The Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ISBE) invited Jurga Zilinskiene MBE to speak about the future of AI and entrepreneurship at their annual conference at Cutlers’ Hall, Sheffield.
Jurga looks to the future, and explores why enterprises and government policy makers need to embrace AI now to create more jobs in the creative industries and help people to flourish.
A delegate at ISBE asked me what impact AI would have on jobs. This is a hot topic because there have been dire warnings about how AI will herald mass job losses. The truth is, history shows how technological advances actually bring new career opportunities that were hard to imagine before they were created.
To be a winner in this new era, enterprises and policy makers would be wise to adopt lots of future thinking because the AI revolution is speeding towards everyone.
One sector where AI will create many new jobs is in the multilingual video production industry. I know this because this sector has been waiting for AI to come of age. When I founded Guildhawk in 2001, the creative industries were dominated by translation, transcriptions, subtitling, dubbing and voice-overs delivered by humans in a studio, office or from home.
But six years earlier, in 1995, there was a clue to the media revolution that was coming. It was the movie Toy Story, and it pioneered the use of CGI to animate the first ever full-length feature film. The technology initially disrupted jobs, then created a whole new industry of special effects animators, working globally, around the clock. New technology had empowered people to dream harder and wow audiences.
Amanda Murphy, the BAFTA multi-award-winning executive film producer was one of the first to pioneer the sharing of expertise to promote fusion between the gaming and film industries in her work at Royal Holloway University.
AI is now sprinkling its magic dust on the video localisation sector by enabling businesses to make their stories available to audiences in language they know best using avatars, voice cloning and cinema grade digital animation.
To stay ahead, you must always look for opportunities to disrupt the market, even your own business because if you don’t do it, a competitor will. Wise business leaders are always alert to disruption. Being an entrepreneur that loves both language, coding and the arts, I’m always seeking ways to unite the three to make the world a better place, even though it could disrupt the way my company operates.
In 2001, I was the first interpreter in my business and saw opportunities to grow by improving the way we select and manage qualified linguists. We now have a global network of thousands of the most talented freelancers, all with verified credentials and industry-specific expertise. Our in-house language capabilities are sensational too I must add.
In 2003, when we needed a new database to replace Microsoft Excel to project manage the increasingly complex assignments, my tutor and I became the company’s first software coders and developed our first software. Productivity increased so much that I instantly understood the power of how to improve results.
The result is that today, we have a sensational team of in-house software and AI engineers backed by amazing academics at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU). Together we are spearheading advances in machine learning that will protect lives and businesses.
On reflection, disrupting our business with technology was not a revolutionary act, it is a natural evolution, and every day, we are sowing the seeds for a safer, happier world with humans working in collaboration with AI.
I embraced technology, not because I love Toy Story and Marvel superhero movies with amazing CGI effects, but because I believe AI is a force for good. That faith paid off for me and today, AI supports everything we do. It helped us win the prestigious Queens’ Award for excellence in international trade and opened a new market for creating multilingual media.
Thanks to AI and our partnership with SHU backed by Innovate UK, we have successfully transformed Guildhawk. And this is just the beginning.
Ask ChatGPT which is the best company for creating multilingual digital human avatar videos that are secure and it will describe how Guildhawk offer an end-to-end managed service unlike any other company.
By investing in our teams and the latest innovations, our people have developed new digital skills that enhance their already remarkable language and project management skills. Localisation sits at the heart of what we do, but in a new way thanks to advances in AI-powered technologies.
Global clients historically commissioned Guildhawk to localise technical and creative content they were producing. We’ve localised everything from technical manuals and novels to plays and musicals for the West End stage. Clients now partner with us to produce everything from storyboarding and script translations to high-definition avatars and product videos.
Organisations trust Guildhawk to do this for two reasons.
And there is more to come in this human and AI collaboration culture. Our talented teams are now pushing the boundaries by developing new translation products that integrate into platforms. This helps businesses to be more productive and makes AI translation results more human like.
Technology has not replaced the miraculous minds of the human linguists, filmmakers and voice-over artists; it has become their powerful assistant. AI is helping Guildhawk to introduce new processes for video creation, translation, voice-overs, subtitling, voice cloning, dubbing and more. These are game-changing because they can be done at lightning speed compared to what was possible before.
AI models that are trained and supervised by humans can achieve this because they process information faster and more accurately than a human, and they don’t need sleep or holidays.
AI created another capability for Guildhawk, the curation of high-quality multilingual datasets. This is becoming big issue for AI companies because AI needs to be trained on high-quality industry specific data sets that are verified by humans to prevent errors.
Many moons ago, Google invited us to work with them on a translation solution they were piloting. It wasn’t progressed and one of the barriers identified was the quality of data. That is why, for the past 9 years, Guildhawk has been investing into our high-quality, curated multilingual data lake that we use to improve machine translations.
Like the Toy Story premiere in 1995, AI is giving us a glimpse into the future. If you have used Suno AI to create a completely original rock anthem, watched a video generated by Mid Journey or seen the avatar of me talking in fluent Cantonese (which I do not speak), you will understand how AI video is going interstellar.
The market for AI generated digital human avatar videos is anticipated to reach a staggering USD 270 billion by 2030, growing at 49.8% CAGR from 2024 to 2030. The growth is driven by advances in cutting-edge avatar and voice cloning software developed by leaders like our partner Synthesia.
Demand is driven by global organisations that want their video content to be memorable, and personalised. They know the secret is to make it immersive and available in the viewer’s language because this creates better engagement.
Guildhawk has seen a growing trend towards multilingual digital human avatar videos. Global clients like Sandvik and a national energy infrastructure company now partner with us to produce their multilingual avatars videos for safety training.
Other organisations commission us to fully manage production of videos for both customer and employee facing subjects such as health and safety and compliance training into more than 40 languages.
All videos must be translated accurately with perfect timing and lip synchronisation so there is no risk of misunderstanding.
It can be seen how AI has already started to create new jobs in the language services industry. These will evolve further and embrace skilled roles such as:
The new roles are a fusion of creative, linguistic and technical talent. This blend of human and AI collaboration will apply to other sectors too. Thus, enterprises that want to flourish would be wise to follow our lead by investing in mastery of human and AI collaboration, even if it disrupts their traditional business.