On April 3, 2025, representatives from 14 organizations gathered at the beautiful FIFA Museum in Zurich for a series of roundtable presentations and discussions organized by Slator on behalf of DeepL.
Titled “The Boom of ‘Bring Your Own Language AI’ – Opportunities and Risks,” the event brought together diverse stakeholders from the insurance, banking, government, life sciences, telecom, transportation, and international organization sectors.
Mordstein’s presentation focused on the rise of a custom language AI within organizations, highlighting the language access challenges many of them face in global business.
For example, although English remains the dominant language of international commerce, only 20% of the world’s population speaks it fluently, remarked Mordstein. The lack of widespread fluency creates costly communication issues, with some estimates suggesting that companies lose up to USD 55,000 per employee annually as a result.
Language-related hurdles also end up affecting about a third of businesses attempting to grow internationally, added Mordstein. AI is rapidly becoming the answer to such hurdles, with a substantial 60% of employees worldwide already using AI for work, including tasks like text generation (50%) and translation (20%). However, the use of unauthorized AI tools is prevalent, with 55% of employees admitting to using them.
There is thus a critical need for secure, enterprise-grade AI solutions that offer reliability, personalization, data protection, and seamless integration with existing systems. DeepL’s specialized AI is a decidedly superior alternative to general AI in solving those needs, commented Mordstein.
“Unlike general AI, which relies on public data and carries ethical and legal risks, specialized AI is trained on company-owned, secure, and legally compliant data. This approach ensures higher quality results, reduces errors, and is tailored to specific business workflows,” added Mordstein.
Specialized AI solutions can help overcome many challenges while realizing significant cost savings, increased efficiency, improved communication, and enhanced data security.
Furthermore, DeepL’s technology outperforms competitors like ChatGPT-4 and Google Translate, offering features like DeepL Voice and DeepL Write specially tailored to the needs of thousands of businesses.
Mordstein shared that the ultimate goal is to facilitate international operations and deliver significant economic benefits, including potential savings of up to EUR 3m (USD 3.4m) and a 90% reduction in translation time.
Language AI Evolution and Expectations
Faes’s presentation highlighted a trajectory of machine translation (MT) capabilities in the past 20 years, moving from translating single phrases to entire company communications to today’s advancements in sophistication, quality, and scale.
This evolution has consistently shaped user perceptions and expectations of the technology, from unusable to present-time near-perfect AI-enabled output.
Comprehensive multilingual communication management is also becoming increasingly feasible through AI, as is the integration of translation capabilities into various applications, platforms, and workflows (Translation-as-a-Feature, TaaF). “Rather than existing as standalone tools, users can embed translation services within their existing digital environments,” explained Faes.
Faes also highlighted the distinction between Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B) contexts for language AI. DeepL’s solutions, for example, consider the specific needs and requirements of these two sectors when developing and deploying its AI translation solutions.
Key Takeaways
A consensus developed among attendees about the relevance of efficient translation for day-to-day business. Some were long-time users of DeepL, and some were curious about DeepL and Slator research.
AI is increasingly being used to address cost, time-to-market, system integration challenges, and other challenges, and organizations require an AI-enabled translation solution that is also secure and reliable, and can be customized for their specific needs.
Specialized AI translation trained on proprietary data offers a significant advantage over general AI in terms of accuracy, security, and relevance for multiple use cases.
DeepL emerges as a complete solution, addressing cost and operational concerns as AI translation reaches ever-higher quality levels, requiring minimal or no human intervention.
As language AI today encompasses multiple modalities, use, interest, and demand continue to increase exponentially. Next on the horizon is a more integrated and versatile approach where the technology is expected to handle increasingly diverse content formats and complex real-time multilingual interactions across various media, all with high accuracy.
To find out more about a custom language AI solution from DeepL for your organization, start a conversation today.