What does AI actually read? Mostly the open web. And Common Crawl, the page-by-page archive that sits at the foundation of GPT, LLaMA, Gemini and other major language models, looks nothing like the world that speaks. Hindi: 610 million speakers, 0.22% of pages; three percent of the rate it is spoken. Bengali sits at the same ratio. English is 41% of pages, falling slowly. The training data that shapes how machines understand language is wildly uneven. Eight years of snapshots, 29 languages,...

AI search and localization are starting to overlap. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is described as optimizing content so AI systems cite it or feature it in direct answers across tools such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot. But for global companies, that definition is incomplete unless it includes language.

Last week I read Elena Verna’s newsletter on high-impact IC work. I kept nodding. Elena’s thesis is about tech and growth, but essentially the same is happening in localization too. We may be entering an era where a senior, high-leverage individual contributor (IC) can own a much larger slice of localization end-to-end than was practical over the last two decades. Not everywhere, and it’s not for everyone, of course. But in the right contexts, it’s becoming a real operating model, not just a...

AI amplifies what’s already there. And for most teams, that’s the problem. Last week I co-hosted Session 1 of GALA Academy’s three-part course on AI for the language industry. L’Meese Greaney is up next (Sales, May 12). Erik Vogt closes it out (Growth, May 19). They’ll both be excellent.

What’s going on with jobs in the language industry? Some roles are fading. Some are mutating in real time. And a few new ones are popping up that basically tell us where this whole thing is (probably) heading. Their titles don’t always say “AI” or “agents”. But the job descriptions do.

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.