The Top 5 Ways AI is Already Impacting Globalization

It’s been hard to cut through the buzz surrounding AI ever since OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst on the scene back in 2022.

With global thought leaders and industry experts all hailing the arrival of AI technology as a paradigm shift, businesses and organizations worldwide are coming under increasing pressure to adopt AI wherever they can.

But how do we cut through the hype and noise that surrounds AI? And what are the practical examples where AI can already be effectively implemented?

To discover exactly this, we invited a panel of experts to discuss AI’s Top 5 Applications to Globalization. We heard insights from Florian Faes, Managing Director at leading localization industry publication Slator, David Liu, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Gen AI at software automation experts SnapLogic, Julien Leblanc, Head of South Europe at sales enablement platform Highspot, and Acolad CRO Gráinne Maycock.

The fascinating discussion touched on a wide variety of areas where AI is already tangibly impacting daily operations - from scaling up content production to building in compliance with complex regulatory frameworks - while keeping in mind the vital role that human oversight and creativity still play.

Here’s a look at 5 key areas and how AI is already changing the game:

AI Content Creation

One of the most immediately apparent benefits of AI has been its capacity to rapidly upscale content production. An AI can help you research and write content faster than ever before - when it used to be difficult to create content at scale. But one of the truly revolutionary aspects is how it can also be used to review its own output, says Florian.

Practically speaking, this kind of automation is helping to improve AI content quality and enables humans to increase their own expertise. Secondly, this allows content to be increasingly multimodal - it’s now easier to build more audio and video content, and more of that content is multilingual because Large Language Models (LLM) can work across languages.

This is increasingly allowing businesses to hyper-personalize their content. Marketing campaigns, regulatory explainer videos and other similar content can all be tailored to smaller audiences. “We see a huge shift, for example, campaigns that would have taken teams six weeks to create are taking maybe six hours,” adds Gráinne.

Increasingly, content creation workflows are becoming less linear. Organizations are trying to take the best of all the technologies and tools that are available and looking at partnerships to see how they can build additional expertise into their organization, workflows, and therefore content.

AI Voices, Chatbots and Interpreting

Beyond written content, AI is quickly revolutionizing multimedia, interpreting, and integrated chatbots too.

The increasing viability of direct speech-to-speech machine translation, along with better models and hardware to cut latency means AI interpreting is improving all the time. And, as Florian pointed out, it’s especially game-changing for low-resource languages where it can be difficult to find translators and interpreters. 

One great example of successful AI interpreting was a recent life sciences product launch where attendees could listen live in their own language by using an app on their own smartphones. 

AI is also making a big difference with chatbots - and as with a lot of AI implementation, use cases are unlocking other applied use cases. David shared how SnapLogic implemented SnapGPT, a tool to use prompts to create an integration that connects Highspot to Salesforce, to avoid the need for users to code.

As well as unlocking that sales enablement content in Salesforce, it meant that a team of German developers could use the tool in their own language and create an integration that would work across all languages. 

AI voices are also proving revolutionary in creating multimedia and video content. One of the traditional challenges for businesses wishing to create video content, especially in multiple languages, can be the high cost of entry. More so when considering studio expenses or the availability of voice actors. 

One of the very first AI services launched by Acolad was to address exactly this issue, with multilingual AI voice-over helping to reduce the cost of creating quality multimedia content that can be efficiently created in multiple languages.

AI and Regulatory Compliance

As the EU’s recent approval of its landmark AI Act shows, the regulatory landscape surrounding AI is developing quickly - and so businesses need to be ready to adapt and build-in processes to guarantee compliance and data governance.

While, understandably, still a very risk-averse industry, life sciences organizations are moving towards a more open-minded approach to looking at how to combine keeping risk low while also using the optimization that AI can provide.

Gráinne: “With the experimentation and the practical applications, the proof of concepts, we’ve done, we’re proving to the life science space that there are many low-risk applications that actually have a higher quality output than humans, and can still be validated. So I think we’ll see more and more to come.”

AI, Elearning and Education

With the benefits of AI adoption becoming clearer to leaders and C-suite executives, there is increasing pressure within organizations to adopt AI tools. But how can they empower employees to make the most of AI tools, and even overcome internal resistance from those reluctant to take advantage? 

One key to this, says Julien, is making the most of the capacity of AI itself to help localize learning materials into whatever language your employees are most comfortable in. Tools can help training become an ongoing discipline, facilitated by technology.

Secondly, to reduce resistance to change, it really helps to stress the concrete benefits for the teams themselves. For sales teams that could mean using Gen AI to quickly summarize meetings, analyze what went well, what could be better and write a draft of a follow-up email. That gives salespeople more time to spend with prospects and clients. It could also involve the use of AI video summarizing to digest content in a more time-effective way.

An effective example of how to encourage AI adoption is the Acolad AI Ambassador program. Building an internal cross-team group of AI-enthusiastic experts meant they could share their AI knowledge within their own business units, identify and improve workflows, and generally take away the fear of embracing AI change.

Alongside this, using AI itself to create a simple training course for every employee can help increase adoption and acceptance. “We’re lucky enough to have a training division who created packages of AI training, available for our internal teams, but also for our clients,” says Gráinne.

The Role of Human Creativity in an AI World

While current generative AI tools often imply a human in the loop to prompt and give feedback, that is not always the case. There is a lot of genuine concern about the impact that AI will have on society, particularly when it comes to the impact on jobs.

David pointed out that content generation and translation are likely to be heavily impacted as AI models improve, but there probably needs to be regulatory compliance to ensure AI is developed in a way where you still want a human in the loop. 

However, Julien considers that a lot of jobs may be improved by what generative AI will add because the tools will empower content creators to be even more knowledgeable, productive, and efficient in whatever they use their content for.

As Gráinne points out, it’s often the guiding human expertise that can make the difference: “Human and creativity will always be combined, it’s not suitable for every use case, and we will never get rid of humans or have complete AI adoption, but I think the mix of where AI really impacts cost, quality, productivity, we’re seeing the acceptance levels change as well.”

Discover more insights from this fascinating discussion - watch the webinar recording.