Last week, I spent two afternoons glued to my screen attending Loc Tech Live 2026, a virtual conference that brought together 340 localization professionals to discuss the messy, technical "how" of localization. The event went deep: architecture diagrams, code demos, and the real infrastructure behind localization at scale. Not my natural habitat, to be honest. But given how localization is evolving, it's a world everyone needs to understand, at least to some extent.

We all need to be good at marketing, even if we don't work in marketing. And it's not just about brands or products. In the language industry, as everywhere else, we need to know how to market our function (why we exist), our team (who they are and what they do), and ourselves (why we remain relevant).

There is one thing we don't talk about nearly enough these days: AI. Or, ehm, the cost of multilingual AI when using AI for language-related tasks.

It’s such a popular question, isn’t it: what were you doing when? When we landed on the moon (yes, we did). Or when 9/11 happened. But what were you doing when ChatGPT was released back on November 30, 2022?

What the heck are we doing with AI? or Can you share your AI slide deck with me? Who hasn't been on the receiving end of questions like this over the past few months? Everyone has been asked to have an "AI strategy." For anyone working in the language industry, the time to adopt multilingual AI is now.

Let's face it, marketing and localization occasionally have an uneasy relationship. And that’s even if organizations have their marketing localization support well set up – whether through a dedicated in-house team or an external partner. This is often because these two teams have divergent goals, different mindsets, or just speak a different language (pun intended).