[GALA Valencia 2024] Soapbox Paulo, Jennifer Yin Wong

1) "Are LSPs doomed? How do we navigate in the changing industry without succumbing to the fear?" - Paulo Pereira Guimarães (Managing Director | Inside Language Solutions)

Are the LSPs doomed? Throughout all social media (especially LinkedIn) and industry conferences, we see discussions about a deadline for the LSPs. AI will end everything, and our business will no longer be needed. Is this correct? Does my company have an expiration date?

Let's talk about some truths about the technology and the market.

2) "LLM, the Multi-Thousand Dollar Solution for the Ten Dollar Problem" - Jennifer Yin Wong (Smartling)

Since the announcement of GPT, the need for AI incorporation into the localization process has expedited. The localization industry is taking major steps to incorporate AI technology into every step of the process. It’s been a year, and every company is asking itself, why is AI not part of the solution already? One of the core principles of AI Product Management is to ask the question, do you really need it? Can your problem not be solved with cheaper technology? Is this AI technology really bringing you the benefits that are worth all your R&D and model maintenance costs? Is the ability to say, we use AI or LLMs really worth it?

For example, we are looking at ways to use AI technology and LLMs to improve translations, but we constantly see that custom-trained models are outperforming AI solutions. We’re trying to provide quality better than something that’s been proven to be highly predictable and reliable. But we still get requests for using AI, because it’s the newest and latest technology. Can our numbers change your mind?

Do you really need this multi-thousand-dollar solution? Or do you just like saying “We use AI.”?

Host organization: Globalization and Localization Association