Brand Stories

Koto and Tripadvisor reimagine travel branding through real stories and lived-in design

Published

2 weeks ago

July 7, 2025

For millions of travellers, Tripadvisor has long been a byword for trustworthy advice. It’s synonymous with real people, real reviews, and no glossing over the dodgy breakfasts or the wobbly pool tiles.

As the platform evolved from a review site to a full-fledged global trip planning and booking powerhouse, it needed a brand that could keep pace and turned to global creative studio Koto to redefine its identity for its next chapter.

The result is a warm, human-centred brand transformation that leans into what Tripadvisor has always done best: sharing authentic experiences, unfiltered and unapologetic.

Arthur Foliard, executive creative director at Koto, says: “As Tripadvisor is entering a new chapter of its growth, the brand had to meet that moment. That meant putting the heart of Tripadvisor – its global community of travellers – front and centre. We built the entire strategy and identity around real people: their words, their photos, their stories.”

At the core of this new identity is a focus on Tripadvisor’s most powerful asset: its enormous community of reviewers. Koto immersed itself in the ways people actually use Tripadvisor today, working closely with the company’s internal teams across brand and product.

They anchored the redesign around a simple yet potent truth: people want advice from other travellers who reflect their values and lived experiences. No generic stock images or algorithmic nonsense – just honest, relatable insight.

That principle set the tone for the entire project, driving not just the visual refresh but also Tripadvisor’s verbal identity. The voice is warmer, friendlier, and easier to connect with, flexing confidently between product and brand without losing its character.

Koto designed it to balance editorial clarity with the wisdom of its community, ensuring that the traveller’s voice never gets lost in corporate messaging. Giselle Childs, senior strategist at Koto, explains: “We wrote like a well-travelled friend: simple, warm, thoughtful, and fun in the right moments. At the same time, we had to leave room for the traveller voice to shine.”

Of course, you can’t talk about Tripadvisor without mentioning Ollie, the owl mascot that’s quietly watched over its brand for years, and he’s had a glow-up, too. Once ornamental and static, he’s now freed from his circular perch, becoming a more curious and dynamic companion whose gaze follows the traveller’s content.

“We freed Ollie from the circle and gave it more personality, more flexibility, more play,” Arthur says. “Now Ollie can peek, point, wink, and travel with you in a way it never could before.”

Tripadvisor’s signature green also received a thoughtful rethink. Originally inspired by “green means go”, it’s now warmer and more vibrant, complemented by new shades such as Trip Pine and Trip White to build depth, reassurance, and clarity.

A secondary palette, drawn directly from thousands of real traveller photographs, adds personality. Whether it’s the blush of a sunset, a splash of sea foam, or the deep blue of a city night, these hues are designed to feel personal and lived-in — a tribute to the platform’s true storytellers.

Tripadvisor’s new custom typeface, Trip Sans, takes inspiration from its iconic bubble rating system, echoing its circular forms to create a sense of cohesion and warmth. Graphic devices borrow from the world of travel ephemera – rounded corners, green dots, and postcard-like frames – to gently structure content without overwhelming it.

Crucially, photography remains the emotional heartbeat of the brand. Sourced exclusively from real user content, the imagery is unfiltered, narrative-led, and dynamic, giving people an honest sense of what they might actually experience. Koto even developed a preset suite to unify tone and texture across this rich, user-generated pool of photos, preserving a sense of place and story.

Motion adds an extra flourish, but never in a showy way. Ollie’s eyes subtly track content, interface elements glide with intent, and transitions are calm and measured. The overall impression is one of exploration and a kind of gentle, guided movement that mirrors the travel experience itself.

There’s a risk, with so many layers, from typography and motion to graphic elements and photography, that things could feel cluttered or overly designed. However, Arthur and the team kept their north star clear.

“We built the system with the traveller in mind, not the designer,” he says. That meant letting typography remain clean and editorial, allowing imagery to shine, and ensuring motion supports rather than distracts.

