“English has become the go-to language for international business, but the reality is that only about 20% of the world’s population speaks it fluently,” said Jarek Kutylowski, CEO and Founder, DeepL. “This has a significant impact on global businesses and professionals – over half of C-level leaders spend more than an hour each day dealing with ineffective communication, a challenge that also extends to other management and leadership levels. To address this, what we’re seeing through our research is that businesses are increasingly turning to AI solutions – 72% are planning to integrate AI into daily operations, with 25% targeting specific tasks such as translation in 2025.”

Report highlights include: 

• Businesses are budgeting for AI integration: In 2025, businesses will be looking more closely into how AI is bringing ROI-positive value to their organization. Across every region, top AI budgeting allocations include business operations (28%), workplace tools (19%) and specialized tasks such as translation (25%). The Netherlands shows the highest AI spending commitment, with 30% of businesses in the nation planning to integrate AI into all operations, closely followed by Germany (29%), Belgium (28%), France (26%) and the United States (25%).
• Communication barriers are a significant issue facing global companies: As businesses expand globally and scale into new markets, language barriers are emerging as a key challenge. Market expansion (35%), engaging customers across borders (32%), and customer service (24%) are cited as the top language obstacles faced in their business while navigating this global landscape. In particular, expanding into new markets is a significant challenge for European companies operating in geographies with multiple official languages or export-driven economies – including Belgium (45%), Germany (41%), and the UK (44%) – followed by the US (37%), which represents the world’s second-largest export economy. Of the markets surveyed, France (42%), the US (38%) and Belgium (38%) also reported the most significant challenges while serving customers from other markets; emphasizing the importance of robust multilingual capabilities in those regions.
• Specialized AI tools like DeepL are combatting top business communication challenges: Language AI is unlocking significant growth and efficiency for global businesses, enabling them to harness language as a strategic asset to better tap into the power of communication and collaboration both internally and externally – all while driving deeper connections and expanding global reach. Businesses are merging Language AI solutions with human expertise and oversight to solve their urgent communication issues and minimize the challenges associated with cross-cultural communication – particularly in highly regulated industries with high-stakes communications, like legal and manufacturing. This includes utilizing Language AI alongside external translation agencies (32%) and supporting in-house translation teams with AI (31%), to embedding AI into key products (26%).
• Internal communication is a growing priority in European markets: Internal language barriers are leaving global companies struggling to effectively and efficiently move business forward. In particular, The Netherlands (31%) and France (25%) report the highest pressure to support communication between teams speaking different languages, highlighting how linguistic diversity impacts both customer engagement and workplace collaboration. DeepL’s findings are aligned with a 2024 Forbes study that found half of all knowledge workers say they are hampered by communication challenges.

“In order to communicate with people from other countries, naturally, we have to use English, and it’s always urgent. It used to take staff up to half a day to translate a document created in Japanese into English. Now that we are using DeepL, we can do this task very fast,” said Shoji Otsubo, Senior Manager, Panasonic Connect.

Since its inception in 2017, DeepL has become the go-to Language AI provider for businesses around the world, offering cutting-edge translation and writing solutions that are a critical investment for international business growth, addressing communication challenges across various domains. DeepL’s rapid growth and demand worldwide are also reflected by its rapidly-expanding customer network, which now includes over 100,000+ businesses, governments and other organizations worldwide including 50% of the Fortune 500.

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What inspired the creation of DeepL, and how has the vision evolved since its inception?
DeepL was developed in 2017 with a mission to break down language barriers faced by businesses through specialised AI technology.

Seamless communication across languages is crucial for companies operating internationally or looking to scale – both in order to boost efficiency and to find new markets. Our models are purpose-built for language and translation tasks, offering unparalleled precision.This accuracy is further enhanced by the input of many human translators to find the careful balance between accuracy and fluency and provide more natural sounding translations.

We are constantly evolving to ensure we are meeting our customers’ needs and have achieved this by introducing innovative products such as the Glossary feature, Tone setting for translations, and Style for writing. Our latest innovation, DeepL Voice, provides voice translation for real time-spoken interactions. Today, we offer AI translation and writing solutions used by over 100K+ businesses worldwide.

Can you share a pivotal moment in DeepL’s journey that significantly impacted its trajectory?
The recent launch of DeepL Voice marks our first foray into speech based translations. With the first two products,Voice for Meetings and Voice for Conversations, DeepL Voice makes it possible to conduct virtual meetings across several languages as well as real-time translation for in-person conversations. We believe that real-time speech translation is the next frontier for us as a business, enabling us to extend our expertise beyond writing solutions, and enabling businesses to communicate in multiple languages as required.

What differentiates DeepL’s AI and neural networks from other translation technologies?
Our success comes down to the strong academic-level research we’ve always been active in, coupled with the specialization on solving translation and language problems for businesses in those high-value use cases. There are not a lot of software companies that have such a deep tech expertise and carry out such detailed AI research.

DeepL is taking its unique offerings a step further by being one of the first in the world to commercially debut the new NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with DGX GB200 systems, helping researchers to test new ideas faster, train models more quickly, and deliver near real-time inference whenever our users need us.

How do you ensure translations maintain cultural nuance and context across diverse languages?
We work hand in hand with thousands of human translators to ensure our models outperform the competition. Our expert team of translators is involved across many states of our R&D process, from building the models for a new language to improving existing ones.

By incorporating a human element in the initial phases of our research, we avoid the risk of our translations sounding robotic, and help ensure that our translations pick up cultural nuances. This also applies during the evaluation stage; while synthetic evaluations deliver quick results, the ground truth is to ask those that have invented and mastered the use of language to provide feedback on translations – how accurate they are, how nuanced, how native the language feels. Only we humans can judge on that. To this day, some of our earliest adopters and users are translators.

