Bryan Murphy Podcast Transcript
Bryan Murphy 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 Bryan Murphy. Bryan Murphy is the CEO of Smartling, the leading AI translation platform with $223 million in funding global brands like British Airways, DoorDash, Verizon and MasterCard use Smart Link’s AI to scale content across languages, delivering human quality translations 10 x faster than half the cost.
With a proven track record of scaling technology companies, Bryan brings over two decades of executive leadership experience in automotive, SaaS, e-commerce, and retail. His strategic vision and customer-centric approach have helped drive Smart Link’s, global expansion and product excellence.
Well, good afternoon Bryan. Welcome to the show.
Bryan Murphy: Great to see you, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I really appreciate it and you making the time today. We’re just an hour apart. You’re in the New York. Connecticut area today. I’m in Kansas City, so it makes it quite a bit easy. But Bryan, if you don’t mind, I’m gonna jump into your first question.
You came into Smartling with a deep background in e-commerce and tech, not language services, and saw a huge opportunity in translation and localization. What specific pain points did you identify in global content that convinced you that this was ripe for disruption?
Bryan Murphy: Sure. Yeah. I, I’ve been localizing e-commerce and software applications for the past 20 plus years in it.
It’s, I’ve always been frustrated by how slow, expensive, and time consuming it is for the teams involved. So if you’ve ever done it, you know what I’m talking about, or you, you download content, you put it into a spreadsheet, you email it to the translator, they email it back. There’re mistakes back and forth.
And then you get your engineers to reload that content back up into the website or whatever application you’re using. So it’s slow, expensive, and, and so we did it as little as possible. Right. And I knew that, and that was frustrating because we know how important localization is for. Conversion rates, engagement, revenue growth, all those sort of things.
So when we came across Smartling, I got really excited. It was a total game changer. I wish I’d known about it, I didn’t. Right. And that, that’s one of the problems that we needed to solve was go to market. But here was a, a SaaS company, a cloud native company that allowed customers to automate 99% of their translation six times faster than traditional.
And. At a fraction of the cost. So it’s, it’s been a total game changer for our customers and that’s one of the reasons why we’re growing so fast.
Brian Thomas: That’s amazing. Again, there’s always a problem out in the world that needs to be solved, and I’m glad you did come across this. I can only imagine the time and expense it took to do that manually.
I think we’ve all been there. I was a prior web developer way back in the day and definitely saw a need back then, so I really appreciate that. Brian Smartling emphasizes human quality translation powered by AI workflows, not AI replacing people. How do you strike the balance between machine automation and human review?
Brand voice fidelity? What gets lost if you lean too far one way.
Bryan Murphy: Yeah, that’s really the, that’s really the trick, right? So I like to say that good AI, right, is like magic and it’s easy to use. Like we all have that experience sit down and you start using GPT or, or perplexity for the first time. You’re like, wow, this is easy and it’s amazing to use, to build that experience is hard, right?
That’s why these companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build these, these experiences. What, what we do for our customers in order to. Make sure that they’ve got that brand voice that they’ve got. That high quality is we build each customer a custom trained engine, right? So we take their translation memory, we take their glossary, we take their style guide, tone of voice, et cetera, and we take all of that information and we use it to train these engines so that way.
When the initial translation comes out, it’s going to sound like that, that customer, so I’ll give you a great example. Both IBM and Apple are customers of ours, right? So they’re both tech companies, right? But they have, as you can, as, as soon as I say this, I think you’ll recognize that they have very different tone of voice.
So it used to be in the past that you would rely on the translator to look at a style guide and interpret how that was. Now we’re actually building that right into the AI engine so that whether we’re translating into French or Japanese or Korean, that. Tone of voice comes out appropriately, and by the way, appropriately for that country.
Right? So another nuance is Germans have a different tone of voice than Japanese or French, right? So you can imagine that. So we make sure we build all that in, and that’s one of the reasons why we’re able to build these, why we’re able to provide our customers with AI translation that delivers on-brand correct tone of voice by country.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. I really like that you highlighted something here. Good AI is like magic, and I think you and I both have seen good and bad AI and I agree with that, but what I really like about it is you, each customer gets their custom trained engine based on their brand, their sentiment, building that style guide right into it, and I think that’s amazing.