It’s a subtle but confident shift that made Tripadvisor’s brand feel more generous, more open, and crucially, more human. It shows that design systems don’t have to flatten or sanitise a brand’s personality, even at scale. Instead, they can amplify the quirks, stories, and wisdom of real people, which is exactly what Tripadvisor set out to champion when it first began 25 years ago.

Arthur sums it up neatly: “In a time when everything’s being optimised or AI-generated, Tripadvisor’s advantage is that it’s real. And we made sure the brand wears that proudly.”

It’s a lesson for other travel or platform brands wrestling with authenticity. You can incorporate AI tools, a slick UX, and a seamless booking flow, but if your brand voice feels robotic or disconnected, people will see right through it.

With Koto’s help, Tripadvisor has chosen to trust in the power of lived experience and to celebrate the beauty, humour, and occasional chaos of the road just as it comes. At the end of the day, the best trips are the ones you can’t fully predict, and that’s something no algorithm (no matter how clever) can ever truly replicate.

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Brand Stories

Congress is interested in expanding AI training for federal workers

Published

1 hour ago

July 18, 2025

Terry Gerton

Terry Gerton: Let’s start with kind of a big level-setting. As we talk about AI, from your perspective, what is sort of the current state of AI competency across the federal workforce?

John Pescatore: Well, I think it’s important for us to understand the current status of what is AI. There’s not even a good definition of what that is. Obviously, everybody’s using a lot of tools today to do internet searches with AI engines, and we hear about it in the press and politicians talk about it. It’s a very mature technology — it’s been around for over 20 years — but it’s really exploded here for a number of reasons. So it’s way overhyped. And if you think about the way bad guys try to fool us into falling for phishing attacks, they try to get a sense of urgency going — it’s got to move, you got to do something quickly — that’s sort of where we are with AI. So from the point of view of the state of competency, there’s not even a definition of what it means to be competent yet. So what we have to point out first is: What does it really mean when we talk about using AI, or buying AI, or protecting ourselves against AI? We’re still sort of in a definitional phase.

John Pescatore: In the federal government, probably two years ago, I think I did a briefing on Capitol Hill to the Senate lunchtime briefings we do to them on topics. So I’ve been sort of thinking about this for several years. SANS over that time period has put out three training courses focused on the key aspects of AI. So we’re starting to see the demand for that sort of training go up. So we know there’s a thirst to become competent. It’s only here very recently that you can even define what that means.

Terry Gerton: That’s a fair point. And AI is going to show up differently depending on the kind of work that an individual does in the federal government. But there is this new bill that’s been introduced in the House — the AI Training Extension Act of 2025. So to your last point, as there’s growing interest in training, what is this bill trying to accomplish?

John Pescatore: There had been previous draft bills that came out last year — maybe even 2024 — that were focused on the procurement of AI, and it had to do with training procurement officers and people involved in technology procurements, how to evaluate AI.

John Pescatore: This current draft legislation that just came out in June is aimed at broadening that to train IT people and end users and security people. That’s very key — the procurement side is important — but that wasn’t really focused on the real problems. When we look at it today — already in private industry, certainly in some spots in the federal government — there’s kind of three things we have to worry about with AI. One is bad guys using it against us. That gets a lot of press, and we spend a lot of time there. But the most important one is: How do we make sure if the mission side is rolling out use of AI that it’s done securely? That’s really the number one. And the final one is: How do we — security people and IT people — use AI to more efficiently do our jobs? In a time when it’s harder to hire new people — more harder than ever — how do we use AI tech tools to make our people more productive, to try to fill some of the gaps? But that first one — making sure we’re protecting our own mission and our company’s use of AI — is really where the most work and training needs to be done.

Terry Gerton: So what are the key aspects of that kind of training? What do people need to be focused on? What do we need to make sure that our federal employees have as basic AI skills?

