Looking back at 2020, we were happy to have had our technology and processes in place to deal with extreme security or safety issues and instantly enable fully remote operations. The accelerated digital transformation came with many business opportunities, which allowed us to stay on course or even exceed expectations within many of the industries we serve. We are also proud we managed to pull off a major M&A transaction resulting in the merge of Amplexor with Acolad, handled exclusively in digital form. While we never compromised on our people’s safety, our main challenge was obviously the lack of physical human interaction both internally and within the market. Internal communication and marketing were crucial domains addressed involving a lot of innovation and experimentation. We expect this to continue in 2021, while we are optimistic the pandemic factor will eventually fade. I also guess we will not be the only ones, searching for the right and new balance between office and home office presence, going forward.

The new office, engaging with the market and integration, would best summarize the last 12 months. Imagining a post covid world has been a topic for us as it was for many organizations. Acolad and Amplexor have been actively planning and preparing for a more flexible work environment going forward. Unfortunately, we’re not really in the post covid era yet, but we gradually adapt our policies and offices globally to cater for more flexibility while striving not to compromise on teamwork, collaboration, and communication. Reaching and engaging effectively with target audiences digitally has been the key business driver for our customers and our own sales and marketing organization. We’ve seen a huge momentum for our solutions addressing these needs in language & content services as well as in our content management and digital experience technology offering. After the closing of the acquisition of Amplexor by Acolad end of last year, a lot of preparation went into the integration of the 2 companies in a combined organization. Now, seven months into 2021, we are happy to see that the management team has successfully executed the ambitious integration plan and the organization smoothly continues its transition preparing for further exciting developments.

Dealing with continuous pandemic waves and integration projects, 2021 was almost indistinguishable from 2020. However, the outlook and underlying fundamentals seem notably different. We experienced strong demand for many of our service offerings which put pressure on our ability to increase delivery capacity, recruit, and source teams. Changes to the labor market became more pronounced. The ability to work from home has moved fully from nice to have perk to prerequisite. We needed to reinvent our value proposition as an employer and partner. This was easier said than done in an industry that is in the midst of a fundamental transformation. In our case it meant reassessing, strengthening, and continuously improving our HR organization and related processes. Equally importantly, it required the executive team to refocus on the corporate strategy and vision, enabling them to inspire and communicate with our internal and external stakeholders throughout this trying time. Our mission, of course, remains to help our customers reach and engage with their target audiences effectively regardless of locale or language. Going forward reaching our own target markets and personas in an ever-digitalizing context with ongoing restricted physical contact, keeps our sales and marketing organization on their toes. We nevertheless are optimistic that we are incorporating some human warmth in these exchanges and hope more in-person interactions will get back into play over the course of this new year. We really miss meeting our peers and customers in person. Our master plan continues to include further M&A activity, looking for further diversification and growth in terms of scope and size. We’ve actively been involved in many M&A projects and hope to announce some closed deals soon. We look forward to continuously transforming ourselves and adapting to change while keeping our team aligned and focused on our true mission.

Back to business as usual? Probably yes, if we consider that we stick to our master plan and adapt to the changes that occur on the way. Geopolitical and economic uncertainty combined with tangible inflation nevertheless pose challenges.
The battle for talent continues and adds pressure. We therefore continue to reinvent ourselves as an employer, adapting our corporate policies and culture. We are redefining the “workplace” and restructuring our office landscape accordingly. The workplace is more virtual than ever, while office facilities focus on learning, collaboration, and communication. In this shifting landscape, agility and trust are side by side as the most valuable assets for our organization.
Despite the current challenging economic environment, many indicators are pointing to an optimistic outlook for the localization industry. The rise in demand for our services that we saw end of last year continues with significant differences across geographies and industries. We see more and more customers that partner with us, recognizing us as a strategic enabler to their business. Technology enabled services as well as services around technology see the fastest growth. Connectivity, Machine Translation, and Content Management Systems remain the key focus topics. While we saw a slowdown in Interpreting demand during the Covid era, growth picks up strongly in Europe, North America, and Asia.
The recent acquisition of Ubiqus boosts this growth as it adds new services and capabilities.
While our sales organization is happy to be back out there, our digital marketing operations get up to speed creating impact and engagement with our markets. Our marketing team has also successfully rebranded most of our companies to Acolad, except for Ubiqus.
Business as usual thus means continuously transforming ourselves and adapting to change while keeping an aligned team focusing on our true mission.

