Not long ago, moving abroad meant opening endless tabs on your laptop. Everything, from bureaucracy to finance, climate and social life, needed to be carefully researched. That hasn’t changed in the last five years — the need for research is still there. What’s changed is how much more efficient that research has become. Despite being, to some degree, anti-Artificial Intelligence, I have to admit it’s been genuinely helpful with a few things:
Understanding bureaucracy
When I moved to Portugal in 2018, I had to translate long Portuguese websites paragraph by paragraph on DeepL; Google Translate wasn’t very good at the time. More often than not, I ended up asking a Portuguese native speaker for help — and I knew very few back then. Two years ago, when I moved into a new flat, I translated the rental contract using AI and had it explain the clauses to me. When I later ran the contract by my lawyer, he confirmed the exact same legal reading of the Portuguese text.
That said, AI isn’t always current on more serious matters including immigration rules, laws and recent regulatory changes. For anything with real legal weight, I still consult a lawyer or fall back on old-fashioned research.
Job searches
For most people, moving abroad comes with job hunting. Whilst it’s hard everywhere, job searching in an unfamiliar country can send anxiety through the roof.
What AI has been genuinely useful for is tailoring CVs to the expectations of employers in a specific country.
It’s also good at mapping the job market: explaining what types of contracts exist and outlining the basics of local labor law.
Flat hunting
When I was searching for my first apartment in Lisbon back in 2018, there was very little information about which neighborhoods were good and which were best avoided — Lisbon wasn’t nearly as popular then as it is now. What was online warned me off places I ended up finding perfectly pleasant, like Intendente and Anjos, which had a rough reputation in the early 2000s but had improved considerably by the time I arrived in 2018. It also steered me toward Olivais, which I personally found deadly boring. Now, it’s far easier to get a real comparison of neighborhoods, pros and cons, drawn from both Portuguese and English sources.
Needless to say, AI draws its material from the Internet and the Internet can’t tell you how you’ll feel in a particular part of town. For that, you still have to go there yourself.
AI also has clear limits. It cannot:
Replace local knowledge
I’ve seen people use AI in some strange ways — mistakenly treating it as a tool with sensibility. It doesn’t have any. Certain kinds of knowledge only accumulate through shared, lived experience.
Take politeness. The Portuguese appreciate it when you’re almost old-fashioned in your formality — think Victorian levels of politeness, in both language and manner. Brazilians, on the other hand, equate politeness with warmth: you’re polite because you’re friendly, not because you speak in a literary register. That distinction is the product of eight years living in Portugal — no website ever told me I needed to be extra warm with Brazilians and a touch more formal, linguistically, with the Portuguese. It’s a conclusion drawn from lived experience, not something you can look up.
So, don’t use AI to explain socializing or human interaction to you. It won’t get it right.
Predict your feelings
A friend of mine once asked AI how painful a certain plastic surgery procedure would be. She’d also watched endless influencer videos of people describing their recovery as a piece of cake the day after. AI, drawing on the same sources, made the pain sound just as tolerable. In reality, the pain was unbearable and it wasn’t because she has a low pain tolerance.
We later found out that many articles on the subject, often written by the surgeons themselves, downplay the side effects. Influencers, for their part, want to project confidence in their choices and have every incentive to lean into whatever gets clicks and views, whether true or not.
Which is to say: AI won’t tell you how you’ll cope with the darkness of a Scandinavian winter or whether your rhythm of life will actually suit southern Europe.
AI has become an excellent assistant for moving abroad. It saves an enormous amount of time and effort and it’s good at organizing facts and plans. What it can’t do is replace human judgment. That’s still something we do better for ourselves.
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See more about artificial intelligence here in Dispatches’ archives.
Read more from Sarah here.
Sarah Nagaty has a PhD in cultural studies, She’s lived in Portugal for six years.
As a student of cultural studies, Sarah is drawn to what connects people from different backgrounds to new cultures and places, how they relate to their new surroundings and what kind of activities they could engage with in their new hometowns.
