Guides

Four countries, fourteen nights, two people, one budget in euros. That is the shape of an ordinary European trip, and it is the kind of puzzle a chatbot will happily solve in half a minute. The plan it hands back reads well. Some of it is invented. This guide is about keeping the useful half and catching the rest before you pay for anything.

You send forty applications and get three replies, one of them a rejection that thanks you for your interest in a company you never applied to. It is tempting to blame a machine. The machine is part of it, but not in the place most people picture. In 2026 the AI inside a European hiring process sits in several spots at once: it parses your CV, ranks it against the job ad, schedules the interview, scores the test, and often writes the ad you answered.

Most "AI agent" demos are a five-minute magic trick. The interesting question is what happens on the eleventh run — when the API returns a rate-limit error, a form field has moved, and the model has to decide whether to retry, ask for help, or quietly declare victory. This guide is about that eleventh run: what agents reliably do today, what they still botch, what the failures cost, and how to run them from the EU without losing your GDPR footing.