[00:00:03] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Localization Today, the show where we explore how language, technology and strategy come together to drive global impact. I'm Eddie Arrieta, CEO at Multilingual Media, and today we are joined by Ankush Sharma, Senior Director and head of Globalization Engineering at Adobe.
Ankush leads a global team in building scalable platforms, integrating advanced machine translation and generative AI to enhance multilingual content delivery. We'll discuss Adobe's Globalization Summit and how Genai is reshaping the future of globalization. Ankush, welcome and thank you for being here.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: Thank you, Eddie. It's nice to be here with you and Ankush.
[00:00:53] Speaker A: Right before we started the recording, we were wondering what would be the best way to introduce yourself.
And we thought it'd be great to just give you opportunity to let you introduce yourself and the work you're doing in whichever form you consider relevant.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: Yeah, you pretty much introduced me, but I'll just add to it. I've been at Adobe for almost 20 years and I've been mostly involved in scaling up globalization teams at Adobe, making sure we deliver high quality, high agility, multilingual content across different surfaces and different content types for different regions. Today, we have come a long way in terms of how Adobe has evolved on the globalization landscape, in terms of developing a platform that is robust and scalable to ensure we can support more than 100 languages across the world. And it's a great place to be talking about what new paradigm shifts are happening in the globalization industry and what Adobe is doing to take care of those.
So thank you very much for having me here and love to discuss more about what Globalization Summit is all about.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: And that's completely right, Ankish, because that's why we're here, to talk a little bit more about what the Adobe's Globalization Summit is.
What is the gathering about? Where is it going to happen? What can people do to get involved with it? And those that are listening to the conversation probably will have the same questions. We want to start basic here. Ankush, what is Adobe's Globalization Summit?
[00:02:33] Speaker B: So Globalization Summit is designed as a technology focused conference exploring the cutting edge of Genai and its role in globalization.
It has its genesis and way back in 2023 when we rolled out the first edition.
But while many industry conferences and events focus on commercial strategies, we are offering a space for deeper technical conversations and knowledge sharing. We are trying to bring Together product companies, LSPs, language technology innovators to discuss how Genai is shaping tools, workflows and the future. Of multilingual experiences. This is supposed to encourage cross functional dialogue among engineer, product leaders, linguists and technologists who are in some way very close to the localization industry and shaping the globalization technologies of tomorrow. It's going to form a convergence point for all of these different role plays to come together and talk and discuss and share best practices in terms of how Gen AI is shaping the future of providing personalized culture, fluent digital experiences at scale for reducing time to market, lowering operational cost, and enhancing quality and authenticity of global content. In short, I would just say that it's a collaborative environment where people can share real world challenges and solutions.
It provides opportunities to see technical demos and discuss practical applications of Gen workflows.
And to be fair, I really expect honest discussions coming around topics like quality, ethics, scalability, cultural nuances, local idioms and all that shaping the Gen AI workflows going forward.
I really want a community feel where attendees leave inspired and better equipped to navigate this fast changing landscape.
[00:04:42] Speaker A: And that's a, that's a really, that's a really interesting concept and really interesting challenge.
There was a Adobe Global Summit globalization summit in 2023. What was, what was, what was, what was that like?
[00:04:55] Speaker B: So let me just talk a bit about how 2023, which was our first edition, came into being. So the globalization industry has evolved a lot and I have been attached to it for almost more than two decades and I've seen this whole thing go from a completely manual to to some inflection points in the past two decades like nmd, adaptive NMD that have set the stage for bigger things to happen. We are now looking at right in 2323 we were looking at seeing globalization shifting from a downstream task to a strategic integrated part of the product and content development. Right at the start of release cycles and experiences, we saw a huge increase. We were seeing and we are continuously seeing that a huge increase in terms of digital experiences and Gen AI as a disruptor was demanding newer conversations and collaborations across industries. This is what led us to kind of start thinking about bringing the right people together to discuss and showcase innovations and share real world use cases that were going to hit upon us sooner than later. So in a big way.
