources. It was an environment I thrived in, and felt comfortable in. So the idea of leaving all that behind, and going to America where I didn’t know anyone, and I didn’t know how things worked, was very nerve-wracking.” But the memory of the club night flyers spurred her on. “I didn’t want to be the person who says no and regrets it. So I went, and it was the best thing I ever did.” Although she hadn’t had much exposure to digital product design, she found that her experience in wayfinding proved very useful. “With wayfinding you are thinking about how to move people though a space, with visuals and graphics, in a way that tells a story. A lot of that thinking is very similar in digital products.” A defining time Connor spent five years at Apple and moved to Airbnb in 2021, initially as senior director of design, before becoming a VP the following year. She saw in Airbnb what appeared to be a very rare opportunity. “It felt like this was going to be a defining time for the company, and that we would really be able to shape something,” she says. It was also exciting to work for someone who was a designer before he was a founder. “I am fortunate to have a leader who understands the value of design,” Connor says. “For a lot of my peers who work at organisations of this scale, a lot of their job is translation, advocating for design, and trying to get a seat at the table. I never need to advocate for design with Brian – he has made space for the design team to be at the heart of the company.” But once a designer, always a designer. Does he often give feedback on specific design details? “Oh 100%,” Connor laughs. “He has this deep knowledge, and this great perspective, because he is looking at the whole company all of the time. But he’s always in the pixels too, asking about the radius of a button or something.” https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/Services-browse-book-demo-2025-Summer-Release-Digital.mp4 Overseeing 200 designers can be challenging, but she sees the fundamentals as being similar to leading much smaller teams. “I don’t think there’s a huge difference between managing five designers or managing 200, when you break it down,” she says. “The ability to build trust, to empower teams, and to be decisive, these all scale up.” She has built a culture which revolves around courage, and says she is drawn to people who, like her, “have a point of view and speak up for what’s right.” “I think that goes back to the Girl Guide thing again,” she says. In a company like Airbnb, where design and business are very intertwined, does she expect her designers to understand the commercial impact of their work? “I expect them to be curious about it, and want to learn,” Connor says. She tries to encourage this commercial awareness through, for example, inviting other teams in the business to share their insights with the design team, and mandating that project reviews include a discussion of the impact created. “We want to make it easy for the team to understand why these things are linked, and why they’re important,” Connor explains. More senior roles are expected to have more of this business acumen, but she doesn’t miss the days when designers often felt like they needed to have an MBA, to speak the right language. “I want our designers to be designers, first and foremost,” she says. Day one Back at the Airbnb launch event, I ask Connor what happens now. “Well, we’re going to have a really good party,” she says. “But I think we are excited to build on all this work now. “I actually think today is like day one,” she says. “I think that’s how it feels for the company.” Design disciplines in this article Industries in this article Brands in this article What to read next The Guardian unveils redesigned app and homepage Digital Design 7 May, 2025 Aad creates guide to more sustainable digital design Digital Design 4 Feb, 2025 How Ragged Edge gamified credit scores for Checkmyfile Digital Design 26 Nov, 2024

Looking back, there are a few mistakes I made while traveling internationally with my grandma. Emily Schlorf 2025-05-13T14:12:01Z Save Saved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? In summer 2024, I traveled with my grandma, mom, and sister to Montreal. I wish I'd thought more about my grandma's physical needs when planning the itinerary. It would've been nice to have more downtime in our schedule, too. Despite living 1,800 miles apart, my 81-year-old grandma and I have always been close. We share a love for "Downton Abbey," cross-stitch, and strong coffee, and I couldn't imagine spending weeks in the summer anywhere but her sunny kitchen table in central Minnesota.Of course, I'd be naive to assume my time with her is unlimited. That's one reason my grandma, mom, sister, and I decided to embark on a trip to Montreal together last summer.Although I'm grateful we were able to take this trip, it could have gone a lot smoother had I known these three things about traveling with an older relative. The itinerary should have reflected everyone's physical needs, not just my own I should've considered how long it would take my grandma to get to excursions like our afternoon tea. Emily Schlorf I'm the most frequent traveler in my family, so I took on all the planning myself and approached the task the same way I do for solo travel: leaving no stone unturned.I thought my grandma would be well-prepared for the long days, given that she walks 3 