BUSINESS

“The new PRD are the evals,” Xavi Amatriain, Expedia Group’s first chief AI and data officer, told the VB Transform 2026 audience last week in Menlo Park. “So basically, you encode what you want the product to do through your evals, which might include red teaming evals and all kinds of other things, which already have a bunch of security requirements. So, you already embed that into the PRD and the product design document before you even start coding.”He pushed it further. “With AI-assisted or AI-generated code, that’s gonna be the future. It’s like all your thinking is gonna go into the evals.”Amatriain served as VP of AI and Compute Enablement at Google across the platforms powering Gemini and Google Search before his December 2025 appointment at Expedia. He’s mentored talent who went on to found Perplexity and Scale AI. VentureBeat’s VB Pulse research on the evaluation gap reinforced the stakes. Sixty-six percent of the 157 enterprises surveyed already permit some production deployment without human review or are building toward it within the next 12 months, yet only 5% fully trust the automated evaluations that would make that decision. Half have shipped an agent that passed internal evals but then failed with a real customer.Don’t let guardrails get in the way of feedback“The more guardrails and artificial business rules and sort of rules that you put into the system, the worse off,” Amatriain said. “Not only because they’re brittle, but also because they actually mess up with the feedback loop. You are actually biasing the user and the feedback you get from the user, and then you’re learning that in the wrong way.” He called guardrails “a necessary evil” and said the goal is to minimize their impact over time.Not everyone at Transform agreed. Other speakers argued during the event that the highest-risk actions still demand very firm guardrails.Expedia governs AI through three layers instead. Principles come first, communicated broadly. “I like to encode at a very high level how I expect decisions to be made, because in a large organization you’re gonna have a lot of distributed decision making,” Amatriain said. “And sometimes, if you’re lucky enough, those principles might be embedded in your culture. But most of the time, my experience has been they’re not.” The processes and tools that enforce them follow. “Principles look really nice on a picture on some wall, but you need to then give them teeth,” he said. Automation sits on top of both.In practice, this plays out through what Expedia calls agent release toll gates, checkpoints calibrated to risk. “Governance needs to correlate to the risk,” Amatriain said. “And if you have something that is low risk, you don’t need too much governance to get in the way. But if there’s a lot of risk, then you need more governance. That can be encoded.” The toll gates tie evaluation rounds, red teaming, and security review to each agent’s risk level, and the checks shift from recommended to required as the stakes climb. Specialized agents over monolithic intelligence“Even when I was at Google, I was like, I don’t believe in AGI as sort of like a singleton and a unified sort of like single model,” Amatriain told the audience. “I think it’s much better to think of it as composition, sort of like having specialized agents that are very good at some task and then composing the system out of those specialized agents.”Expedia’s architecture starts at the component level. Tools compose into skills, skills assemble into sub-agents, and sub-agents get orchestrated into the full agentic system. “You need to have those principles that are unified that talk about things like what is the tone that we’re using, how are we addressing the user, how are we passing context, memory,” he said. “All of that needs to be thoroughly designed.” He framed this as a systemic design problem. “It’s not about the model, it’s not about a specific solution, it’s about how you’re designing the system.”Amatriain argued that scoping each agent narrowly also makes the system easier to secure, since teams can evaluate and lock down individual agents in isolation before composing them.When the user must keep the final clickTravel pricing changes in real time, flight availability shifts minute to minute, and hotel reviews routinely contradict what suppliers claim. Amatriain described a system that blends retrieval-augmented generation with direct API tool calls, choosing the approach based on latency. “If the user asks you a question like, how much does a four star hotel usually cost in Chicago in July, you don’t expect the agent to take two minutes to answer that question,” he said. “You expect an immediate answer because that answer can be cached and it doesn’t need real-time information.” A pet-friendly four-star near Lake Michigan with a pool might justify a 30-second reasoning window.“The supplier might be saying, yeah, we have a great swimming pool, but then we also have the reviews from the travelers and we actually see there’s two reviews that say the swimming pool was not great or was not open after 6 p.m.,” Amatriain explained. A generic chatbot, he added, would only surface what a supplier self-reports, while Expedia cross-references against its own review corpus.“We don’t want the agent to book the hotel or to buy you a plane ticket for you,” Amatriain said. “That’s something that the user has to have the agency. And the agent can recommend, can suggest, can discuss with you, but you’re gonna have to hit that click. And that’s non-negotiable.” That constraint, he argued, is also a security decision. “Once you establish those design principles, you also don’t need the guardrail because otherwise you’re gonna have to put all those guardrails in after the fact.”The next attackers will be other AI systems“Security needs to be a principle that is shifted as left as possible and as part of the design itself,” Amatriain said in response to an audience question. “And usually when you need a guardrail is because you’ve not thought about it early on.”A second audience member pressed for lessons learned from production. Amatriain described a feedback loop where monitoring signals flow back into the eval suite. “You can almost automate the whole cycle,” he said. “But having that whole feedback loop from real signals, from your operating AI system, all the way into being reported and fixed as quickly as possible is going to become essential.”Amatriain’s toll gates are a bet that governance calibrated to risk can stay ahead of that feedback loop. VentureBeat’s separate June Pulse survey on agent security, drawn from 107 enterprises, shows how thin that margin is. More than half, 54 percent, have already had an agent security incident or near-miss. Fifty-nine percent plan to adopt, add, or replace agent security tooling within 12 months, and 29% plan to move this quarter. Incident rates climb with organization size, reaching 63% among enterprises with more than 1,000 employees versus 49% for companies with 101 to 1,000. And sandbox isolation, the one post-breach control that limits damage, drops from 35% adoption at the smaller companies to just 20 percent at the largest.Amatriain warned that threats will increasingly come from other AI systems. “You’re gonna get threats coming not only from humans but also from other external agentic systems that are really powerful, and they’re gonna be poking at everything you’re doing. And as soon as you detect something, it’s not only about the detection, but the time to fix becomes essential here.”

