Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Hello.
[00:00:04] Speaker B: Welcome to Localization Today, where we explore how language, technology and community converge to unlock ideas for everyone everywhere. I'm Eddie Arrieta, CEO here at Multilingual Media. Today we are talking about the Localization triathlon, a new way of framing the work of our industry. Just as athletes must master swim, cycling and running, localization professionals must balance three equally essential forces.
AI for speed and scale, automation for efficiency and flow, and humans for creativity and cultural nuance. To explore this, I'm joined by Anna Albinson, CEO of Gridly. With deep experience in digital transformation, SaaS and international business development, Anna has led growth and innovation on a global scale. At Gridly, she champions collaboration between people and technology, carrying forward the same winning spirit that earned her multiple Swedish championship titles in table tennis. Anna, welcome and thank you for being here. I want to learn your secret table tennis techniques. I want to beat everyone in my circle so they don't know what came to them. That's what I want.
How are you?
[00:01:24] Speaker A: Thank you. And thank you for that introduction. You know, my experience in table tennis, it's a few years ago, but of course I can learn you some tips and tricks. Them.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you very much. And I just really appreciate the effort that it takes to master any of these skills. I remember being beaten in China by 5 year olds and I didn't understand why. I didn't understand what was happening.
[00:01:47] Speaker A: No. And that's an amazing nation when it comes to table tennis. But actually Sweden is catching up now. We have a superstar in Sweden, so catching up and also playing with the Chinese on the highest level, so we're not far behind.
[00:02:03] Speaker B: I will take a look and I do love some table tennis, some ping pong, as we say in Colombia.
But thank you once again for doing this, for jumping into the conversation.
You are new to the industry, one would say, but very mature in so many different fronts. Could you share with us your professional journey? What led you to become the CEO of Gridly? And thank you so much for doing this again.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: Yeah, thank you. Yeah. As you said, I'm actually new to localization. So coming in as my first position running a company and being CEO might sound a little bit strange, but my background comes from a different kind of SaaS company. So I've been in the SaaS industry for many, many years.
I've been focusing on sales, marketing and business development, so the commercial side within those companies, so. So bringing that experience into Gridly can hopefully help Gridly grow even more than it has done in the past. And I can see of course, you know, since I've been scaling SaaS companies before, I can for sure see the challenge you have when you are growing. Also a cloud based service. Right.
Sometimes you think it's too easy to scale a cloud based service into a new market but. But you don't consider the effort needed in localization to have your digital product really perform in another market. So I've lived with the challenges for a long period of time and now finally I can be part of solving those working with localization. So that's my main background from SaaS companies and on the commercial side of businesses.
[00:03:43] Speaker B: And Anna, of course, for those that might be unfamiliar, could you tell us what the story behind the name Gridley is?
[00:03:51] Speaker A: Yeah, actually that is an amazing name the founders of the company came up with.
So Gridly is all about the grid. You could say that we really love Excel, we love spreadsheets and that is also what the UI looks like when you are working within gridly.
So we started with like a CMS and if you look into that it's very grid based and we think that that is a very user friendly, friendly ui. You understand how the product works, you can see the structure, you get a very good overview when it's organized like a grid.
So that's the name Gridly. So I'm really, you know, kudos to the guys founding the company that came up with that amazing name for gridly because that is exactly what it is. Localization in a grid that can do so much more than an Excel sheet or a Google spreadsheet.
[00:04:42] Speaker B: That's a really interesting way of putting it. I do love a table.
I can say I do love a table. And sometimes when I ask, especially I mean a third world country, one would put it that way. And really what that means is the technology is available, just the usage of it is different. And even using cloud tables to tables that are on the cloud is very strange for some companies here to do. So it's very interesting that you talk about tables and Excel and probably that's why you take that approach of the triathlon.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: Right.
[00:05:21] Speaker B: So you describe localization as a triathlon. So that's of course you have grids within the grid. I guess. So you'll have these three components of AI, automation and humans. Can you tell us more about that? What inspired these framing and how it works?
[00:05:37] Speaker A: Yeah, and that mean I come from an outside in perspective looking into localization, looking into our platform and for me it's very clear that it is all about automations, AI and humans of Course also doing the analogy of sports is very close to me. I've been playing a lot of table tennis, but also a lot of other sports. And I can easily see that to be able to perform as is best, to really, you know, exceed expectations and to really perform on a high level, you need different kind of skills. But you don't need them in silos. You need them to work together to make sure that you get the best results needed. So looking into this specific topic and how I see it in the world of localization, of course you need AI for speed and scale. I mean everyone is talking about AI. Everyone would like to include AI in the localization process today.
