Embracing AI: How Partnerships are Driving Language and Content Success

While AI offers immense potential, organizations often face hurdles in implementing and scaling AI technologies. These challenges include:

Cost: The upfront investment in AI tools and infrastructure can be substantial.

Expertise: Building internal AI capabilities often requires specialized skills that may not be readily available.

Complexity: Integrating AI into existing workflows can be complex and time-consuming.

Security Concerns: Some businesses worry about the potential security risks associated with public AI platforms, especially regarding sensitive data.

Adam Blair, VP Sales at DeepL - which has now partnered with Acolad to advance AI language services - used the example of increasing willingness to embrace machine translation to address these challenges.

He said: “More and more companies are considering machine translation as the first or one of the first considerations when they look at their translation strategy. And secondly, [there’s] more and more demand for deploying machine translation in a compliant way across the entire enterprise.”

Strategic partnerships are emerging as a critical solution to overcoming the challenges we mentioned above. By partnering with companies that specialize in AI development, data integration, or language services, businesses can:

Tap into specialized expertise: Partners bring deep knowledge and experience in AI technologies, accelerating the implementation process.

Reduce costs: Sharing the investment and leveraging economies of scale can significantly lower the financial burden of AI adoption.

Streamline integration: Partners can facilitate seamless integration with existing systems and workflows, minimizing disruption.

Ensure security and compliance: Reputable partners prioritize data security and adhere to strict compliance standards.

SnapLogic provides innovative integration platforms that enable businesses to connect their data and applications more efficiently, and we’ve been helping clients together since November 2023.

Dominic Wellington, from SnapLogic, explained how their software existed to solve the tricky dilemma of integrating complex legacy processes and systems that many businesses rely on.

To take the integration one step even further, our partnership with SnapLogic means that we can seamlessly build translation workflows into those integrations.

“Snaplogic is graphical, it lets you drag and drop the building blocks of your business process on screen to build that integration database,” he said. “And the partnership with Acolad lets us drag another widget into that flow. And while I'm moving that from here to there, I'm also going to translate this as I go, and it's just done.”

Cisco, as one of the world’s largest communications businesses, faces significant content management and localization challenges.

Jane Faraola, Senior Program Manager within Cisco’s collaboration team, described how even with a small internal team, they can manage content volumes of up to 90 million words per quarter with the help of partnerships - localizing in up to 50 languages and managing about 150 products.

When it comes to AI, she explained how the business set some AI guardrails, but is now looking to use AI to leverage even greater automation - especially where it can yield positive returns in cost efficiency, and shorter turnaround times while maintaining accuracy and quality thresholds.

For example, content translation is managed through partnerships with three different language service providers, including Acolad.

Cisco ran trials around Generative AI translation to evaluate different methods of translating content, using traditional machine translation, generative AI, and post-editing through humans and AI.

They discovered that, for now, neural machine translation - or anything with a human post-edit - is still outperforming generative AI LLM translation.

“AI in the loop method of translation actually did not outperform our machine translation, conditions at sufficient quality and cost levels to justify a transition. But the qualifier there is yet because, you know, this technology is moving fast. So there may be a time in the very near future where, AI will take over, that that, post edit.”

Jane’s example shows the importance of evaluating new technologies and making the most of your partners’ expertise to implement those partnerships that can really deliver value.