The year 2022 has ended and represents a major milestone for the Acolad group. We’ve reached a stage where most of the work has been done in terms of aligning the organization and its processes according to our post-integration plan. Although we obviously never lost the focus on the customer, the teams are now better equipped than ever to excel in selling and delivering quality services. We’ve also significantly progressed on harmonizing our technology platform and tackled key functionality of our roadmap in the area of connectivity, shifting from fragmentation to continuity, as well as AI automation. The AI and MT teams have benefitted from the merge with Ubiqus. Besides the aspects of tech innovation, this drives a lot of change in terms of human-machine interaction and synergies. While we saw many industries and geographies grow our business, the impact of inflation and geopolitical instability caused some segments to slow down as well. In this challenging environment, many of our customers have been looking for stronger partnerships and our involvement in streamlining localization and content management processes. These organizations have largely switched from just buying the cheapest possible to getting the best value for money. Engagement models and Service Level Agreements have gotten more complex with increased KPI reporting requirements. A key trend has also been the increased attention to our ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) framework and policies as clients integrate us into their ecosystem. On the Human Resources front the battle for talent continued and mobilized more internal and external recruiters. Our office landscape has gradually been adapted and our teams have been finding a renewed balance in terms of physical presence. Reconciling increasingly senior employees as well as Gen Z interests keeps HR leaders on their toes, the objective still being to provide agile workplaces and facilities that cater for learning, collaboration, and communication. The sales organization has enjoyed being back out there, meeting customers and prospects, as well as attending physical events and conferences. The legal and marketing team has in the meantime successfully rebranded most of our companies to Acolad and has its digital marketing operations up and running across all our market audiences. More than ever adapting to change while keeping an aligned team focusing on our true mission.

Many of us, within the industry, have been wondering whether and how the industry is growing and what the impact of generative AI (GenAI) will be going forward.

We see differences in terms of growth across geographies and industries just as we’ve always seen in the past. The continued digitalization and constant increase in content volumes drive the demand for content transformation and localization services. The different content (text, speech, or video) and service types also grow at different rates. Automation of processing and localization tasks make the services more affordable offsetting part of the growth in terms of value.

Automation and the use of AI or Machine Learning are not new to our industry. We’ve gathered a lot of experience using Machine Learning and Language Models to automate tasks or assist our employees to execute tasks. Besides Machine Translation we’ve used AI to assess and transform content as well as to select the right human resource to perform tasks. While we continue to improve the use of technology, we keep identifying opportunities for automation allowing humans to focus on what really matters.

So, generative AI and its Large Language Models is a technology we understand and can relatively easily adopt as an industry. It is an opportunity for us to support our customers with additional services. We help our customers understand the concepts and use cases, beyond the public hype. I view it more as an evolution than a disruption for the industry.

This of course poses challenges as well as we need to adapt our skills, organizations, and business models. We, nevertheless, still have a lot on our roadmaps to improve today’s operations. So, the biggest challenge of all in my opinion is doing so while preparing for the future.

The Post-Localization Era or AI disruption of the industry. For many, the language services industry seems to be disrupted by AI, whereas it is merely, admittedly, an important phase in the evolution of the language and content management space. I guess a big difference is that content, language, and of course AI are now boardroom as well as general-public topics. Localization or translation of content has historically been handled by a support function within organizations with generally little visibility to lines of business or management. The focus of these outsourced tasks was cost, quality, and capacity. The industry’s response was process automation and optimization.

Still, in the localization era, organizations understood that they could connect better and more with their target audiences (customers, citizens, etc.) by localizing their content. Content grew to be a corporate asset and localization a means to create more value. The industry got exposed to lines of business and became more familiar or integrated within customer business processes or use cases.

So, what does AI change? It does indeed allow us to further automate tasks and thus drive down costs. Most importantly, it enables us to do more with content and to generate or transform content in many ways. Managing content still won’t be everyone’s core business, and organizations continue to need the help of technology and service providers. The industry’s historic revenue drivers, content volume combined with unit of work price, are, of course, impacted. A trend where volume growth gets offset by lower prices is not new but accelerating.

We can nevertheless expect the content and language industry players to transform their business models and content processing platforms to be even more robust, integrating all available AI/GenAI tools as they become available. The added value lies in the orchestration of fit-for-purpose processes to deliver the right content at the right time and in the appropriate format. This orchestration includes technology and human intervention, which is required to secure proper content governance.

In conclusion, the industry has the DNA, resources, and competence to meet the challenges of content management in the Post-Localization Era. We will continue to leverage human expertise and technology specializing in customer-centric use cases.

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 engage effectively with their target audiences. Content is more strategic than ever in the processes that allow our customers to achieve their objectives. In our digitalized world trusted, verified, and compliant content in a secure environment across languages and content types is vital.
AI and technology allow us to do more with less human intervention. What must change is the applied business model. Price and cost were basically derived from the time a human spent on the work to be performed. Technology was mostly part of the work order or company overhead. Going forward, Technology is at the heart of the service and a main or important cost driver. Customer self-service functionality emerges as well as customers wanting to give AI driven tool access to users across the organization. This leads to very different business and pricing models, comparable to mainstream software subscription and license models combined with human activities, consulting, and system integration fees.
Finally, this has a major impact on how the industry sells its added value and the competencies and skills of all their staff. So, a lot of light at the end of the tunnel.