Andrew Thomas Podcast Transcript
Andrew Thomas joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
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Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Andrew Thomas. Andrew Thomas is Vice President of Marketing at Acclaro, where he oversees all aspects of marketing from brand strategy and positioning to storytelling and demand generation with more than 25 years in the localization and software industries.
Andrew brings deep technical expertise and a long-term view of how global content, translation, technology, and marketing have evolved and where they’re headed next. Having seen localization grow from one-off manual processes into sophisticated, highly automated ecosystems, Andrew is particularly passionate about helping organizations.
Understand and adopt modern localization strategies. His area of focus include translation, technology, linguistic ai, content, scalability, and the role of marketing and making complex systems accessible and valuable to real people.
Well, good afternoon, Andrew. Welcome to the show.
Andrew Thomas: Thanks for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. And making the time, your two hour time difference today, you’re in San Francisco, I’m in Kansas City. I really appreciate it. It’s such a beautiful day. So, I just love doing this. And Andrew, if you don’t mind, I’m gonna jump into your first question here, Andrew, as VP of Marketing at Acclaro, you sit at the intersection of marketing and customer success.
What does sustainable growth look like in today’s global localization market?
Andrew Thomas: It’s a really great question and it’s important for everybody who’s interested in this topic to think about whether you are asking that question as it relates to my company at Claro, or whether you’re asking about it related to the clients that we serve.
The answer is basically the same. Sustainable growth in localization isn’t just about. Translating more content. As you know, we’re in the middle of a massive content explosion thanks to ai, but it’s actually about delivering predictable results. We gain our client’s trust by consistently delivering not just the volume of content that they need, but the level of quality that they need that content to deliver.
It’s not always about having content that’s perfectly translated, but rather focusing on the bigger picture of what I like to call quality of outcome. Really understanding what they need that content to accomplish, and then consistently delivering that content in any particular language or regionalized variation that they need in order to achieve success.
Brian Thomas: 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 you says equals delivering quality and predictable results. And it’s really the, at the end of the day, the quality of outcome for the client.
And 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: 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. Then I ask 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 wanna do business with you at all. So, yeah that’s usually the, 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 that revenue from the rest of the world that executives care about.
Brian Thomas: 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 started out, you asked your clients two questions. You break down that revenue stream and then ask them, kind of really makes ’em 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 value today? And where is human expertise still non-negotiable?
Andrew Thomas: 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 gonna 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 gonna be a lot of companies that are gonna 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. 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 gonna get that correct.
So, accountability and 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 wanna leave up to just AI and automated processes.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I 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, and making sure that is correct. So again, appreciate you unpacking all that for us in 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: It’s a great question. It’s 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, 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 gonna 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.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I really appreciate that. A hundred percent 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 as you talked about right now, we’re probably gonna start to move away in the, the near future from the simple translation, as 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, 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 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: Thank you. Likewise. I enjoyed myself.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Andrew Thomas Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
