Podcast Host (3:26)

Thank you, I really appreciate that. I love it when experts like you are helping our audience understand really what you do for your customers. But back to that sustainable growth, which he says equals delivering quality and predictable results. And it's really that at the end of the day, the quality achievement outcome for the client, no matter where that market is. And I really do appreciate you providing those insights for us. Andrew, localization has evolved far beyond translation. How do you help businesses think about localization as a strategic growth lever rather than a downstream cost center?

Andrew Thomas (4:00)

Yeah, honestly, I start off with two questions. I ask them, number one, what's the breakdown of their revenue streams domestic versus everywhere else? And quite honestly, for most companies, if they're global at all, everywhere else is much larger even percentage wise than their domestic revenue. And then I asked them, when's the last time that they've ever purchased a product in their own personal lives that wasn't in their language. And quite honestly, that quickly clarifies for them just how important localization is. And it becomes rapidly evident at that point that it's not just the cost of doing business, but rather it's the difference between customers deciding whether or not they want to do business with you at all. And so, yeah, that's usually the shortcut to that conversation. We also spend quite a bit of time working with our clients who oftentimes are at the departmental level within those companies and are treated as a cost center, honestly coaching them and helping them explain that to their upper management to make it clear to their upper management just how valuable localization is in driving all of that revenue from rest of world that executives care about.

Podcast Host (5:15)

Thank you, I appreciate that. And obviously a big part of this is showing that value of localization to your clients. But I liked how you start out, you ask your clients two questions, you break down that revenue stream and then ask them, kind of really makes them think is when's the last time they purchased a product that is not in their language. And I like how you phrase that because it does make you stop and think about that. So I appreciate that. And Andrew, AI and automation are reshaping language services. Where do you see AI creating the most of value today? And where is human expertise still non negotiable.

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Andrew Thomas (6:19)

yeah, this is the big debate in our industry right now. Quite honestly, you cannot deny that AI is helping companies scale the amount of content that they're translating into various languages, or frankly generating from scratch into various languages. So scale is where I think AI is producing the most value. In the next couple of years, it's also going to transition increasingly into automating more processes as AI becomes increasingly agentic. But where you cannot sacrifice human expertise comes in number one, accountability. So I think there's going to be a lot of companies that are going to be experimenting with AI that frankly might fall into some problems if they just let the AI run rampant without any kind of human oversight. And then also cultural nuance. When you think about AI, it really is fundamentally applied statistics. It only knows whatever it was originally trained on. And yes, it can continually be updated with new information, but it's always looking backwards in the sense that it's only ever generating content from what it's been fed in the past and rearranging that content into new patterns. So if the world were to change overnight, it cannot quickly adapt the way that you or I could, because we understand that the context has fundamentally shifted. I'll give you a very quick example. Covid most recent major impact in the world that nobody could have predicted prior to Covid. If you were to search, if you were to use AI to translate content and it came across the word mask, it would assume that you were talking about a beauty product, a facial mask of some kind of. It would not understand that when Covid happened, you were actually talking about a mask to protect yourself from germs in the air. And so fundamentally, overnight, it was producing translations that were no longer relevant, and it's not to be blamed for that. It was only as good as the content that had been trained on. When those kinds of fundamental shifts happen, if you don't have a human involved that understands the cultural nuances and how the world changes overnight, at times the AI is not going to get that correct. So, accountability, cultural nuance. And then last but not least, if you're in a regulated industry such as medical, finance, legal, there's fundamentally aspects of some of the content that you have to Translate in those industries that cannot at all be imperfect. They have to be exactly correct. Because frankly, people's lives or liberty are at stake. Right. And so you need to ensure that not only the right professional, but somebody who actually understands both the language and the content reviews it to ensure that it is correct. That's not something you want to leave up to just AI and automated processes.

Podcast Host (9:14)

Thank you. Appreciate that. Scaling is really where AI is powerful. You talked about that producing probably the most value right now, both the creativity and producing that volume of content. AI is certainly powerful, we all agree on that. But as you talked about limited on the content that is trained on and has access to current or past. Again, you highlighted a few things I think is important in this is that accountability, cultural nuance and that industry specific information and making sure that is correct. So again, appreciate you unpacking all that for us and our audience. Andrew, last question of the day. As we look ahead to the future. How do you see the localization industry evolving over the next five, 10 years? And what capabilities will companies need to compete globally with confidence?

Andrew Thomas (10:01)

Yeah, it's a great question.

Podcast Host (10:02)

It's.

Andrew Thomas (10:02)

Our industry is definitely being disrupted by AI right now, just like a lot of industries out there. I think over the next several years, companies like ours will be moving rapidly away from simple translation and focusing more and more on what I would call content intelligence and transformation. Right. We're no longer just taking words from one language and turning them into other languages. Now, thanks to multimodal AI, we might be transforming words into video or audio into text or any number of languages, any number of outputs. Right? So this kind of multimodal approach is dramatically impacting how we approach managing translation projects and also managing kind of the volume of work that our clients need us to support. So that's one fundamental shift. Another shift is that because translation is becoming essentially a feature that's being embedded in lots of the common tools that we use today. Thanks again to AI. It's less about that and it's more about consulting these companies and like I said, partnering with them on quality of outcome. It's less about just getting content from one language to another and much more about ensuring that content is actually delivering both what the customers that the recipients want and what the company needs for that content to perform. These days, content is actually doing the vast majority of communication with your customers. It's not salespeople, it's not, you know, people in your support departments. It's literally content. That's what people are turning to first. And so you really have to be focused on that quality of outcome as a company. And so I think our industry is going to be making that shift fundamentally, largely off of the back of being able to scale on top of AI, as long as we have the right people in the mix to ensure that the quality and the accuracy is there for that outcome.

Podcast Host (12:08)

Thank you. Really appreciate that. 100%. Agree with you. I think every industry, I know every industry is being disrupted by AI right now. But your prediction, if you kind of look at as you talked about right now, we're probably going to start to move away in the near future from the simple translations you talked about to content intelligence, which I thought was interesting. And then translation obviously is now becoming a feature and it's embedded in everything we do and use today, thanks to AI. But at the end of the day, and the message I took away is quality of outcome for both seller and the consumer. And I think that's important, that messaging is right. So I appreciate that. And Andrew, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.

Andrew Thomas (12:49)

Thank you. Likewise, enjoyed myself.

Podcast Host (12:52)

Bye for now.

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