Benjamin Faes:
Building the Future

You mentioned how your career experience honed your ability to envision and pioneer new revenue models. To the extent you can share details, what do you envision for RWS?
I see three significant growth vectors that barely existed two years ago.

First, AI data services through TrainAI. Every frontier AI model needs massive volumes of high-quality, culturally nuanced training data (preference data, evaluation data, red-teaming data). We have more than 250,000 data specialists, linguists, and domain experts across 175 countries.

That’s an asset almost no one else can replicate at our scale and quality threshold.

Second, AI-powered multimedia transformation. We acquired Papercup’s IP to integrate AI dubbing and subtitling directly into the new Trados platform. The AI dubbing market alone is roughly a billion-dollar opportunity. Brands need their video content to feel native in every market, not just captioned.

Third — and this is the one I’m most excited about — cultural intelligence as a SaaS layer. Language Weaver Pro, built through our strategic partnership with Cohere, is the clearest expression of this. It combines frontier neural machine translation (NMT) with the cultural and domain expertise that only RWS can provide. The new Trados platform takes it further: an end-to-end environment where AI and human expertise work together seamlessly. The trajectory is to make this available as infrastructure that any enterprise can plug into their AI stack. Not translation as a service. Cultural intelligence as infrastructure.

When you came on board in early January 2025, former CEO Ian El-Mokadem stayed on until the end of the month to facilitate the transition. What lessons did you take away from his leadership?
Ian was generous, pragmatic, and genuinely committed to a smooth transition, which says a lot about his character. The most important thing I took from him was context. Not just the business mechanics but the unwritten map: which clients had been with us for decades, which teams had been through the hardest restructuring, where the institutional memory lived.

He also reinforced something I already believed: RWS’s people are its real moat. Capabilities can be copied. Patents expire. But a global community of linguists, domain experts, and cultural specialists who genuinely care about quality — that’s built over decades, not quarters. Ian understood that deeply, and I’m grateful he made sure I did too.

As you indicated before, AI is rewriting markets across the world in ways that are both exciting and daunting. Could you talk in more detail about how AI fits into RWS’s strategic vision, and what is its appropriate role?
AI isn’t a feature we bolt on. It’s the architecture of everything we’re building.

On the offering side, our entire product strategy revolves around what we call the cultural intelligence layer. Again, Language Weaver Pro launched through our partnership with Cohere integrates frontier NMT with quality estimation models trained by our own linguists and deep domain expertise. The new Trados platform brings it all together: an end-to-end environment that delivers near-instant, human-caliber translation quality at scale. It frees our specialists to focus on the work that truly requires human judgment, like cultural adaptation, regulatory nuance, and brand voice.

And that same intelligence doesn’t stop at creating and adapting a brand’s content — increasingly it protects it. Our recent acquisition of Obviously is a good example. Obviously brings an AI-driven platform that lets enterprise legal, marketing, and finance teams track their brand and IP assets, identify threats like counterfeits and copycats, and quantify the commercial impact of infringement. Combined with our patent and localization capabilities, it creates a single Global Brand Guardianship platform — one place to create, localize, register, monitor, and enforce a brand across every market a client operates in. It’s the natural extension of the cultural intelligence layer: if you understand what a brand means in every context, you’re uniquely positioned to defend it.

Internally, we’ve unified all our technology teams, so we build the AI intelligence layer once and surface it across every product. Our delivery platform automates workflows end to end. That’s a structural change, not a superficial one.

As for the appropriate role of AI generally, I have a strong view. The industry has been obsessed with maximizing IQ: making models smarter. What’s missing is EQ: making them wiser. Culturally aware. Contextually sensitive. Brand-safe. Every AI experience, from your morning briefing to your autonomous car, will need to adapt to who you are, where you are, and what you mean, not just what you said. Building that layer of understanding is the next great challenge in AI. And it happens to be RWS’s reason for being.

Thinking about the business landscape in which you compete, what do you consider to be the one element that sets RWS apart?
Depth. Not breadth.

We have 68 years of accumulated knowledge about how language, culture, and meaning actually work in the real world across regulated industries, legal jurisdictions, and brand ecosystems. We’ve codified that into 45-plus AI patents, more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, and the workflows of 80-plus of the world’s top 100 brands. We have a quarter of a million experts who don’t just speak languages — they understand the cultural operating systems behind them.

No pure-play AI company has that. And no legacy translation company has our technology ambition. We occupy a unique position: deep human expertise, scaled by proprietary AI, delivered as enterprise-grade infrastructure. My job is to make sure we never lose the depth while we dramatically accelerate the scale.

Given the stressful nature of leading a company through transformative times, what helps you relax and unwind?
I’m a visual person, so photography and videography are my reset button. There’s something about framing a shot that forces you to slow down and see what’s in front of you. I’ve recently got into action cameras and love capturing movement and light in ways you can’t with the naked eye.

I’m also religious about sports. Every morning, I alternate between running, cycling, and weights — a ritual that gets me physically ready and mentally energized before the day begins. There’s a clarity that comes from pushing your body first thing that no amount of coffee
can replicate.

And honestly? I read. A lot. Mostly about technology, culture, and how they collide. I find it hard to separate curiosity from work, which I think is a good sign that I’m in the right job.

Is there anything you want to add?
Just this: I think our industry is at an inflection point that’s far more exciting than the narrative suggests. The dominant story is that AI kills language services. I think the truth is the opposite.

AI is creating an entirely new category of enterprise need: cultural intelligence at scale. The volume of content that needs cultural adaptation is about to explode as AI-generated content floods every channel. Regulatory requirements around AI safety and cultural appropriateness are accelerating. Demand for trustworthy, human-validated AI output is growing, not shrinking.

The companies and the people who built this industry have exactly the expertise the AI economy needs. Our job, RWS’s job, this industry’s job, is to repackage that expertise for a new era. Not to defend the old model, but to architect the new one. I came to RWS because I believe we can do that. Eighteen months in, I’m more convinced than ever.