I mean, everyone is working on it. I don't know how many that are successful at this point, but there is a lot of things going on and a lot of companies that are running experiments and launching different kind of features. So AI for speed and scale and then of course you need the automation for efficiency and for flow, to make sure that content like fast flow seamlessly during the process, that you have less friction, fewer mistakes, and that you can build up pipelines that enables humans and AI to actually work together.
And looking into the humans, I think humans still have a really important role to play in this process.
But I think that there need to be some updates to the profiles working within this area. I mean, humans is still needing for proofreading, for creativity, for cultural fit. I mean, everyone that's had worked with LLMs and AI translations, for instance, within localization knows that. I mean, it's not that easy. It's a complex process. It's still pretty mature. I would say there is still a lot of mistakes. The quality is not high enough. And I think that is due to, you know, that the. It's due to the context. You need to provide the right context for the AI to be able to deliver high quality. And I know that many companies are struggling there right now, but for me the most important role for the humans going forward is to be the like AI friendly linguistic orchestrator, you know, the one running this. We need someone that understands these areas that you know, are linguistic, that know language, that knows the process, but they can move into the new world, that can move in to become like tech friendly, that can use AI at its best, take the best out of tech and humans together. So we are talking about, and there is a lot of resistance, I would say in the business into AI sometimes at least when you talk about translators, but I think the one that can really transform into the new world, there is a huge demand, but a very low supply. So that is a, that is a really need in the market. So to summarize this up, I think, you know, as I said, you need AI for speed and for scale and for efficiency. You need automations for efficiency and flow. And then you need the humans to kind of orchestra this so it becomes like one process and not three silent processes.
[00:08:59] Speaker B: That's, that's a very, very, a very nice way to put it. And it feels also that it is, it is pushing talent in, into a place where it needs to either innovate or be or find something else to, to. To do. There might be a place for human translation the old way. Kind of like in, like what happens in, in Japan, right, where you have these shops that do things that wouldn't otherwise exist because it's such a manual job that a machine does it like a million times faster. But because it has a tradition, then that's where it's value it's at.
[00:09:37] Speaker A: Yeah, and I think that, yeah, and I mean the, the translator is the one who's working with the language that has the deep knowledge. There is definitely a role to play for them. I mean, I represent a tech company, so that is everything that we provide a platform. But I know that our customers, they would like to have the competence of those that can handle both the language side of things and then kind of the tech process orchestration kind of things. Everyone would like to have that. But what I see in the market is that there is a lack of companies that can actually provide that today. There are a few, but. But I think there is a big need out there for humans that can be part of the transition into the new era.
[00:10:19] Speaker B: Yeah, it's very interesting. In this podcast we've talked a little bit about that in terms of course of the evolution of talent and what that talent really needs to be paying attention into.
We are excited to have this conversation. Those that are listening to this or those that are watching it over YouTube, we thank you for your presence and your continued listenership and viewership.
These disciplines that you mentioned, automation, artificial intelligence and this human element of it, they have to work together. What strategies help teams ad gridly transition smoothly between those disciplines.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that I can think of both that you need to make sure that you build connected workflows. As I mentioned, it cannot be like silos. You need to design workflows that connect AI, automations and humans. If I look into gridly, for instance, so within gridly you have like one single source of truth.
Where like AI generated translations or AI generated content work together with automation rules and we have humans that can edit, live together.
This is not in like separate systems, separate spreadsheets. Everything is in one single platform.
So that means that you know, you don't get these separated workflows, you need to combine them and you need to have them work together. And that is also the background of Gridly comes from the CMS side. So we had it was a CMS until early this year when we actually added both CAT and TMS functionality into the platform. That's also behind. You know, everyone wants to work in the same place. I mean who needs more tools or new want to work in different kind of tools to handle the same kind of process. So I think that is really important too make sure that all of these three areas are connected and combined in the same kind of workflows. So that is one important thing. And then if I should mention one more, I would come back to the role around orchestration. I mean to help people shift from being doers to orchestrate or run operations.
I mean this mindset, to change the mindset, that is a huge thing. I mean the teams that embrace AI, they will be the ones that are really successful. So if I should mention two things on how to, I mean handle this challenge, it would be to combine workflows and then make sure that you have someone. And for now and for the coming years, I'm sure that that is a human to run the orchestration and to set up everything up to be the prompt master, to be the one, the superstar in these three combination of different things. You need to have a really good localization that is future proofed.
