The CMO’s Guide to AI, Human Expertise, and Getting Global Communications Right.
Every CMO is being asked the same question right now: can’t we just use AI for this?
When it comes to translation and localisation, the answer is more complicated than either side of the debate admits. AI has genuinely changed what’s possible — but it has also created a new category of risk that global brands are only beginning to understand.
Here’s what marketing leaders need to know before they hand their brand voice to a machine.
What AI Does Well
Let’s be honest about where AI-powered translation has made real progress. Tools like DeepL, Google Translate and the large language models now embedded in enterprise workflows have raised the floor dramatically. Routine content — product descriptions, support documentation, internal communications — can be processed faster and more cost-effectively than ever before.
For high-volume, low-stakes content, AI is a genuine efficiency gain. Brands managing thousands of SKUs across a multilingual e-commerce platform, for example, no longer need to translate every product attribute by hand. Machine translation post-editing (MTPE) has become a legitimate workflow across the globalisation industry — and rightly so.
Speed and scale are real advantages. Cost reduction is real. For the right type of content, AI translation is not just acceptable — it’s the sensible choice.
What AI Gets Wrong
The problem starts when brands apply the same logic to their creative and brand communications.
AI models are trained on patterns. They learn what words typically follow other words, what phrases tend to appear in certain contexts, and what translations have been approved in the past. What they cannot do is understand why a particular word was chosen — the emotional resonance it carries, the cultural baggage it avoids, the strategic intention behind it.
A strapline is not a sentence to be translated. It’s a distillation of brand positioning, audience insight and creative craft. When you run it through an AI model, you get a linguistically plausible output. You rarely get the right one.
Consider the famous failures: Pepsi’s “Come Alive With the Pepsi Generation” rendered in Chinese as “Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Dead.” Or KFC’s “Finger Lickin’ Good” localised in China as “Eat Your Fingers Off.” These predate AI — but the underlying problem hasn’t changed. Language carries meaning that dictionaries don’t capture, and culture shapes interpretation in ways that training data can’t fully encode.
Modern AI tools make fewer of these obvious errors. But they’ve introduced a subtler problem: outputs that are technically correct and culturally flat. Content that reads like a translation rather than a native communication. Brand voice that arrives in a new market sounding like it was written by a committee — because, in a sense, it was.
The Brand Identity Risk CMOs Are Underestimating
For brands that have spent years building a distinctive voice, AI-generated localisation poses a specific risk that doesn’t always show up in quality checks: dilution.
Brand voice is built on choices — the words you use, the rhythm of your sentences, the tone you strike in different contexts. Those choices are deliberate. They’re the result of strategy, creative development and refinement over time. When AI takes over localisation, those choices get averaged out. The model defaults to what’s statistically normal, not what’s strategically right for your brand.
The result is content that passes a surface-level review but gradually erodes the distinctiveness that makes a brand worth remembering. In competitive markets, where brand equity is often the only real differentiator, this is a serious problem — and one that’s hard to reverse once it takes hold.
This is why brand guardianship — maintaining the integrity of your identity across every market and medium — has become one of the most critical disciplines in global marketing. It’s something we build into every project through our Create services, from brand strategy through to visual and verbal identity.
Where Human Expertise Remains Irreplaceable
The question isn’t AI versus humans. It’s knowing which content needs which approach — and having the expertise to tell the difference.
Human-led localisation and transcreation remains essential for:
- Campaign creative and brand messaging — where emotional resonance and cultural fit are the whole point
- Regulated industries — where mistranslation carries legal and compliance risk, as we explored in our analysis of strategic localisation in global banking
- Seasonal and cultural moments — where getting the tone wrong in a specific cultural context can cause real reputational damage, as our guide to localising seasonal campaigns sets out
- Brand naming and taglines — where a single word can make or break market entry
- Sensitive categories — health, finance, education — where trust is built through precise, culturally appropriate language
Consumers can tell when content has been produced without genuine cultural understanding — and they trust it less. We’ve looked at how this plays out at the point of purchase in our piece on how translation affects consumer behaviour in retail.
What the Best Global Brands Are Actually Doing
The most sophisticated global marketing teams aren’t choosing between AI and human expertise. They’re building workflows that use both — intelligently.
High-volume, repeatable content goes through AI-assisted pipelines with human post-editing. Creative, brand and campaign content goes through transcreation with native cultural consultants. The decision about which track any piece of content takes is made by people who understand both the brand and the market — not by default or by cost alone.
This approach requires a proper transcreation process — one that’s rigorous, accountable and built around your brand, not around what’s easiest to automate. We’ve set out exactly what that looks like in our guide to how a proper transcreation process prevents common mistakes.
At Alignian, it’s the model we bring to every client engagement through our Adapt services — integrating translation, localisation and transcreation into a single, coherent workflow that protects brand integrity at every stage.
Three Questions for Your Next Localisation Brief
Before your team defaults to an AI-first approach for your next global campaign, ask:
- What is this content actually doing? Informing, or persuading? Explaining, or inspiring? The answer should determine the workflow.
- What would be lost if this content felt generic? For brand communications, the answer is usually: everything that makes it worth producing in the first place.
- Who is accountable for the cultural fit? AI tools don’t carry brand responsibility. Someone on your team — or your agency — needs to.
The Competitive Advantage Is Still Human
AI has made translation faster and cheaper. It has not made culture simpler. The brands that will win in global markets over the next decade are the ones that understand this distinction — and build their localisation strategy accordingly.
The tools will keep improving. But the judgment required to deploy them well — the cultural intelligence, the brand understanding, the creative sensibility — that remains stubbornly, valuably human.
If you’re rethinking your global content and localisation strategy, we’d welcome the conversation.
Talk to the Alignian team about your next global project →
<ul>
<li data-social="facebook">
</li>
<li data-social="twitter">
</li>
<li data-social="linkedin">
</li>
</ul>