On May 23, 2025, SlatorCon London brought together a record-breaking 200+ language industry leaders and innovators in the heart of London.
Slator’s Head of Advisory and London native Esther Bond opened the event, welcoming attendees and highlighting Slator’s 10th anniversary, before handing over to Managing Director Florian Faes, who introduced a new market framework that reimagines the industry’s structure as seen in Slator’s 2025 Language Industry Market Report.
Florian’s announcement was a shift away from legacy terms such as LSP and TMS, replaced by the more accurate and future-ready categories of Language Solutions Integrator (LSI) and Language Technology Platform (LTP); terms repeated throughout the day.
In his keynote speech, RWS CEO Ben Faes discussed the Super Agency’s strategic vision amid the AI shockwave with RWS rebranding itself as a content solutions partner. Ben emphasized the exponential growth of content, the need for trust and transparency, and the opportunity to embed multilingual engagement into the core of every customer journey.
Esther returned to moderate the investor panel, featuring Ignacio Monereo of Boost Capital Partners and Simone Cremonini of Alkemia Capital, where they shared why they are backing AI-native startups like Dubme and Contents.com, respectively. The duo emphasized the critical role of adaptable teams, scalable tech, and clear business outcomes in attracting investment.
Clémentine Lerner, Head of Content Localization at RS Group, closed the morning sessions exploring the challenges and rewards of centralizing localization, followed by a short Q&A with Slator’s Alex Edwards. She highlighted the importance of change management, internal advocacy, and aligning with business priorities.
The first panel of the afternoon brought together Phrase’s Georg Ell, Acclaro’s Russell Haworth, Braze’s Iara Altkorn, and Sanity’s Rich Higgins to share the story of how integrated collaboration accelerated multilingual content delivery. The collaboration improved time-to-market for localized experiences, lowered costs, and provided a scalable model for entering new markets.Â
Wise’s Claire Pagès and Ana Valle Nascimento presented a detailed look at localization in finance and why it defies a one-size-fits-all approach. Their team prioritizes regulatory accuracy, tone, and regional nuance while maintaining brand consistency across markets.
The next panel, moderated by Slator’s Silvia Terribile, saw AppTek’s Volker Steinbiss and Florian Lux join Julia Schwarz from the University of Cambridge. Julia offered an academic perspective on the challenges of making AI speech feel natural, while AppTek provided insights into the deployment of neural speech synthesis and automatic dubbing workflows.
In his presentation, Bertrand Gstalder, Group CEO of Acolad, detailed how the Super Agency is restructuring its operations to integrate AI across workflows. He shared how Acolad is investing in scalable tech, talent development, and client-focused solutions to meet rising demands for faster, multilingual content delivery.
The final panel was moderated by Slator’s Anna Wyndham, Head of Research, and focused on the language AI startup journey. Panelists from Signapse and Ollang talked about how they are building innovative solutions for sign language translation and multilingual and multimodal AI systems for localization, respectively.
Florian delivered the closing remarks, inviting the audience to continue the conversation in person again in 2025, at Silicon Valley, or SlatorCon Remote in November 2025 (for details coming soon, check the Slator’s Events page).