The video game giant previously blamed “market conditions” for price hikes.

FIFA’s World Cup 2030 rights auction will test which platform can turn record demand, Spanish-language growth and off-peak U.S. hours into profit.

Airbnb is expanding beyond vacation rentals with new ways to book hotels, transportation, activities and travel services all in one place. The latest updates include boutique hotel bookings, car rentals, airport transfers, grocery delivery and thousands of new Airbnb Experiences. Here’s a look at the biggest new Airbnb perks and what to know before you book your next trip.

Airbnb Adds New Perks

Here are some of the biggest additions:

Boutique hotels: You can now book thousands of independent hotels through Airbnb in 20 cities, with a price-match guarantee and limited-time promotional Airbnb credits when you book with eligible hotel properties.

Travel add-ons: Arrange grocery delivery, airport transfers and luggage storage directly through the app.

Car rentals: Rent a car through Airbnb and earn a promotional credit on your first booking. More local experiences: Choose from 3,000+ new tours and activities led by local experts. One example of the platform’s new offerings is a tour of Notre Dame in Paris led by an architect involved with the Paris cathedral’s restoration (from $95 per guest).

Hotel-style services: Book personal chefs, massages, fitness trainers, catering and more — even if you’re not staying in an Airbnb.

Final Thoughts

Airbnb’s new features may simplify travel planning, but they don’t change the risks that can come with staying in a vacation rental. Clark Howard says every Airbnb guest should follow his Golden Rule for Vacation Rentals: Film both your check-in and your check-out. A slow, time-stamped video of each room documenting any existing damage — and the condition you left it in — can provide valuable evidence if a host later files an unwarranted damage claim. It’s a simple step that could save you hundreds of dollars and a major headache after your vacation.
The post New Airbnb Perks To Know Before Your Next Trip appeared first on Clark Howard.

Without revealing any details about the actual agreement from President Trump on potential presidential restrictions, his White House is urging its acceptance.

The president is expected to impose fresh import taxes this week, as levies from February are only able to remain in effect for 150 days.

The filing comes after months of upheaval that included a controversial market-making agreement, an internal investigation into its MOVE token launch, a Binance ban tied to its market maker and a last-ditch pivot from Ethereum scaling to cross-border payments.

