Smartling: Bridging Humanity and Multilingual Innovation

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n October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services went down. And in the process, it took down a sizable portion of the internet and cloud-based business with it. Productivity ground to a halt as company systems stalled and hitherto-reliable technology failed.

In the midst of the chaos, Smartling stood strong. It stayed online. For CEO Bryan Murphy, it’s emblematic of the cloud-based translation and language services platform’s entire business philosophy: durability, reliability, adaptability, and humanity. And those values undergird its tangible business results — namely, delivering highest quality, automated localization four times faster than traditional language service models at a fraction of the cost.

“We’re not simply automating translation; we’re transforming how enterprises operationalize language at scale,” Murphy said. “It’s really about developing and offering agentic workflows that enable localization teams to deliver on-brand translation across the organization at a fraction of the cost and time requirements that were previously possible.”

Putting the Customer in the Center

Smartling’s entire company structure orients around that customer-centered perspective. It starts from the very moment an enterprise prospect reaches out with a problem. They’re welcomed into the Smartling family by what the company calls solutions consultants.

“Solutions consultants do exactly what they sound like they do,” Murphy said. “Before customers sign up, we have the customer describe what their current process is, what their pain points are, what their goals are. And then the solutions consultant says, ‘Okay, based on what we’re hearing from you, here’s our recommendation for improving and automating that process. Here’s exactly how you get that done.’”

That’s where the humanity begins in the Smartling process. After all, there’s nothing quite so consoling as a good listener who wants to solve your problems. But that’s not where the humanity ends.

“Once the customer says, ‘That sounds wonderful. We’d like to do that,’ and we sign them up, they go through an onboarding process in which they’re assigned a team which includes an onboarding specialist, a Customer Success manager and an integration engineer whose job is to get them up and running and help transform their localization process,” Murphy said.

Smartling is, by design, an incredibly adaptable platform. The idea is to connect the human worker with machine-driven efficiency and innovation regardless of individual business requirements. It starts with the strong foundation established by solutions consultants. And the appropriately named solutions architects take it from there.

If the solutions consultants draw up the blueprints, it’s the solutions architects who bust out the hammers and nails.

“They’re the team of people who work on the technical side — these are extremely experienced and talented people who implement this automation and these workflows on behalf of the customer,” Murphy said.

Maybe the customer needs certain software integrated into their workflows, be it Adobe products, content management systems, AI applications, or something else. Smartling’s solutions architects have seen it all and have the technical sophistication to clear the path toward a client’s requirements.

“These solutions architects are just incredibly resourceful and experienced people who know how to get it done for our clients,” Murphy said.

A team is only as good as its leadership, and fortunately, Smartling brings an impressive executive team together to meet a challenging era for clients and linguists alike. There’s Chief Revenue Officer Tim Kirby, who harmonizes commercial insight with customer empathy. In a business that stands both on measurable outcomes and human warmth, Kirby demonstrates both the dollars-and-cents return on investment (ROI) that business leaders demand with an understanding of their comprehensive needs, Murphy said.

Likewise, Vice President of Language Services Gavin Grimes leads his team to deliver the results that make those ROIs possible. With a record of 99% on-time delivery and four-times-faster turnaround than traditional translation, Grimes makes sure that the efficiency gains of AI-powered technology aren’t just hype — they’re practical and real.

But in a field as rapidly evolving as AI, staying ahead of the curve is essential. Enter Olga Beregovaya, Vice President of Machine Translation and AI. A language technology legend, Beregovaya brings cutting-edge large language model (LLM) science into Smartling’s design, agentic quality assurance (QA) solutions, workflow automation, and customer-specific models.

Finally, Jim Richmond serves as Chief Customer Officer to guarantee that Smartling clients recognize value from the moment they sign up. Rather than reacting to customer dissatisfaction, Richmond’s goal is to prescriptively uplevel localization for each customer. To that end, he’s designed Smartling’s processes as a proactive, data-driven partnership, foreseeing client needs and delivering them.    

It amounts to a leadership team built with the utmost attention to client needs and strategic positioning. And it informs a company culture that extends all the way down to individual team members.

“We’re building a culture where engineers, linguists, and AI researchers work side by side to redefine what localization means,” Murphy said. “To do that, we’ve brought the customer into the center of our decision-making process, with a goal of helping them achieve exceptional outcomes delivered with an experience they love.”

Thinking Bigger

According to Murphy, language services are going through a massive shift. Many language operations — even those serving major companies and corporations — are mired in old workflows and processes. Business leaders are increasingly aware that more efficient options and solutions are possible. Smartling’s primary challenge, then, is to make the case of thinking big and helping customers be able to understand their options and execute flawlessly to create change.

“Think of it like painting a house,” Murphy said. “When you think about cost, you think about the price of the paint, the tools, and that kind of thing. But the reality is that the most expensive part isn’t any of those things — it’s everything that goes into getting the paint on the walls.”