[00:13:19] Speaker B: This is a very exciting times, I have to say. And of course I've heard in this space so many takes that seem to align on the fundamentals. And it's very interesting to see how different frameworks are evolving. Of course that evolution probably also aligned with some commercial goals would take you into the different sectors.
We know that Gridly started in the gaming industry.
You've expanded into SaaS, FinTech, EdTech.
What unique challenges have you faced along the way?
[00:13:56] Speaker A: Yeah, so Gridly was founded of gamers for gamers. So have been running localization process for the world's leading gaming companies now for a few years. So and that has been a success, truly. But what we also can see is there is a huge need for localization outside of the gaming sector. And that is of course driven by globalization and it's driven by localization that you need to Localize your cloud based product when you are growing and when you're getting into new markets. I told you about in the beginning that I can really feel the pain of that. So, so I see the need and we. The.
The way I see it is that within the gaming industry they have really high expectations on what you can accomplish with your localization. The reason for that is that you are selling an experience to the gamer, right? So the only thing really you need to have the gamer feel something, react on something.
You need to have a really good experience and that sets really high demands on localization. You really need to be really professional in that process to be able to scale a game into different kind of markets. Other industries like fintech and edtech for instance, mainly fintech might not have that high need for, you know, the experience that you have in the digital solution. It might be a little bit more rational, which actually makes the localization process a little bit more easy. So for. From Gridly's perspective, it's like we have.
Our product is sometimes a little bit too advanced for other industries because they don't need all the features and functions that we have built into our platform. So from our side, it is a lot about making sure to make it simple for them to. I mean to make sure that we only show the features that they need. Within Gridly, you can do almost anything or we can customize almost anything for our customers because it's so flexible. And that is a strength. When we work with the gaming companies, when we now are working with a lot of industries that can actually become a little bit of a weakness because all industries don't want to be able to do everything when it comes to localization. In that process they want an easy to use ui. They might want different kind of features to be able to handle their specific process. But what we can see also too is that we still work a lot with the gaming industry. We have 70% of our customers within gaming. About 30% outside of gaming is that the ones are that outside of the gaming industry they are almost 100% inbound. So they found fine gridly. They see that gridly can be of use for them and then we start working with them. So we are still very focused. We have a lot of gamers within our company. We are still very big in the gaming sector, but now we see that other industries find gridly. Try Gridley and like Gridley. But there is some adjustments we need to make to make sure that they get the same good experience that our gaming companies get when they Use gridly for localization.
[00:16:58] Speaker B: And that's very, very exciting. And of course I have now ideas that I will share with your team about gaming. Definitely one of the verticals that we really like, multilingual. For those that are listening, if you haven't seen our most recent issue, the June issue focus on gaming and what's in a cover and that sort of topics we did this year we visited the Game Quality Forum in Lisbon. So very excited to see the evolution from gridly and many transferable lessons from what you've been doing there. And you've mentioned it's challenging because it's kind of like a different grid. You could say, let's put it that way, but you need to transfer the spirit of that that provided such a great experience in these new verticals.
What do you, what do you, what are, what do you think are the main lessons that you could say you, you transferred from that exercise?
[00:17:53] Speaker A: Yeah, I would say. And I had, you know, when we have explored this area, I think I've had interviews with more than 30 companies on C level that are outside of the gaming industry to find out what kind of challenges do they face, what do they need to run localization in a more professional way? What do they expect from a platform if they're going to invest in a platform for localization?
And my insight sites is that, I mean they have the same kind of process. The challenge is exactly the same. They would like to localize text, imagery, audio, they would like to have one source of truth, they would like to have control of the content. They would like to have somewhere for people to collaborate around this content.
So the workflow and the stream and the need, I would say is exactly the same as within gaming. But then it's like the processes are different when it comes to how you work and the need that you have. What I've also seen in some industries is that they are a little bit unmature maybe when it comes to localization. Moving into this area for the first time within gaming you always have like really superstar professionals handling the localization part of it. They are so used to it. So from our side, it's also sometimes like go to market challenge that we really need to also be able to talk and explain what Gridley can do with a target group that might not be the true experts within this field that might be doing this for the first time.
So there will be another kind of onboarding process or education to make parts of these targets group to also understand the features and functions within gridlay and how they can use it to make sure that their process become more smooth, that they will have the faster time to market that everyone would have and that they will have a digital product that perform better because they have been localizing it in a professional way. So there are similarities but also some differences.
So but if you look into gridly a few years from now, I think that the percentage of customers outside of gaming will probably increase a little bit because the demand will is really high.
[00:20:10] Speaker B: That's fantastic news that that requires a lot of humans to be doing exactly what you're mentioning those humans should be doing. And if you allow me to read between the lines of what you're saying, and I read that at the high level there is confidence that this needs to happen.