What AI and machine learning advancements do you foresee driving DeepL’s future innovation?
Language AI is one of the most strategic investments a business can make. Since our inception, we have been a research-driven company. We will continue to invest heavily in our development as a company, creating specialized translation and writing solutions for businesses worldwide. Combining our depth of research with proprietary data accumulated over seven years, we can understand unique business needs and address them with our solutions.

B2B is our fastest-growing segment and is at the core of our GTM initiatives, driving our platform expansion. Our reach across markets has been further solidified by key milestones this year, such as the opening of our first office in the US and the launch of our services in Arabic.

What growth opportunities do you see for DeepL in the Middle East, and how are you tailoring the product for that market?
At DeepL, we understand the unique business needs of the region and the importance of Arabic communication for businesses here, which is why, earlier this year, we launched our translation services in Arabic to provide millions of companies and employees in all industries whose primary language is Arabic, the opportunity to go global and standardize communication across borders. Additionally, Arabic is the first language we have launched that is written and read from right-to-left, which represents a significant milestone in our journey.

How do you approach partnerships with regional businesses and governments to expand DeepL’s global presence?
We work closely with our customers globally, regardless of sector, to truly understand their needs. Our customers span multiple sectors, from the private to the public, including governments. Learning more about their different needs has enabled us to build solutions tailored to their needs; for example, we launched a specific commercial package earlier in the year called DeepL for Enterprise, which covered multiple areas our customers had been asking us for. 

What industries or use cases have the most potential for adopting DeepL’s services, particularly in multilingual regions like the Middle East?
Some of the sectors that benefit the most from Language AI are retail, manufacturing, and legal.

Using retail as an example, Language AI allows for operational efficiency by scaling communication across global offices, and reducing translation timings. Language AI can help develop multilingual marketing assets and customer service tools, translate internal systems, and enable seamless international expansion.

We’ve also seen significant benefits within the legal and manufacturing sectors. Given the UAE is home to diverse cultures and languages, legal professionals can benefit from DeepL’s AI translation services to bridge the language barrier often encountered by international law firms and practitioners. Our translator allows global manufacturing facilities to ease their supply chain and distribution with accurate translation of customs documents, product descriptions and local regulations.

How does DeepL’s technology empower startups and SMEs, especially those looking to scale globally?
Many startups and SMEs operating globally or looking to scale internationally need quick and accurate translation solutions. From employees communicating in their native languages and still understanding each other to external communications or legal documents, translation is a daily requirement for most organizations.

This is where we come in. At DeepL, we are focused on addressing the business use-case for language. Due to a lack of precision, several everyday AI tools pose security risks for businesses. Known for accuracy and security, our tools allow businesses to uphold professional credibility via trusted, high-quality, full-stack technology within a rigorous security framework.

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“Bringing the quality and security that DeepL is known for to real-time speech translation was the next frontier for us as a business and we’re excited to finally unveil our first products. Building on the expertise and models we’ve developed since our launch in 2017, we’ve been working closely with customers as part of a beta program to ensure that we’re delivering a solution that solves real-life challenges businesses face,” said Jarek Kutylowski, CEO and Founder at DeepL.

“DeepL is already a leader in written translation, but real time speech translation is an entirely different story. When translating speech as it happens, you’re dealing with incomplete input, pronunciation issues, latency and more, all of which can lead to inaccurate translations and poor user experience. These are the same challenges that are oftentimes faced in human conversation that can lead to misunderstandings, so we built a solution that would take these into account from the offset and enable businesses to break down language barriers by enabling them to communicate in multiple languages as required,” Kutylowski continued.

The launch of DeepL Voice marks the company’s first foray into speech-based translations, bringing DeepL’s industry leading translation quality and security to spoken communication with two powerful products:

• DeepL Voice for Meetings eliminates language barriers from virtual meetings. It enables every meeting participant to speak in their preferred language, while other participants receive translated captions in real-time so they can engage and communicate in their native language thus increasing engagement through clearer communication and allowing people to communicate where it was previously not possible.
• DeepL Voice for Conversations works on mobile devices to enable one-on-one, in-person conversations across languages thanks to translated captions. It provides two convenient viewing modes to ensure each person can follow translations easily on one device.

DeepL Voice expands the company’s suite of robust language and communication tools available via the DeepL Language AI platform, which is trusted by 100,000 businesses and governments worldwide for its accuracy and security. To ensure that it achieves the high levels of quality and accuracy required for business usage that DeepL is known for, this new Voice technology is powered by AI models trained on diverse data sets that take into account different accents and environments.

DeepL Voice is now available to businesses worldwide and supports the following spoken languages at launch, with more to follow in the future: English, German, Japanese, Korean, Swedish, Dutch, French, Turkish, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Italian, with translated captions available in all 33 DeepL Translator supported languages.

The launch of DeepL Voice was the pinnacle of DeepL’s first flagship conference, DeepL Dialogues, hosted in Berlin on November 13. Audience members in attendance were able to see a live-demo, hear from beta customers and see how the solutions can enable them to break down language barriers across their business communication.

Christine Aubry, Internationalisation Coordinator from Brioche Pasquier, a beta customer of DeepL Voice who also attended DeepL Dialogues, added:  “Before DeepL Voice, our main challenge was maintaining the inclusion of our international sites in Company projects.The experience was great, DeepL Voice for Meetings really brought our teams together – bridging the gap between our sites and opening the door to collaboration and teamwork. I have tested other tools which generally only support one language in the meeting, but there is nothing like this; DeepL Voice is by far the most complete tool I have used.”

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