In 2025, Acolad celebrates its 30th anniversary, 30 years of helping brands develop across borders—and cultures. What an amazing journey full of success, challenges, and most of all human stories.

2025, also marks a pivotal moment: our industry is at a crossroads.

The coming years (and months, as the speed of change is impressive) won’t just be about scale or speed—it will be about relevance.

We are no longer in the translation or interpreting business. We are in the human understanding business, and our role is evolving rapidly, embracing the whole content journey.

AI has already commoditized standard translation. It’s fast, scalable, and constantly improving. That’s a fact. It pushes us to redefine our value. Our clients no longer need words translated—they need efficient multilingual experiences that resonate across cultures, channels, and formats.

My belief: The future belongs to “ecosystems”.

Daily, we experience the fast pace of transformation both in localization and interpreting.

At Acolad, we believe in Technology, our “Body.”

At Acolad we believe in Human at the core, our “Heart.”

From creating/labelling data, localizing with the right tone in all formats, interpreting with the power of AI and remote capacities while securing high-stakes conversations, ensuring strong linguistic validation in Life Sciences, building marketing campaigns that powerfully resonate and reach the right audiences and secure the right outcomes. etc.

Technology is everywhere. Human is everywhere.

Trust and service are foundations.

The essence of our future is in building the right ecosystem smartly blending Tech with Human, in a trusted environment.

This is our path - and has been for the past 2 years. Our platform, Lia, reflects this vision merging AI-driven translation, real-time interpreting, linguistic validation, and data services—designed to empower both clients and experts.

Let’s be honest: transition isn’t easy… for anyone. The pace is relentless and impacts are real. The ‘how’ is a shift.

However, we do believe that after 30 years of being forward thinking, open, and staying reliable, Acolad values – drive real progress with our clients, partners, and teams.

We must be bold enough to say translation alone is no longer enough (and we know it never really was) and brave enough to lead our clients—beyond words, into meaning and measuring impact. The future is Bold and Exciting if we choose to embrace it now!

After the uncertainties of 2023, 2024 has been marked for Acolad by operationalization.

First and foremost, 2024 was the birth of our LIA platform, allowing us to bring our AI solutions to life for our customers in an industrial and secure manner.

2024 is also the acceleration of our interpreting activities in a booming market, particularly around our Acolad Live platform and remote interpreting services, as well as the introduction of AI Interpreting.

It is the constant adjustment of our operating model in a post-localization context. This is a real challenge for all operators given the massive transformation and opportunity that AI has brought to the global content space.

Finally, 2024 is the launch of our new Acolad brand platform, echoing the completion of our integration plan over the past few years, giving rise to "One Acolad."

Great achievements to start 2025, the year of our 30th anniversary!

The picture is not all bright, however.

In a very tense economic and political context for our clients and for ourselves, and the belief, by some, that with AI, localization would become "almost free", the pressure on budgets has been very strong in the translation field. The opportunities brought by new services have not been enough to compensate for a major evolution in our industry. This is certainly just the beginning with the acceleration around AI, and it requires constant self-challenge.

For Acolad, 2025 will be marked by acceleration around LIA, particularly APE/AQE models, the further development of Acolad Live as we accelerate interpreting growth, data services expansion, multimedia, and linguistic validation in our Life Sciences specialized practice. These changes - this pivot I might say - however impose significant transformations and technological investments that will undoubtedly continue to disrupt the industry and likely penalize players who do not have the human or financial means to build or buy.

It is to be hoped, however, that these transformations do not lose sight of the goals of successful localization, the real value of the services provided, and the ethics around delivery to market. We are excited to continue to enable value for our clients, help them accelerate their AI journey and bring measurable results to their organizations in a time of continued disruption and innovation.

I wish the best to the industry.

As we proceed steadily and quickly into an era of AI-augmented global content solutions, moving away from traditional language-centric structures and strategies, we start to see early results of the efforts, trials, and developments of the past months. While absolute truths are mere marketing illusions, and both technology and mindsets are evolving as we speak, some facts are becoming clear, presenting both challenges and opportunities.

Acolad Labs' recent analysis confirms that while Neural Machine Translation (NMT) still surpasses Large Language Models (LLMs) in quality, performance, and cost-efficiency, the integration of AI into our offerings is revolutionizing the content value chain. On the other hand, the integration of AI into our services and workflows is becoming increasingly tangible. We are witnessing this through the introduction of new offerings, such as:
- AI Voice Over
- QA for regulatory compliance
- Automated Post-Editing (APE)
- Adaptive Quality Evaluation (AQE)
- Translation Memory (TM) improvements

But while it seems promising, it's crucial to discern real outcomes from the AI buzz, requiring close monitoring and evaluation. It is still early to have an exact picture of just what benefits can be drawn from it. It is through progressive and concrete experiments with our customers that we implement the right scenario for them.

Moreover, the industry’s direction will heavily depend on buyers' perspectives and expectations. Will they increasingly push for automated solutions, or will they maintain a focus on high quality with “human at the core” approaches? Regardless of all of this, something is undeniable: Content and Language Services Providers, with their vendors, need to adapt once more, with continuous improvement and “tech addiction.” This time, however, adaptability is not enough: a true global footprint and the resources, partnerships, and capacity to deliver the technology are a must-have.

As the digital revolution has pushed companies over the last 20 years to adapt their business model and innovate, GenAI will push us into more new directions and at a faster pace. Between the hype of this "new" thing, the "unknown" of potential industry reshaping and expected "regulations" for an Ethical AI, many questions will continue. Questions from Customers, Shareholders and Employees all drive the need for applied innovation.

How do we envision that @Acolad? For sure the traditional way of doing business will be disrupted, and as an innovative organization disruption is not new. But it is faster than ever before. We are acting pragmatically with our Customers to ensure the right value application versus pure noise.

We see LLMs pushing LSPs to provide new tools/usages to support content creation and globalization. This in turn drives supply chain and service evolution.

As a global content provider, we foresee the emergence of new types of content enhanced by GenAI, and for which efficiency will be increasingly important as well as new services. However, we do believe that human in the loop will not disappear. It will just change. The cultural, linguistic, and technological elements of global content release will further merge and it will become about those who can embrace all three to provide client value.

This transformation will need a new set of skills (e.g prompt engineering) raising the question of empowering our people for this new role and challenging organizational structure (e.g Prompt Center of Excellence vs Data team)? Talent and Buyer personas will also evolve.