Gabriel Fairman is a thought leader and entrepreneur specializing in localization and business process automation. He has navigated Bureau Works from a Boutique Translation Agency to a Global Localization Platform/Translation Management System. A speaker of six languages, Gabriel grew up speaking American English, Brazilian Portuguese, and Argentinian Spanish. He then picked up a bit of French, Italian, and Mandarin. Gabriel writes about the first-hand experience of a business leader, entrepreneur, father, and human being. He loves to play the guitar, cook, play tennis, and be in nature in any way or shape.

Esther spent several years in France and Luxembourg for work and study, and has since returned to her native London. She has a strong languages background, having studied for degrees in French & Linguistics and Translation & Interpreting. She went on to pursue a career in the Language Services industry, where she gained PM, technology and management experience before joining the Slator team.

Florian Faes is the Managing Director of Slator, the leading source of research and market intelligence for translation, localization, interpreting, and language AI. Slator’s Advisory practice is a trusted partner to clients looking for independent analysis. Headquartered in Zurich, Slator has a presence in Asia, Europe, and the US.

Bryan Murphy is the CEO of Smartling. Formerly, Bryan was the VP of vertical markets at eBay and CEO and co-founder of WHI, a SaaS company acquired by eBay in 2012. He has also served as CEO of Breather and as president of Digital for Serta Simmons. Bryan serves as a director for JEGS.com, Playpower, and Madcap. He is also an advisor for Starboard Capital Partners and is a former director of Neighborly and PartsSource.

Raj Sachde works with global enterprises and high-growth innovators to modernize legacy systems and scale next-generation workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS). As part of AWS’s Enterprise Migration & Modernization team, he helps organizations build the cloud and data foundations needed to operationalize language and multimodal AI across diverse markets and industries.

Before AWS, Raj built IBM’s Intelligent Automation business and led large-scale transformation programs at Tata Consultancy Services and Tech Mahindra, where he also headed global M&A. He holds degrees from Harvard Business School and IIM Ahmedabad and is a CFA charterholder.

Raj brings a globally attuned, outcome-driven perspective to the evolving AI landscape—shaped by decades of experience bridging enterprise strategy, emerging technologies, and platform-scale execution.

Prerak Garg is a seasoned product innovation and strategy leader with deep expertise in cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Over the course of his career, he has helped launch breakthrough products and drive large-scale business growth. He currently advises Microsoft’s Senior Leadership Team on high-impact business and technology decisions shaping the company’s long-term trajectory.

Prerak played a pivotal role in developing DAX Copilot, the industry’s first generative AI assistant for physicians—now adopted by over 500 healthcare organizations and credited with saving clinicians more than an hour per day. He also helped define Microsoft’s broader AI strategy, including the product vision for Azure AI Foundry, and led its evolution from a single-model (OAI-centric) approach to a multi-model focus.

He currently leads cross-functional efforts spanning product design, business models, and go-to-market strategy across Microsoft’s Copilot portfolio (e.g., GitHub, M365) and AI infrastructure.

Prerak thrives on solving complex, cross-disciplinary problems at the intersection of technology, business, and user needs. He is passionate about pushing the boundaries of conventional thinking and translating bold ideas into tangible business impact.

Sabri I Hammad is a results-driven executive leader with a distinguished career spanning over two decades, driving significant digital cloud transformations. Currently an AI Solutions Consultant at Google, he specializes in seamlessly integrating deep technical consulting with strategic sales execution to foster customer success.

Throughout his tenure at Google, Sabri held multiple key roles where he accelerated customer adoption of Google Cloud by leading complex digital transformations and implementation strategies. As a Manager of Global Offers, he spearheaded the creation and successful launch of new professional service offerings, generating. He also served as a Customer Success Executive, cultivating accelerated adoption and onboarding of Google Cloud for key organizations and guiding executives through organizational changes.

Prior to Google, Sabri spent a decade at Oracle, where he provided pre-sales technical consulting, designing complex architectures, and developing new cloud services for migrations and DevOps. His expertise spans the full technical lifecycle across various cloud offerings (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, Hybrid/Multi-Cloud) , and he excels at bridging the gap between complex technical solutions and critical business needs.

Florian Faes is the Managing Director of Slator, the leading source of research and market intelligence for translation, localization, interpreting, and language AI. Slator’s Advisory practice is a trusted partner to clients looking for independent analysis. Headquartered in Zurich, Slator has a presence in Asia, Europe, and the US.

Kelly Marchisio leads the Multilingual modeling team at Cohere, whose goal is to build cutting-edge multilingual LLMs for the world. Kelly completed her PhD in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on multilingual representation learning, unsupervised and semi-supervised machine translation, bilingual lexicon induction, and efficient natural language processing. Prior to JHU, Kelly completed master’s degrees Christ’s College, University of Cambridge and Harvard University, and was a web developer at Google in Mountain View, CA.

Andrew Thomas is VP of Marketing at RWS. With over 25 years of experience in the industry, Andrew has witnessed the evolution of content and translation management from manual, labor-intensive work to complex, highly automated systems. He has a passion for embracing change and inspiring others to do the same by explaining complex concepts in a simple and understandable way. As an industry expert, Andrew frequently presents at conferences and events, where he shares his perspectives on the latest trends and developments in the localization industry.

