“We don’t have to play defense. What we do is incredible. It matters to industries around the world.”
In a keynote speech at SlatorCon London 2025, RWS CEO Benjamin Faes urged attendees — whether language solutions integrators (LSIs), language technology platforms (LTPs), or buyers — to take a proactive approach to exploring and integrating AI.
Content, which Faes called “the heartbeat” of business, has experienced a recent explosion, with generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI, producing in just 18 months the same amount of content created on the internet over the past 30 years.
GPTs have evolved from a “party trick” to “an essential tool to so many industries,” Faes said, from healthcare to life sciences, finance to customer service.
Businesses are struggling to keep up with the pace of change and to make decisions about how to generate content, which steps to automate, and how to engage with their audiences.
RWS conducted a large-scale survey with 4,900+ consumers from around the world. According to their responses, transparency boosts trust: Consumers said they want AI to be labeled so that they know when content has been created by AI. Therefore, businesses can grow trust by explaining how content was created and by referring to the origin of that content.
Moreover, 82% of consumers said they would like humans to be involved in content generation in some form.
Faes shared the principles RWS has adopted in response to the GenAI revolution: understanding “living” content, which is now live, embedded, and personalized; blending human and AI strengths; and designing globally.
Language as the Origin of Content
Faes brings an “outsider” perspective to the language industry, having joined RWS in late 2024 after decades in the tech industry at companies such as Google and AOL France. While providers have long aimed to educate clients on language offerings and their benefits, Faes sees value in taking a step back.
“Content is something that all companies understand,” he said. “So if the message is, ‘I’m gonna help you connect your content with more users,’ there’s something formidable.”
For example, Faes said, 20% of internet users are Chinese, but only 1% of content online is in Chinese.
“Today, I still think, language is, in some shape, a luxury product for companies. There are not many companies that design for a hundred languages because it’s complicated, it costs too much,” Faes explained.
But when a company does choose to create a system that is global and includes localization as part of the tech stack from the start, it can have a major impact.
Faes cited the RWS partnership with content creation platform Canva as a success story. Since 2016 RWS has been a driving force behind Canva’s ambition to make design accessible to everyone, providing expert translation and localization services to enable customers across 190 markets to easily access Canva’s suite of online tools in their own language. Today, more than half (130m) of Canva’s 230m users worldwide interact with the platform in languages other than English — a fact Faes believes is key to Canva’s preeminence in its field.
Riding the AI Shockwave — and Going with the Flow
“Living at the heart of this AI revolution,” as Faes described the moment, has prompted RWS to adopt some new terminology and rethink its offerings and potential benefits to clients.
Dovetailing with Slator’s understanding of the current language industry landscape, RWS has moved away from being “just” a language service provider toward becoming a “content solution partner,” Faes said.
This is evident in the new titles of linguists working for RWS: Formerly known as translators, these professionals are now referred to as “language specialists” or “linguistic specialists,” which Faes said better represents the work they do, which includes reading, changing, and adapting content.
Translation and interpreting may be available for free from certain B2C products, but, Faes said, this does not reflect what companies such as RWS do.
Faes said RWS sees itself as delivering to clients in three ways: by generating better, smarter, scalable content; by transforming content to resonate and connect with audiences around the world; and by protecting data, content, and ideas.
“I think if we unlock that possibility for companies, we can be at the heart of a huge transformation,” Faes said. “It is not the translation that’s important. It’s the connection that we make around the globe.”