Closing the year with a bow, SlatorCon Remote provided insights and a plethora of interesting discussions on December 2, 2025, to over 500 language industry professionals from across the globe.
Slator’s Head of Advisory, Esther Bond, welcomed attendees to the event before turning the mic over to Managing Director Florian Faes and Head of Research Anna Wyndham.
Florian and Anna opened with a walkthrough of the redefined language industry framework, expanding the addressable market to USD 31bn.
Language Solutions Integrators (LSIs), they said, face pressure to integrate — not just deliver — while Language Technology Platforms (LTPs) must stay competitive in a model landscape that changes every few months. On the buy-side, AI teams are realizing that the localization challenge is not experimentation — it’s operationalizing at scale, dealing with the right governance, measurement, and enterprise-grade quality.
Florian and Anna closed by stressing that LSIs need to reposition as true solution integrators — orchestrating AI, human expertise, and workflow intelligence — while LTPs need to differentiate through reliability, explainability, and robustness, not model hype.
ELAN Languages CTO Jourik Ciesielski, speaking for Crowdin, delivered a keynote on security in translation workflows. Ciesielski warned that every additional “actor” in a translation workflow — tools, freelancers, hardware, connectors — increases exposure to risk, and called for “zero-trust” policies and continuous technical controls. Security maturity, he said, is now a major differentiator in RFPs.
Anna moderated the first panel, featuring Phrase VP of AI Solutions Semih Altinay, Zoetis Diagnostics Globalization Manager Esther Curiel, Monzo Bank Localization and International Content Lead Freddie Braun, and Stripe Head of Localization Zach Duncan.
The discussion centered on embedding AI into everyday business operations, moving from experimentation to a reliable, integrated capability. The panelists agreed that governance, trust, and “quiet automation” — AI embedded behind the scenes, reducing manual load while humans focus on nuance, quality, and compliance — are essential for adoption. Looking ahead, they predicted that the next wave of performance gains will come from multimodal models, multi-agent workflows, and hyper-personalization built into enterprise pipelines.
In a fireside chat, ModelFront CEO Adam Bittlingmayer warned of a growing gap between AI’s potential and enterprise adoption. He advised companies to maintain control of their data and tooling and avoid vendor lock-in.
Voiseed Co-Founder and CEO Andrea Ballista spoke about advances in AI dubbing and expressive synthetic voice. Ballista said that 2025 is indeed the year of AI dubbing, but the shift goes far beyond dubbing alone. “Voice is now taking the lead in multiple use cases,” he noted. He also introduced an emotional modeling framework designed to guide expressive AI delivery across languages. “When words are integrated with human emotion and intensity modeling, AI dubbing reaches greatest expressiveness,” he said.
A startup panel led by Slator’s Research and Community Specialist Silvia Terribile brought together VoiceFrom Founder and CEO Dominik Roblek, No Barrier Co-Founder and CEO Eyal Heldenberg, and Ailaysa Founder and CEO Senthil Nathan. They shared insights from scaling speech-native AI interpreting, medical-grade AI communication, and multilingual content creation platforms, highlighting demand for context-aware speech translation, safety layers in healthcare, and support for long-tail languages.
From SAP, Program Manager Xinzi Rao presented the company’s LX 2030 strategy — a shift toward AI-powered translation, risk-based language planning, and the consolidation of SAP’s tool landscape. Rao showcased SAP’s feedback-enabled, AI-marked documentation workflow and the evolution of SAP Translation Hub into a “central AI translation solution.”
The final panel, moderated by Slator’s Alex Edwards, brought together LanguageWire COO Signe Poulsen and Konecranes Documentation Manager Pasi Savola for a discussion on making technical documentation global. They stressed structured content, metadata-rich workflows, and clear processes as essential foundations. While AI accelerates production, they noted that safety-critical industries still depend on human review. “We cannot leave everything to AI, […] we need the human touch to make sure that the content is right,” Savola said.
Esther closed the event with thanks and an invitation to attend SlatorCon London on May 22, 2026, and future SlatorCon Remote editions in 2026. For details coming soon, check the Slator’s Events page.
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