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Leadership Reflections on

Successes, Challenges, And What’s Ahead

Twice a year, CSA Research asks its LSP CEO Council members a focused and timely question. Their responses provide strategic insight into how language industry leaders assess performance, navigate challenges, and adjust priorities in a changing market.

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Read CEO Perspectives by Year and Topic

CEO commentary appears in order of company revenue size.

Simon Yoxon-Grant

President, CEO LanguageLine Solutions

The linguist of the future will not be replaced by AI. With judgment at a premium, they will instead be elevated to a higher-trust role. The question isn't whether AI will transform language access. It already has. It's whether we'll let it hollow out what matters most or use it to amplify our humanity. This last year taught me something simple: the better machine language gets at precision an...

Mark Evenepoel

President, Board member Acolad EX Amplexor

Like in many industries, AI adoption, hype, and real use cases combined, lead to doomsday thinking. Although the language and content management services industry has always dealt with technological evolution and transformation, the pace and public visibility has dramatically increased. The role of the industry has fundamentally not changed. We are there to help our customers communicate and eng...

Bertrand Gstalder

CEO Acolad

A Year Focused on the Future 2025 marked a major milestone for us: a true operational transformation, driven by the large-scale integration of AI across our services through our Lia platform—interpreting, translation, and multimedia—along with the expansion of our Data Services. It was also the year we launched Lia Go, our self-service solution for translation, multimedia, agentic AI, and interp...

Matthew Taylor

CEO DA Languages

2025 was another strong year of growth in UK Interpreting. Ever more public bodies recognise the value that investment in Interpreting brings: preventing hospital re-admission, preventing re-offending, and ensuring justice is served. The final quarter of the year was affected by UK Government budget speculation. Now that clarity has been provided, better investment decisions can be made. It’s impe...

Alexander Ulichnowski

CEO Argos Multilingual

The AI Paradox: Why Automation Demands Stronger Market Ownership For enterprises scaling globally, AI has fundamentally changed how fast products and content can be localized. Translation, adaptation, and even market-specific copy can now be generated almost instantly. Yet many organizations are discovering an uncomfortable truth: while AI accelerates execution, it exposes a gap in market ownershi...

Pierrick Mathieu

Co-Founder, COO Powerling

AI s a Catalyst — Not a Substitute Artificial intelligence is a powerful accelerator for our industry. It enables faster go-to-market, more customized solutions, and the ability to manage content at a scale that was previously out of reach — often with lower costs and greater global consistency. AI also democratizes access to media and content, allowing organizations of all sizes to think and ope...

Konstantin Iosseliani

President, CEO Janus Worldwide

2025 was the first year when everyone in the language services industry truly felt the cold breath of AI. This effect was further amplified by the current geopolitical landscape, in particular, the slowdown in international trade driven by tariffs and sanctions. So what lies ahead for our industry in 2026, and what strategy should we follow? When thinking about this, I often recall a Chinese p...

Ludmila Golovine

President, CEO MasterWord

In the past year, many of us have watched AI automation move from “interesting” to being part of the operating landscape. We’ve also seen early market optimism give way to tougher questions about the responsible integration of AI in language services. In interpreting, that shift is happening in real time. Leaders are being asked to pilot speech-to-speech solutions while still protecting accuracy a...

Marina Ilari

CEO Terra Translations

As we look toward 2026, I expect to see an even more pronounced shift in how we define and measure localization success. Quality will continue moving beyond linguistic accuracy alone toward global audience impact, how localized content performs with real users, protects brand reputation, and supports broader business objectives across markets. At the same time, AI experimentation within our indu...

Chris Hodgson Castillo

CEO Mother Tongue

2025 was another big year in our industry, and one of rapid change and evolution. Mother Tongue sits at the more creative end of the market, and that change is as true for us as anyone. Things have changed so much in fact, that we now see ourselves serving an entirely new category: Creative Language Intelligence. This reflects the AI-powered shift in how we support our clients today, and how we...