“That concept applies to language services,” he continued. “Automation is the biggest value driver in this whole chain. And that’s where, as a software and technology company, we truly excel. We understand how to connect systems to systems, and as a result our customers are able to automate 99% of their translation.”

Increasingly, localization managers for enterprise teams are looking for outside-the-box solutions. According to Murphy, those goals typically break down into one of two categories: process goals and strategic goals. In his experience, almost all the prospective clients he talks to are fixated on the process goals: automation, quality, cost, speed, workflow design, and the like.

Those are good goals, Murphy said, and they should be considered. But by factoring in a company’s strategic objectives, he believes greater things are possible. That’s where it pays to start thinking about language work like a businessperson. Once managers start grappling with the bigger questions — revenue growth, conversion rate, engagement, customer satisfaction, and more — language work becomes truly transformative for a business’ health.

“One of the things I’m really after now is helping our customers — the localization departments, the product departments — to think about their company’s strategic goals,” he said. “What I urge them to do is to align themselves to those strategic goals. Once they do that, they’re going to have a much better probability of getting resources they need to deliver the type of impact they want.”

From Smartling’s perspective, automation is the key to truly transformative, scalable strategic solutions. That’s why they’ve built their services to deliver 99% automated workflows powered by AI translation with custom-trained engines. If the content requires it, a human stays in the loop. For everything else, customization and AI-driven language QA guarantee consistently high-quality results — a properly trained model consistently delivers a 97 MQM quality score versus the 98 MQM score typically achieved by a human translator.   

“Our customers are able to just about triple the amount of content that they translate,” Murphy said. “We’re talking about a 60% reduction in cost per word, an average increase of 30% in measured quality, and, in some cases, a six times faster turnaround time.”

“Now that’s really tremendous,” he added. “That’s a massive ROI from an operational perspective.”

It’s no joke. Just think about what tripling translation capacity could mean for a business. With those kinds of efficiency gains, markets that seemed decades out of reach could be achievable in a fraction of the time. And that’s the essence of strategic goalsetting: finding the solutions that make the unthinkable inevitable.

Innovating for Influence

Innovation is a two-way street. Murphy and his team can encourage strategic thinking and innovative management all day long, but those values need to be reflected by Smartling itself. That’s why Smartling decisionmakers and engineers are constantly looking for methods to keep the platform on the cutting edge.

For Murphy, that means embracing the idea of translation as a service.

“To us, it means that any user in the enterprise has always-on access to instant, on-brand, high-quality translation in whatever application they’re working in,” he said. “Think of it as the enterprise equivalent of cloud computing — but for language. We’re talking about instant, on-brand translation wherever work happens.”

To that end, Smartling is designed as a central localization hub that brings Marketing, Product, Customer Experience, Learning and Development, Human Resources, and Legal departments into the same fold. What was once a tedious process of email and messenger tag suddenly harmonizes with effortless grace and coordination.

“Enterprises today are quite comfortable with using applications enterprise-wide like Salesforce for CRM, or Netsuite for accounting,” Murphy said. “I think that the concept of using a software application like Smartling as an enterprise application for localization is less socialized, but translation as a service could offer huge benefits for enterprises.”

Smartling is always on the lookout for methods to expand that integrated vision. What are the pain points businesses are experiencing in translation and localization? What are the bottlenecks? The inefficiencies? The redundancies? Those are the thoughts that drive the team toward new horizons.

One good example of that philosophy in action is MCP Server, which integrates Smartling’s translation intelligence directly into enterprise AI ecosystems. There’s no custom middleware necessary — it just works.

“For example, a user of an AI application can create and retrieve on-brand translation directly through MCP Server,” Murphy said. “This is how engineering teams embed localization into their AI stack, making translation as seamless as data retrieval.”

Taken altogether, Smartling offers a recipe for making a language department not just valuable, but indispensable. And that’s not just good for business — it’s also good for linguists. Language workers have long debated how best to earn a seat at the C-Suite table and become central to business decision-making.

Murphy argues that the surest road to that kind of influence is furthering the goals that define business success. By limiting their vision to process goals, localization managers may be hobbling themselves and their careers more than they realize.

“As a consequence, they miss out on having more influence, delivering more value, and achieving greater career growth,” Murphy said. “So we’ve been working with our customers to help them better align with corporate goals. We want them thinking about implementing key performance indicators (KPI) measurement solutions and crafting business plans.”

When localization managers can effectively make that case — when they can prove the strategic value they bring to an organization — they haven’t just earned a seat at the table. They’ve proactively carved out the space themselves.

“We know that effective localization is a major factor in achieving business growth,” Murphy said. “What we want is to help our clients demonstrate that value and make a persuasive case into expanding that investment.”