So thank you. And Brian working with Global Brands, for example, British Airways. Verizon. MasterCard means ensuring translation and localization at scale with reliability. How do you build a product and operations that guarantee both speed and brand safety when rolling out into dozens of markets simultaneously?
Bryan Murphy: We’re Smart Links in enterprise grade technology solution. We, we have. Thousands of enterprise global brands that rely on us to be part of their process, right? So 99% of 99%, as we talked about, is, is automated. Soup times important. We, we have 99.99% uptime. So we invest heavily in, in making sure that that redundancy’s there.
In fact, there’s been a number of instances with, as you remember, AWS went down, the northeast went, or the Easter Eastern seaboard went down a week or two ago. We remained up. If you remember when CrowdStrike. Had a problem. We actually, CrowdStrike’s actually a, a customer, we actually helped help. Them serve up communications during that period of time.
So we work hard to make sure that we’ve got the uptime that our customers rely on. We also invest heavily in data security and privacy, and that’s evidenced by our PCI SOC two HIPAA high Trusts, certifications. Our customers also value audit trails, so we have a lot of healthcare, a lot of financial services companies, so they require, so we, so audit trails are a big part of what we do, right?
So we just. Every time you change content, right, there’s an audit trail that links back to the prior version of that, and all of that’s then kind of capped off by a powerful language quality assurance and hallucination detection and mitigation solution on the back end. So as a matter of fact, because of all of that that I just described, we actually guarantee quality, which is unusual in our, in our industry.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome, and I’m glad you took a time to really unpack some of that, what you’re doing to ensure that reliability, the redundancy, you mentioned automation and uptime. You also invested in data security, auto ability. I think that’s important, but at the end of the day, it’s the quality assurance is big with your platform and I really appreciate you that sharing those insights.
Bryan Murphy: Yeah, that’s at the end of the day, that’s really key and we, there’s two ways we offer an AI translation, which is instant and very high quality. We guarantee that quality, if you require an extra step, that’s when we’ll we’ll bring a human into the loop for review. So that’s kind of like the build and the suspenders.
Brian Thomas: And that is important a lot of times for qa. So appreciate that. And the last question of the day, Brian, looking ahead maybe five, 10 years, how do you envision the translation localization industry evolving with ai? Will the role of human translator change dramatically? Or what should companies start preparing for now if they wanna stay ahead?
Bryan Murphy: Sure. We, so we view. We’re building translation as a service is the way to think about it. So we see translation, localization writ large as being an automated centralized utility that’s available to all functions within the organization, able to enable, once again that custom, that custom engine, that high quality on-brand translation easily and instantly.
So whether I’m in the marketing department, the, or, I’m a. Product manager or an engineer, learning and development, legal customer service, all of those functions will have, and by the way, all of their various. Brownfield tech stack, right, that you think about. So you’ve got CMS over marketing, marketing automation solutions like Eloqua, and then you’ve got PIM over in e-commerce, you’ve got CRM systems, et cetera, learning and development applications.
All these are brownfield applications that we integrate to natively with one centralized translation feature that has that custom trained engine and language quality assurance that I talked about. So if you can kind of picture that as your, in your mind as like this, this. Engine that you kind of plug, plug into the ethernet port, so to speak, of this engine enabling that translation of service.
That’s really where we are very rapidly evolving to. And so IT organizations, if I’m a CIO or a CTO of an organization, I should be thinking about that. That’s not something that’s been available in the past. Like that’s a new AI solution. And what we see a lot of right now, and I talk to a lot of C-suites around the world and everyone’s under pressure to.
Not only implement AI, but to show results from ai. And so translation is one of those places with this type of solution where once again, you plug it in and not only have you plugged in an AI translation solution, but you’re able to almost instantly show significant organizational. Results. So once again, kind of going back to they’re able to translate, our average customer as a result of implementing is able to translate three x more content for 60% less cost, six x faster.
Right. That’s like a slam dunk in the world of, uh, you know, you put that PowerPoint up, that slide up and talk about that deliverable in your organization. That’s a big deal.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Really appreciate that. And having that automated, centralized utility for all areas of the enterprise. You talked, you broke that out a little bit, like marketing department as an example, but again, easily and quickly.
Deployable, custom trained engine plug and play, ready to go. Shoring results, not hype, and about six times faster. So, I think that’s really amazing. Bryan, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Bryan Murphy: Great, Brian, I really appreciate talking with you.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Bryan Murphy Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