2023, the first summit in 2023 set the stage for 2025. Earlier, the first edition highlighted early experiments with Gen AI in multilingual content creation. We are now going to focus on shifts from experimentations to real world deployments of Genai in global workflows. While we started off discussing cultural nuances, quality and ethical Considerations in AI in the last edition, we are now going to deeper dive into operationalizing Gen AI. What was earlier thought of as pilots are now getting into production workflows where we were fostering collab and we are trying to foster collaboration in a bigger way by showcasing advanced tools such as success stories and best practices that have happened since we had the last summit. In all, we are trying to reinforce our vision through the summit that globalization is about delivering native authentic experiences everywhere. And it's not just about translation, it's much more than that.
[00:07:18] Speaker A: That is a very strong statement and very powerful as well, which talks to the nuance behind what it is to truly globalize and what are the elements that are involved in such process. It's very interesting how you talk about also reinforcing, fostering this culture of collaboration, which it suggests as well that a lot of what happens within the summit, in a way it's very serendipitous.
It is, it is focus, it is directed. But in many ways there are many interactions within that actually end up translating into productivity output, new ideas. Irregardless of the times, I presume 2023 was very different to 2025. How did that inaugural event in 2023 help shape the program rolling out in 2025?
[00:08:21] Speaker B: Yeah, that's what I said in terms of just 2023. So you look at the Genai scale of, you know, how it has evolved in the last two years while 2023 we were still thinking of is Genai better than NMT or not? Is it going to be the big success stories in globalization? By default, Genai touches the translation industry in a big, big way. It's kind of met out for that, it's kind of rolled out for the localization and globalization. But if you look at how we started off in 2023 and where we are now, while we were talking about experimentations in 2023, we are really now talking about operationalizing the same experiment in real world workflows. While there were initial discussions on how things can happen or should happen, we are now talking about deeper dives into exactly how they went and what are the best practices that can be shared going forward.
It was more touching the surface in the last summit to now a much, much more deeper dive into actually how we are using the systems today and how those are helping us benefit in terms of system solving, cultural nuances, personalization, productivity, quality, everything coming together in terms of newer tools that have been created, newer use case that have been developed, and also actual best practices in all these Areas that we talk about. So it's an add on to the last summit. I would say it's a next step to what we started off two years back.
It's going to be a much, much more deeper discussion this time around.
[00:10:09] Speaker A: Very exciting. As well as the title for the summit which is Accelerating the Globalization AI Ecosystem.
We can't stop by wonder what does that phrase mean at Adobe? Why is now the right moment to convene around Genai and globalization? Ankush?
[00:10:29] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good question because I think we spent a lot of time thinking about what should be the right team for 2025, given the time we are in and how big an inflection point Gen AI is bringing out for our industry.
And really to look at it, we are really now talking about creating a connected system where Genai localization, creative tools in general and enterprise workflows, they all work together. We are moving away from, you know what we were talking about, experimentation and all. We are moving away from isolated AI use cases to more scalable integrated globalization solutions. And we are now talking about supporting an ecosystem, not just small tools or automation, but actual an ecosystem where all partners, vendors, customers, customer, they all come together and drive value from the overall workflow. This is where we are. We want to accelerate, we want to move much, much more faster as compared to how we have been. And so if you look at the curve itself, the curve is too steep in curve is steep in terms of how fast we can go. It gets more and more faster with what, with how much you have covered till now. And as we get better at it, we are going to drive more productivity and faster turnaround times and better quality in a lesser period of time. So the potential out with Gen AI is really immense. And that's what we mean by accelerating the globalization AI ecosystem.
Your other question asked about why is this the right time for this conversation or for this summit to happen?
As I said, Gen AI has matured from pilot to production ready use case in just a few years.
Enterprise needs faster, more personalized global content at scale. And there's always an urgency to define high quality, ethical, culturally fluent AI practices. And that's what we are into. And it's not just Adobe, it's every company on the planet trying to look into at this very moment, look into how generative AI can accelerate their globalization workflows. We are trying to play our role and Adobe is trying to strive certain industry standards and share toolings to tools that we've kind of developed over the last two years.
Since the first summit and are learning from those workflows. As we share this with all other partners of ours that come for the summit, we are trying to lead conversations on responsible gen AI and use it in multilingual context. And it's not just multilingual, it's also multimodal now. And we are trying to ensure globalization remains as human centered in a completely AI driven future.
[00:13:27] Speaker A: As we have to greet, the conversation with our other guests moves around multimodality and some even say multidimensionality, which are very interesting concepts. So complexity, it's incredibly increasing.