John Pescatore: So it depends on the role of the person. So that’s how we sort of start our training out. We have one that’s a broad one for leaders and managers — what do they need to think about? So for example, governance of AI is very important. Who is in charge of deciding what data the AI engine ingests, and how is that data protected? A great example is Microsoft — this was early last year, over a year ago now — they had a security incident with their own use of AI, and Microsoft Azure Cloud led to a huge breach because they hadn’t thought through the governance of AI.

John Pescatore: So in that example, employees’ PCs — disk drives — were indexed into the AI engine. That included every one of their emails, their passwords. So it was not a failure of the technology. It was a failure of the governance and the definition of how it was to be used. So that’s the first one — governance. That’s the same in information security in general. We have to have governance in place before we can start coming up with policies, before we can implement controls to cause those policies to take place. So that’s number one.

John Pescatore: From the typical IT person’s point of view, who might be involved in an IT project, it’s understanding the basic concepts and what it really means. We tend to talk about AI as one blob. There’s many different types of AI — machine learning. A lot of what you’re seeing today is generational, but these queries and the ability to do fake pictures and voices. But there’s a lot of different uses of AI. And then the final thing after that is the cybersecurity people. There’s been AI in use in cybersecurity tools for really 20 years. It was called machine learning for a long time. Now we do have some options where security people can take advantage of AI tools to do some things — but not all that it’s claimed to be.

Terry Gerton: I’m speaking with John Pescatore. He’s the director of emerging security trends at the SANS Institute. Let’s think about how agencies would acquire this kind of training or do it themselves, as the General Services Administration is thinking about centralizing procurement. Should we think about the government buying a common training package for agencies? Should agencies think about specific training programs for particular skill sets or mission sets? What should they be thinking about as they begin to acquire training for their AI teams?

John Pescatore: I think the way the government’s gone about looking at cybersecurity training and IT training overall in general still holds. And it’s not to start by looking at the training — it’s to start looking at the roles. And that’s typically by defined job categories within the various frameworks, like the NICE framework and other government efforts that have that, where a role is defined and then what skills are needed for that role, and then how are those skills demonstrated and how are those skills acquired. So I might acquire those skills — maybe I worked 10 years in a field and I’ve never taken a training course, but I have those skills. Maybe I’m brand new, right out of college, I have a degree but I’ve never had any hands-on experience. I’m lacking some of those skills, or I may have others.

John Pescatore: So then you get to certification that says: How do we assess what skills the person does have? It’s not just a paper, resume exercise. And then what’s available to fill those skill gaps? And that’s where training comes in. So there might be a degree in computer science — might be able to fill some of it — but we know from many years of experience most computer science programs don’t necessarily teach people how to do things. They teach the concepts of how to talk about things. Then we might say for certain skills — operational skills — they need hands-on experience. That may involve training with lab-type hands-on environments. Others may be strictly concepts. So I think in AI we’ve seen definitely there’s a need for that concept-type training so that managers understand what this means, and similarly that people that are technical managers understand how to evaluate their own staff’s needs. And then there’s a lot of hands-on needs.

John Pescatore: We can look at the medical world, for example. What they saw over the years was, obviously, we need highly skilled doctors. But we also need people to operate MRI machines and CAT scan machines — and then understand the medical side of things, but also understand the technology side of things. Then we need people to evaluate what the technology is saying. And then finally, we feed that small number of experts. The same is true in the federal government for IT and IT security around.

Terry Gerton: What I hear you saying is there’s all kinds of different training. What an individual who’s preparing emails and PowerPoints needs in terms of AI training is different from someone who’s managing large databases or deploying cybersecurity. But through all of that, there is a focus on transparency and ethics. Where would you bring those two topics into the training planning structure?

John Pescatore: Well, in transparency and ethics, I would largely lump that under governance, because that’s what you have to think through when a program is going to start up and do something with AI — provide better health care to state and local tribal entities using AI tools to do things — all these things that many things have been talked about.

John Pescatore: That’s where you get into, from the start: Well now, how do we do this and protect any information that’s in there? How do we validate the output from a safety point of view? And then from an ethics point of view: How do we make sure the inputs to this result in ethical outputs? So we’ve learned that AI is very good at hallucinating. If AI says, “make something up,” another AI engine ingests that. And all of a sudden, all the AI engines think it’s true.