miles a day and eats a far more balanced diet than I do.What I failed to consider, though, was how difficult it would be for her to walk on the uneven cobblestone streets. On our first day in the city, we nearly missed an afternoon tea reservation since I didn't factor in the slower pace we'd have to take to accommodate my grandma's careful steps.I also didn't realize just how exhausting a full-day Three Pines tour would be. Although fantastic — with stops at a monastery, local museum, and five-star resort for lunch — our visit to the villages that inspired the fictional location of my grandma's favorite mystery series was nine hours long. My family and I went on a nine-hour tour of Three Pines. Emily Schlorf As the day progressed, we took turns snoozing in the back seat of our tour guide's van. Upon arriving back at the bed and breakfast, my grandma exclaimed how long of a day it was; and I didn't disagree.Similarly, I didn't consider my grandma's physical limitations when choosing restaurants. Although they weren't lacking in ambiance — picture patios swallowed in bougainvillea and cool, brutalist interiors overlooking Lake Saint Louis — the dim lighting and small font sizes made it challenging for her to read the menu.My mom, sister, and I mitigated my grandma's vision issues by taking turns reading the menu aloud, line by line, but that got old fast.In retrospect, I wish I'd shown up equipped with solutions, such as finding the menu online so she could zoom in on my phone or reminding her to bring her readers, to improve everyone's dining experience. A long trip means extended time away from routinesEveryone gets to a point on vacation when they're ready to return home, but I would argue that the feeling is stronger for older adults like my grandma, who travel once or twice a year and may be used to a strict daily routine.Although my grandma never expressed this feeling to me outright, I noticed as the days went on, she became less game for her granddaughters' plans.For example, on our last evening, my sister and I wanted to check out the shops lining Saint-Laurent Boulevard, but my grandma preferred to have takeout in the hotel.We compromised, and my sister and I walked to the boulevard to pick up dinner, but we ditched our shopping plan since we felt bad keeping my mom and grandma waiting.I wish we'd had more downtime together One of my favorite memories from the trip was when we spontaneously visited a speakeasy. Emily Schlorf Instead of jam-packing every day with new experiences, I wish I'd taken my foot off the gas as the trip progressed — for my grandma's sake as well as my own.As we reached days five and six of the trip, my excitement for the activities I planned dwindled, and I found myself wishing I hadn't planned them at all.Besides, the memories I cherish most from the trip weren't the museums or guided tours, they were the unplanned ones: a shared bottle of wine with our bed and breakfast hosts, a visit to an outdoor antique market, and a nightcap at a speakeasy.Despite the challenges, I'd love to travel with my grandma again I would love to go on another trip with my grandma. Emily Schlorf To anyone contemplating a multigenerational trip, I say do it, but be more considerate than I was. Take time to plan the trip together, think of everyone's needs, and be content with slowing down.Strolling through the city hand-in-hand with my grandma, I learned that it's OK to leave some stones unturned, because the real joy comes from who you're turning them with. Recommended video

U.S. President Donald Trump opened his four-day Middle East trip on Tuesday by paying a visit to Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, for talks on U.S. efforts to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, end the war in Gaza, hold down oil prices and more.Prince Mohammed warmly greeted Trump as he stepped off Air Force One at King Khalid International Airport in the Saudi capital and kicked off his Middle East tour.The two leaders then retreated to a grand hall at the Riyadh airport, where Trump and his aides were served traditional Arabic coffee by waiting attendants wearing ceremonial gun-belts. Fighter jet escort The pomp began before Trump even landed. Royal Saudi Air Force F-15s provided an honorary escort for Air Force One as it approached the kingdom’s capital.Trump and Prince Mohammed also took part in a lunch at the Royal Court, gathering with guests and aides in an ornate room with blue accents and massive crystal chandeliers.As he greeted business titans with Trump by his side, Prince Mohammed was animated and smiling.It was a stark contrast to his awkward fist bump with then-President Joe Biden, who looked to avoid being seen on camera shaking hands with the prince during a 2022 visit to the kingdom.Biden had decided to pay a visit to Saudi Arabia as he looked to alleviate soaring prices at the pump for motorists at home and around the globe.At the time, Prince Mohammed’s reputation had been badly damaged by a U.S. intelligence determination that found he had ordered the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.But that dark moment appeared to be distant memory for the prince as he rubbed elbows with high-profile business executives — including Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — in front of the cameras and with Trump by his side.Later, the crown prince will fete Trump with a formal dinner. Trump is also slated to take part Tuesday in a U.S.