The conversation has matured up significantly and it's great to hear it. Of course you come from a place of being a practitioner of what you are talking about, what you think should be done. Can you talk to us a little bit about how is Adobe infusing generative AI into its globalization platforms?
What concrete improvements have you seen, what has changed around and what have you observed?
[00:14:14] Speaker B: So no doubt we are moving away from traditional manual translation workflows, manual asset production workflows. We are moving into integrating generative AI into our core platform as a way to do things, in fact, all things that possible. So we have in our ecosystem, in our workflows, brought genai in a very big way. All our workflows and as I said, multimodal workflows, it's not just text only, it's also images, it's videos. We are trying to use as much generative AI as we can. There is not like everything is all tried and tested on all types of content. We're kind of looking, of course text is a much more solvable part of things. But as soon as you try going multimodal and you get into bigger dimensions of images and then multimedia, videos, animations, all those kind of things, there is a lot that you can leverage. Not all things have been sorted out, not all things are fully production, but there's huge experimentation that is going. So as we move on the scale of, you know, going from 1 to 10 on text, we are trying to achieve similar kind of scale in production for images and videos with genes. These are part of our workflows now at different levels of production.
And we are trying to bring large language models and multimodal generative tools to automate and accelerate content adaptation, cultural transcreation and creation of region specific content reflecting local idioms, cultural nuances and so on.
So in a big way, the genai is embedded into Adobe's localization workflow. And to your second part of the question, we are really seeing good, huge benefits out of those.
We generally measure it in three dimensions in a big way.
One being agility, turnaround times and how much volumes you can address in what kind of time frames and timelines, quality, how good is the quality going to be in terms of how we used to do this content earlier?
And thirdly, cost.
All these things, these three things matter to us. I don't want to create them in terms of their priority, but if I could, I would put them at equal priority and suggest one workflow needs to go and have all these three dimensions well covered.
When we look at, when we look at turnaround time and cost and compare it with equal quality content, we are looking at saving almost like from different types of content, have different benchmarks, but we go anywhere from 20% to 50% production productivity gains, both in terms of cost and turnaround times.
And if we try to work that around with, you know, whether we are talking about human in the loop or not, generally most of our Gen AI workflows today are with human in the loop with human in the loop, because we are seeing that not any content that Adobe generates, it has to have a human touch involved, it has to have a human preview involved.
But all that said, even after all this, we still tend to have huge gains in productivity overall.
So no doubt Genai is bringing in a lot of gains for us. But at the same times, I am more optimistic and I'm more looking forward to seeing how customers drive value from this. And the way to look at it is the way we are able to address cultural nuances going all through like 80 languages, 40 languages. That's a huge scale that we are targeting now. And that personalization, that culturalization and then that touching on the local nuances of that region is topmost priority for us. If I can handle that, everything else becomes like cost and agility becomes secondary to it.
[00:18:37] Speaker A: That is a very interesting way to put it, especially in the current conversation on what's to be automated, what's not to be automated, what are humans involved, what are humans not involved, when is Genai absolutely critical and when it's great support and then all the interconnections. I think it's a great conversation to hear that it's taking priority at Adobe. I think. Definitely, definitely speaks well of the culture. Now, if we come back a bit to the summit after learning more about how it happens within Adobe for the Globalization Summit this year in 2020, which roles do you think are going to benefit the most from the summit, who would you recommend it to in a way, whether in person or virtually, because people can also join virtually.
[00:19:32] Speaker B: Yes. In general, I think there's huge benefit in probably anyone who is in the localization globalization industry and is in any way looking forward to the Gen disruption, they tend to benefit from participating in this summit.
In general, globalization and localization leaders exploring how Genai is reshaping the industry tend to be should be part of this. Not even tend to be part of this. They should be part of this.
Roles like product managers, engineers and technologists who are building AI driven global content workflows are going to drive immense value from this. We are going to talk about those workflows. We are going to look at best practices out of those and see how once Genai system versus another multimodal stuff, things around productivity are impacting us on a daily basis.
We also expect LSPs and language tech innovators looking to contribute to and learn from the evolving Gen AI system ecosystem in this summit.
So frankly, anyone who is deeply involved in scaling personalized multilingual experiences through Genai technology should be part of this summit.
[00:20:54] Speaker A: That is fantastic. It really broadens the scope of those that can participate and will participate. And full transparency. I'm going to be participating. I find it very exciting, very interesting and it feels like a very hands on opportunity and that's kind of like what I'm looking forward to. It feels like summit slash workshop slash brain trust slash great conversations.