If you are globalizing, whether whatever it is that you do, you do intrinsically and almost kind of like intuitively understand, you need to localize even if the word localize is not yet in your head. Right?
[00:20:44] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
[00:20:45] Speaker B: And it seems that then the discussion is how is the increased adoption going to happen, how is the grid going to be filled? Right.
And of course you are mentioning the gaming great adopter because of the almost imminent need of the gaming industry to thrive.
Is that what you see? And is that what drives that demand that you are talking about? I definitely read that when you're talking.
[00:21:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I would say that that is definitely part of it. But what I also can see is that there is some difference. You know, if you have a C level conversation within a global company, everyone understands the pain of bringing product, the digital product into new markets and that there might be go to market challenges and that you will have to work with the product. You. Everyone doesn't know that the word for that is localization or that there are platforms around that can solve this. So the solution might not be obvious for everyone, but they really, they understand the challenge, they see the challenge and they want to solve the challenge. So I would say that that is the, and everyone in the C level area would like to work with AI for sure because they want to show that they work, that they are working with AI. But I also would like to get the benefit with the increased efficiency and increased quality of course within their company. What I also can see is that if you move into different kind of departments that are working with this more on a daily basis, there might be a little bit more resistance because people are worried of AI and automations and platforms that they will replace their jobs and that, you know, that is happening everywhere. That's not only within localization Right. Or in these processes to make global products local. It happens everywhere in society where AI comes in.
But I can see that there is a difference depending on what level you are having this discussion. But I am like 100% sure that we will have AI in play in these processes as all transformations. At some point we need to move along, we need to accept it. But I think that is really important to keep in back of your head what I said in the beginning, that I think that humans that will adapt will have a really bright future within this area, within localization, the ones that can really transform into the new era. They will be the superstars going forward for sure.
[00:23:15] Speaker B: I think we agree. I think that's going to be one of the main things that we need to take out of this conversation to share with our audience. And of course, looking ahead, looking into that talent that you're mentioning, how do you see the balance between AI, automation and humans evolving over the next five years?
How is that grid going to be filled?
[00:23:38] Speaker A: Yeah, we're going to keep using that.
Yeah. Right now I think that what I see is that we are still in the middle of some kind of learning process on how to orchestrate, how to balance, how to get this workflow to come together as one.
Most organizations that I work with, they are still do, running different kind of experiments, trying to find where AI adds value, how AI comes into play with automations and humans. So I think that we are in a phase of trialing, experimenting. I mean, some product and features are coming out in the market within gridly. We can see that we have around 60% of our customers that are using some kind of AI functionality in the product. But that also means that 40 are not.
So I mean, we are on our way. A lot of things are going on.
But in the next five years, I hope, as I said, the topic of this podcast has really become into the humans versus AI, but I think that it won't, hopefully not be anymore about humans versus AI. It will be about humans with AI or AI with humans. I mean, those that learn how to co create will define the future and become the superstars. And in localization, I think the future will not be about choosing sites, it's about learning how to collaborate. The teams that master that balance will move faster, they will deliver, and they will live with the most authentic experiences. Because that's what we would like to get out of the technology and AI. We still are humans. I mean, the tech is here for us. We would like to have authentic experiences.
So we still need to have humans in the lope and humans in play. But it will take some time before we get to that point that we can really combine this and move out of experiments into the next phase of this really exciting journey.
[00:25:42] Speaker B: That is a fantastic way to put it and I thank you so much for sharing this with us. We are coming to an end of our conversation. Is there anything you think we could still could be said about our conversation? Anything else you want to add? Any messages from you?
[00:26:00] Speaker A: I think the message for me has been really clear on how I the importance of having humans and AI collaboration. But what I could add is maybe on your first questions about table tennis, if I should give you one tip, it will be about your serve. To make your serve bounce twice on your opponent's side when you run a serve that will take you to at least the next level.
[00:26:23] Speaker B: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Anna. Next time I play table tennis, which I tend to do often as well as with tennis, I will look for it and I will keep you updated. I'll keep the audience updated on our next conversation about this. Anna, thank you so much for for joining us today.
[00:26:41] Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[00:26:45] Speaker B: All right, thank you for listening to Localization today. A big thank you to Anna Alvison for sharing her perspectives on the Localization Triathlon and how the balance of AI, automation and humans is shaping the future and will continue shaping the future of our industry.
Catch new episodes of Localization today on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. Subscribe, rate and share so others can find the show. I'm Eddie Arrieta with Multilingual Media. Thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time. Goodbye.