I have seen this painful chapter before in Intel’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) story: cutting 40% of your global workforce, halting factories in Germany and Poland, shutting down your automotive chip division, flattening management from 12 layers to six.None of those is comfortable. But it’s what radical restructuring looks like when a company is fighting for its industrial life. On July 20, Intel Corporation (INTC) added another chapter.The company confirmed it is initiating a new round of layoffs targeting its Data Center and AI Group, DCAI, as part of its broader strategy to become “a more focused and efficient company,” according to an Intel spokesperson cited by Seeking Alpha. The number of affected employees has not been disclosed. Intel indicated the cuts will not alter product commitments or roadmaps.Intel Corporation (INTC) closed July 20 at $97.06, up 2.13% on the session, according to Yahoo Finance. The stock is up 163.04% year to date and 320.17% over the past year. It also ranks as the sixth-best performer in S&P 500 Year-to-Date returns, according to a Slickcharts report, above AMD.Wall Street, for now, is reading the pain as progress. Q2 earnings arrive July 23.Also Read: Intel Corporation Latest News and StoriesWhy Intel is cutting the one division that is actually growingHere is what makes this layoff announcement genuinely counterintuitive. DCAI is Intel’s strongest-performing segment right now. Revenue for the group reached $5.1 billion in Q1 2026, up 22% year over year, with operating margins expanding to 30.5% and generating $1.5 billion in operating income, according to Intel’s Q1 earnings release.So why cut a winning division?The answer is competitive reality. AMD’s EPYC processors are taking data center contracts with superior performance-per-watt efficiency. ARM architecture, championed by Ampere and increasingly adopted by major cloud providers, is redefining server efficiency standards. More Intel News and Stories:Top-rated analyst sets a jaw-dropping Intel stock price targetJim Cramer surprises investors with his favorite stock pickCramer’s Intel bet rests on one unproven numberAnd hyperscalers, including Amazon with Graviton and Trainium, Google with Axion and TPU, and Microsoft with Cobalt and Maia, are building custom in-house silicon that bypasses merchant chips entirely.Intel cannot simply grow its way to safety. It needs to lower its cost structure enough to price Xeon 6 aggressively against AMD, slow ARM’s expansion, and make the economic case that off-the-shelf Intel hardware is still cheaper than custom silicon. That requires eliminating overhead, even in a growing business.”As part of our broader strategy to become a more focused and efficient company, our Data Center Group is aligning its organization to ensure it has the right roles and skills in place to position the business for long-term success,” an Intel spokesperson told Seeking Alpha.Intel’s CEO Lip-Bu Tan’s painful medicineThe DCAI layoffs are part of a broader transformation that CEO Lip-Bu Tan has driven since taking over from Pat Gelsinger in March 2025. Tan initially committed to reducing global headcount by 15%, according to Intel’s July 2025 report. Related: Intel and Google deepen AI ties for chip designMore than 5,000 U.S.-based Intel employees have been let go so far, primarily across California, Oregon, Arizona, and Texas, according to Seeking Alpha reporting. Intel’s total global headcount has been reduced to approximately 81,000.The structural changes extend well beyond headcount. Tan halted major manufacturing expansions in Germany and Poland. He eliminated Intel’s automotive chip division, according to OregonLive.com. He dismantled the 12-layer management hierarchy Zinsner described at the BofA conference in June, collapsing it to approximately six layers while reducing the number of vice presidents from 400 to 200, according to a Semicon Alpha report.Tan also brought in chip designers with Apple and Google backgrounds to reshape product development culture, according to TheStreet.The pattern is consistent across every decision: eliminate legacy overhead, concentrate resources on the highest-return opportunities, and move faster than a large organization historically could. The DCAI cuts are this same playbook applied to a division that grew quickly enough to carry inefficiencies that now need to be stripped out before the competitive environment tightens further.

More than 5,000 U.S.-based Intel employees have been let go so far, primarily across California, Oregon, Arizona, and Texas.CHENG Yu-chen / AFP via Getty Images

What July 23 earnings need to show for the turnaround thesis to holdThe layoff announcement arrives three days before Intel’s Q2 2026 earnings report. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Intel’s (INTC) Q2 2026 earnings is $0.21 per share on revenue of $14.42 billion. This represents a significant turnaround in the bottom line, reflecting an expected 310% year-over-year increase in earnings per share.Intel guided Q2 revenue of $13.8 billion to $14.8 billion with non-GAAP EPS of $0.20 when it reported Q1 results in April.Also Read: Intel’s stock split history (& prospects) explainedIn TheStreet’s previous coverage, Wedbush analyst Matt Bryson noted in a recent client note that revenue and margins are set to beat expectations by a wide margin, with a similar constructive setup likely carrying into Q3, and maintained a neutral rating with a $95 price target.The Q1 bar was already high. According to Intel’s April earnings release, revenue of $13.6 billion was up 7% year over year, non-GAAP EPS of $0.29 dramatically beat the $0.01 consensus estimate, and shares jumped 23.6% the following session. CEO Tan described a “sixth consecutive quarter of revenue above our expectations.”The DCAI specifically needs to show continued momentum in Xeon 6 adoption, with early readthrough from the Google Cloud, Nvidia DGX Rubin NVL8, and SambaNova partnerships beginning to appear in customer revenue.If Q2 delivers a seventh consecutive beat, the layoff announcement this will look like exactly what Tan intends it to be: the necessary discipline that makes a recovery durable rather than temporary.Related: Does Intel pay dividends? History & future prospects explained

The Financial Times reported Tuesday Trump is preparing to impose new levies to replace the 10% global tariffs that expire Friday.

The Iran war isn’t causing your energy bill to soar. Blame Wall Street for that.