John Pescatore: So there’s safeguards that we’ve done from a safety point of — the old, I used to work for the Secret Service and we used to have people do bomb checks — make sure that we don’t have bombs around the properties. And you would take bomb training. And the old joke was: Read the manual first on how to defuse any bomb, and read it to the end, because it’ll say cut the blue wire after you cut the red wire. So it’s the same with AI. There’s some things — if you don’t think from end to end — quality and safety, then ethics and transparency are meaningless. But if you think about it from a procurement point of view — transparency on how do we know what’s going on on the inside of this thing? It says it’s using AI. What does that mean? We still need very definitional levels defined that have not yet been reached.

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Brand Stories

Artificial Intelligence in Asset and Wealth Management

Published

2 hours ago

July 18, 2025

Olivia Greer

Artificial intelligence (AI) has moved with lightning speed from a buzzword to a boardroom priority in the past three years. Asset managers and family wealth advisors have traveled a long way from their early experiments with ChatGPT. They’re now beginning to realize the potential of AI to enhance investment decisions, automate operations and deliver personalized client experiences. But AI opportunities come with unique risks, especially when it comes to data privacy and security, as well as regulatory and legal compliance in a fast moving and fast changing landscape.

Let’s break down the fundamentals of AI and explore some of the most critical risks, offering three primary guideposts for responsible AI adoption and risk management.

Key AI…

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Brand Stories

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Drones Market worth $2751.9

Published

3 hours ago

July 18, 2025

ABNewswire

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Drones Market

The AI in Drones Market is estimated to be USD 821.3 million in 2025 and projected to reach USD 2751.9 million by 2030 at a CAGR of 27.4% during the forecast period.
The report “AI in Drones Market [https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/artificial-intelligence-drones-market-43722301.html?utm_source=abnewswire.com&utm_medium=PaidPR&utm_campaign=artificialintelligenceindronesmarket] by Solution (Infrastructure, Software, Services), Function (Flight Operations, Maintenance, Ground Control, Asset Health, Simulation, Revenue Optimization), End User, Technology – Global Forecast to 2030″ The artificial intelligence (AI) in drones market is estimated to be USD 821.3 million in 2025. It is projected to reach USD 2751.9 million in 2030 with a CAGR of 27.4% during the forecast period. The AI in drones market is witnessing strong growth globally, fueled by the rising adoption of drones across the defense, commercial, and civil sectors. As drone applications expand from surveillance and logistics to agriculture and urban mobility, there is a growing demand for advanced AI that offers greater efficiency, endurance, and reliability. This market growth is further supported by increasing defense investments, supportive regulatory frameworks, and a surge in demand for autonomous aerial operations.

Download PDF Brochure @ https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=43722301 [https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=43722301&utm_source=abnewswire.com&utm_medium=PaidPR&utm_campaign=artificialintelligenceindronesmarket]

Browse 340 market data Tables and 50 Figures spread through 279 Pages and in-depth TOC on “AI in Drones Market”

View detailed Table of Content here – https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/artificial-intelligence-drones-market-43722301.html [https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/artificial-intelligence-drones-market-43722301.html?utm_source=abnewswire.com&utm_medium=PaidPR&utm_campaign=artificialintelligenceindronesmarket]

Image: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Images/artificial-intelligence-drones-market.webp [https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/artificial-intelligence-drones-market-43722301.html?utm_source=abnewswire.com&utm_medium=PaidPR&utm_campaign=artificialintelligenceindronesmarket]

By end user, the commercial segment is projected to account for the largest share during the forecast period.