So I'm really excited to participate. Of course. Ankush. We'll see each other there.
There is an Adobe Genai power globalization ecosystem if we put it in that way. What beyond the summit? What are Adobe's next steps for scaling this ecosystem?
How can the broader industry collaborate to I guess continue fulfilling what's also shared as a vision within the summit? But that continues beyond the summit.
[00:21:54] Speaker B: So whatever we have done and achieved so far, it's not just I won't just take it as it's been done by Adobe and by us.
It's a culmination of a lot of effort that goes with us, with our vendors, with our partners who do a lot of stuff for us, continuously evolving and working with us to ensure we get better systems and better evolution of the whole workflows.
So over time what we have seen is this partnership has increased in a big way. We want to leverage this summit and see how this partnership can evolve even further to develop these AI ecosystem and these scalable workflows that can power most of our content types. And it's not just this knowledge is going to be only with Adobe. It's going to be shared across and that's the same we expect with our, with our LSPs and language innovators. Linguistic innovators who are working with us to come to this summit and tell us how we can look at fast pacing, all this stuff, all this good stuff that everyone else is doing, bringing it into it. There are a lot of good things that are happening and I really am looking forward to seeing agentic workflows and workflows that we have around the world in terms of defining agents and MCP servers and all to start looking at things in a much, much more genai way as compared to just looking at it from a localization per se perspective.
So we're looking at increasing volumes. We are looking at making these systems more automated and, and not we, meaning we as an ecosystem with our partners, making sure that it brings the right productivity to each one of us involved in the system.
[00:23:51] Speaker A: That is really great to hear once again system and looking forward to learning more about it and how it will take place.
If we zoom in on the event, what can you tell us about the dates? What can you tell us about the venue, the city?
What do we have there?
[00:24:12] Speaker B: So the event is on the 12th and 13th of November 2025 and seats are limited and there is no registration fee. If you're interested in attending, anyone's interested in attending, share your intent with us. Whether you're bringing a perspective, a project or simply a passion for the space will want to review your submission and extend registrations based on alignment with the summit's focus on innovation, collaboration and real world impact.
So we're trying to create the right community in the room, one that's ready to help shape the future of globalization with Gen AI at the core.
About the City this is going to be in Noida, which is on the suburbs of New Delhi, which is capital of India and it's a bustling place, It's a nice place to be in. The weather will be good at that time of the year and we'll definitely be grateful to everyone who comes in.
[00:25:14] Speaker A: Very, very excited to hear that it's open, that it's free to attend, a great location. I went last year to New Delhi after 20 years and you can definitely see the improvements in the Indian ecosystem in terms of infrastructure, in terms of like business, culture and also education and many other elements there. So really, really great to hear.
We will have all this information in our blog
[email protected] you should also see this information in the post or description of this episode.
But Ankush, if everything else fails, where can people go and get the information and register on with you or how do they show that intent?
[00:26:00] Speaker B: There's a mailing list that we'll provide you post the show. I'll definitely make sure that that comes to you. That's the easiest and the quickest ways to reach out to the organizing committee who can then guide you to the right, right place.
[00:26:15] Speaker A: Fantastic. So we look forward to sharing with everyone the information. You should already have it by the time the recording is out.
Ankush, thank you so much for doing this. I don't know if there are any extra messages you want to there for the ecosystem, the communities before we go.
[00:26:32] Speaker B: No, I'm good. Thank you so much. Eddie. Thank you for being such great host and thanks for asking the right questions. If you were to ask me what should I ask, these were the exact questions I would have loved to hear from you. So thank you so much.
[00:26:48] Speaker A: This is great and it's our pleasure to have you with us. Ankush to everyone who is listening, listening. That wraps up our conversation with Ankush Sharma on how Adobe is shaping the future of globalization through generative AI and about the Globalization Summit 2025 on November 12th November 13th. If you are thinking of going, send me a message. I'll be there and we can probably talk in depth about these conversations. I can't wait to interview Ankush again but from the Globalization Summit and see how things are going and with other members of the ecosystem. Thanks for listening to Localization today. Please subscribe, rate us on Spotify or Apple podcasts and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates. We'll be back soon with more insights from the people transforming global communication.
Until next time, goodbye.