-Saudi investment conference.“When Saudis and Americans join forces, very good things happen — more often than not, great things happen,” Saudi Investment Minister Khalid al-Falih said. Oil production Saudi Arabia and fellow OPEC+ nations have already helped their cause with Trump early in his second term by stepping up oil production. Trump sees cheap energy as a key component to lowering costs and stemming inflation for Americans. The Republican president has also made the case that lower oil prices will hasten an end to the Russia-Ukraine war.But Saudi Arabia’s economy remains heavily dependent on oil, and the kingdom needs a fiscal break-even oil price of $96 to $98 a barrel to balance its budget. It’s questionable how long OPEC+, of which Saudi Arabia is the leading member, is willing to keep production elevated. The price of a barrel of Brent crude closed Monday at $64.77.“One of the challenges for the Gulf states of lower oil prices is it doesn’t necessarily imperil economic diversification programs, but it certainly makes them harder,” said Jon Alterman, a senior Middle East analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Qatar and UAE next Trump picked the kingdom for his first stop, because it has pledged to make big investments in the U.S., but Trump ended up traveling to Italy last month for Pope Francis’ funeral. Riyadh was the first overseas stop of his first term.The three countries on the president’s itinerary — Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — are all places where the Trump Organization, run by Trump’s two elder sons, is developing major real estate projects. They include a high-rise tower in Jeddah, a luxury hotel in Dubai and a golf course and villa complex in Qatar.Trump is trying to demonstrate that his transactional strategy for international politics is paying dividends as he faces criticism from Democrats who say his global tariff war and approach to Russia’s war on Ukraine are isolating the United States from allies.He’s expected to announce deals with the three wealthy countries that will touch on artificial intelligence, expanding energy cooperation and perhaps new arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The administration earlier this month announced initial approval to sell $3.5 billion worth of air-to-air missiles for Saudi Arabia’s fighter jets.But Trump arrived in the Middle East at a moment when his top regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, are far from neatly aligned with his approach. Trump’s decision to skip Israel remarkable, expert says Before the trip, Trump announced that Washington was halting a nearly two-month U.S. airstrike campaign against Yemen’s Houthis, saying the Iran-backed rebels have pledged to stop attacking ships along a vital global trade route.The administration didn’t notify Israel — which the Houthis continue to target — of the agreement before Trump publicly announced it. It was the latest example of Trump leaving the Israelis in the dark about his administration’s negotiations with common adversaries.In March, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wasn’t notified by the administration until after talks began with Hamas about the war in Gaza. And Netanyahu found out about the ongoing U.S. nuclear talks with Iran only when Trump announced them during an Oval Office visit by the Israeli leader last month.“Israel will defend itself by itself,” Netanyahu said last week following Trump’s Houthi truce announcement. “If others join us — our American friends — all the better.”William Wechsler, senior director of the Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council, said Trump’s decision to skip Israel on his first Middle East visit is remarkable.“The main message coming out of this, at least as the itinerary stands today, is that the governments of the Gulf … are in fact stronger friends to President Trump than the current government of Israel at this moment,” Wechsler said. Restarting efforts to normalize Israel-Saudi ties Trump, meanwhile, hopes to restart his first-term effort to normalize relations between the Middle East’s major powers, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Trump’s Abraham Accords effort led to Sudan, the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco agreeing to normalize relations with Israel.But Riyadh has made clear that in exchange for normalization it wants U.S. security guarantees, assistance with the kingdom’s nuclear program and progress on a pathway to Palestinian statehood. There seems to be scant hope for making headway on a Palestinian state with the Israel-Hamas war raging and the Israelis threatening to flatten and occupy Gaza.Prince Mohammed last week notably hosted Palestinian Vice President Hussein Sheikh in Jeddah on the sheikh’s first foreign visit since assuming office in April.Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the crown prince appeared to be subtly signaling to Trump that the kingdom needs to see progress on Palestinian statehood for the Saudis to begin seriously moving on a normalization deal with the Israelis.“Knowing how the Saudis telegraph their intentions, that’s a preemptive, ‘Don’t even think of asking us to show any goodwill toward normalization,'” Abdul-Hussain said. Madhani reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. —Zeke Miller, Aamer Madhani and Jon Gambrell, Associated Press