By end user, the commercial segment is projected to account for the largest share of AI in Drones Industry [https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/artificial-intelligence-drones.asp?utm_source=abnewswire.com&utm_medium=PaidPR&utm_campaign=artificialintelligenceindronesmarket] during the forecast period. The segment’s growth is attributed to the increasing use of AI-powered drones, fueled by the increasing demand across industries like construction, agriculture, energy, infrastructure, and logistics. These industries are using drones for purposes, such as last-mile delivery, asset inspection, precision agriculture, and crop health monitoring. Additionally, AI enables predicting decision-making, real-time analytics, and object detection automatically through drones, making operations more efficient and lowering the cost of labor. With advancements in drone-as-a-service (DaaS) models and connectivity with enterprise software platforms, commercial clients can access high-end AI capabilities at a low initial upfront investment. Moreover, the increasing concerns for safety, compliance, and sustainability promote the adoption of AI-powered drones in business activities, thereby driving the growth of the commercial segment.

By function, the flight & mission operations segment is projected to account for the largest share during the forecast period.

By function, the flight & mission operations segment is projected to account for the largest share during the forecast period. Flight and mission operations represent the core of AI-driven drone functionalities, encompassing autonomous navigation, route optimization, obstacle avoidance, and swarm coordination. AI enables drones to dynamically adjust to evolving environments, weather conditions, or obstacles in real time, making safe and dependable mission accomplishments possible. In industries like e-commerce, defense, and disaster relief, the capability to automate and optimize the flight paths of drones is imperative for cost-efficient and timely operations. For example, delivery services employ AI to minimize route durations and enhance logistical efficiency, whereas emergency response operators use drones for search-and-rescue or reconnaissance in hostile environments. With expanding use cases and increasingly sophisticated AI models, the growth of the flight & mission operations segment is projected to continue as the most significant application area for the market.

North America is projected to account for the largest share during the forecast period.

North America is projected to lead the AI in drones market during the forecast period, driven by its strong defense infrastructure, heavy R&D expenditures, and the dominant presence of leading drone companies. Additionally, the increasing use of drones generates high demand for sophisticated propulsion systems ranging from internal combustion engines and gas turbines to electric and hybrid-electric propulsion units. The region is witnessing the growing use of drones in delivery services, agriculture, infrastructure inspection, and emergency services, all of which need reliable and efficient propulsion systems. Supporting regulations from the FAA and innovation clusters in the US and Canada have fostered a strong drone startup and AI solution provider ecosystem. Besides, the region’s emphasis on R&D, cybersecurity, and AI chip manufacturing accelerates the implementation of drones.

The AI in Drones Companies [https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/ResearchInsight/artificial-intelligence-drones-companies.asp?utm_source=abnewswire.com&utm_medium=PaidPR&utm_campaign=artificialintelligenceindronesmarket] includes DJI (China), DroneDeploy (US), Teledyne FLIR LLC (US), Skydio Inc. (US), ShieldAI (US), ideaForge Technology Ltd. (India), DAC.digital (Poland), Aerovironment, Inc (US), Pix4D SA (Switzerland), Draganfly (Canada), Dedrone (US), Percepto Ltd. (US), Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. (US), Honeywell International Inc. (US), and 3DSurvey (Slovenia).

About MarketsandMarkets Trademark

MarketsandMarkets Trademark has been recognized as one of America’s Best Management Consulting Firms by Forbes, as per their recent report.

MarketsandMarkets Trademark is a blue ocean alternative in growth consulting and program management, leveraging a man-machine offering to drive supernormal growth for progressive organizations in the B2B space. With the widest lens on emerging technologies, we are proficient in co-creating supernormal growth for clients across the globe.

Today, 80% of Fortune 2000 companies rely on MarketsandMarkets, and 90 of the top 100 companies in each sector trust us to accelerate their revenue growth. With a global clientele of over 13,000 organizations, we help businesses thrive in a disruptive ecosystem.

The B2B economy is witnessing the emergence of $25 trillion in new revenue streams that are replacing existing ones within this decade. We work with clients on growth programs, helping them monetize this $25 trillion opportunity through our service lines – TAM Expansion, Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy to Execution, Market Share Gain, Account Enablement, and Thought Leadership Marketing.

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