Justin Beaudin is the Founder and CEO of Adapt Global Studios Inc. or Adapt. Adapt’s vision is to integrate AI with human expertise in to provide localization for premium video content at a fraction of the cost and time required for traditional methods. Justin has over 20 years of experience in the media and technology industry, having held several leadership roles including SVP of Global Operations NBCUniversal, Chief Operating Officer Deluxe Media, and CTO Vubiquity. Justin is a self-described: passionate technologist, entrepreneur, operator, dad and nerd.

Guy Piekarz is the CEO of Panjaya, an AI company pioneering natural Video Adaptation at scale. With a deep-tech approach, Panjaya built the first AI platform that delivers expressive lip sync, natural performance, and context-aware translation, making localized video distribution-ready and original in any language. He previously spent nearly a decade at Apple, where he co-founded Apple Sports and was part of the Apple TV founding team. A repeat entrepreneur, Guy has built products at the intersection of AI, media, and technology.

Matt Panousis is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer at LipDub AI — the gold-standard platform for high-fidelity lip-sync. With a robust background in law and entrepreneurship, he has a proven track record in launching and scaling AI startups.

In his role, Matt leads strategy, product, operations, and growth. Under his leadership, LipDub AI is swiftly earning acclaim as the highest-quality, enterprise-grade lip-syncing software on the market—already being used by an impressive roster of global customers across M&E, marketing & advertising, online education, and social media, including Accenture, WPP, McCann, and Ring.

Before LipDub AI, Matt founded the VC-backed technology startup ACTO, where he applied AI to modernize how pharmaceuticals and medical devices are brought to market. Trained in law, he blends legal rigor with entrepreneurial execution to challenge convention and build category-defining products.

Alex has 10+ years experience in the Translation and Localization industry, primarily in pre-sales functions (bid management and consultancy), with roles such as Solution Architect, Team Lead – Bid Management, Project and Production Manager.

Scott Suckow is Senior Director of Language Services at UCHealth, a leading university-affiliated health system with locations in Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska. In this capacity he oversees the delivery of language access services at the system’s 15 hospitals and 375 outpatient clinics. He leads a team of 105 staff, oversees a $21M budget, and manages the provision of 950K interpretation encounters annually.

Mr Suckow earned a Masters in Healthcare Administration degree from the University of Southern California and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas. Additionally, he is board certified in healthcare management by the American College of Healthcare Executives, and recently served as President of the College’s Rocky Mountains Chapter. Prior to these roles, Mr Suckow served in the United States Air Force as a healthcare administrator for 23 years, culminating as Chief Administrative Officer for the Wilford Hall Ambulatory Surgical Center, the largest ambulatory care facility in the Department of Defense. During his time in the military, he worked closely with interpreters at locations in Southwest Asia, Central Asia and Europe. Although not an interpreter, Mr Suckow studied languages at the undergraduate level, and has held a life-long passion for exploring languages and cultures around the globe.

At Phrase, the focus is on enriching AI-driven translation technologies to facilitate global business expansion. As VP of AI Solutions, my role is to pioneer innovative strategies, leveraging generative AI to address intricate business challenges and propel product development that aligns with customer expectations. With a tenure of over 15 years in the industry, I have steered my organizations toward achieving record global revenue by tapping into diverse markets, cultures and solutions.

Juan is a Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Tech Lead, and the father of DragonCrawl, a system for code-free and maintenance free mobile testing. Juan specializes in training and productionizing CV, NLP, and large language models. Juan’s job is to train heroes.

Govindarajan (Govind) Varadan has 22 years of experience in helping organizations of all sizes adopt technologies like AI, Cloud, and Digital Transformation to scale their business.

Anna is a language services industry professional with expertise in project management, management and quality systems, and a special interest in the life sciences sector. Starting her career in data annotation in Sydney, she then gained 10 years’ experience in London and Madrid with major LSPs before joining Slator as a research contributor. Anna is today Slator’s Head of Research. She holds a B.A. (Hons) in Linguistics from the University of Sydney.

Prajwal is the co-founder and Chief Scientist of sync., a research company advancing state‑of‑the‑art generative models for video editing. At sync., he leads the research roadmap to enable the dream of “perfect character control” in videos. The team is a pioneer in AI lipsync, enabling accurate dialogue replacement in any video without subject‑specific training. Prajwal holds a PhD from the University of Oxford, where he has developed breakthrough architectures in tasks like visual speech recognition and sign language recognition.

During his Masters’ at IIIT Hyderabad, India, he developed his most influential model, Wav2Lip, kickstarting the AI lipsync revolution and opening up new possibilities for video translation and end‑to‑end dialogue replacement.

Prajwal is passionate about building reliable, production‑ready research models that preserve performance under real‑world constraints and respect creative intent.

Pramod is a senior principal at Blumberg Capital, based in San Francisco.

Before joining Blumberg Capital, Pramod was a principal at 11.2 Capital where he focused on investing in early-stage cybersecurity, data, dev tools and AI. He led seed rounds in Coalesce, Permiso, StrikeReady, Surf Security, MightyMeld, Leen.dev and Collinear AI.

Previously, Pramod was Director of Corporate Strategy/Venture Capital at VMware, advising senior leadership on product, growth and M&A along with investing in startups such as JFrog (IPO), CloudEndure (acq by AWS), Armis (acq by Insight), GuardiCore (acq by Akamai), Wavefront, VeloCloud (acq by VMware) and Affirmed Networks (acq by Microsoft).

Pramod earned an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is an engineer by training with a B Tech in electrical engineering from IIT Bombay and MS in electrical engineering from Purdue University. Prior to earning his MBA, Pramod was a long-time operator building and shipping enterprise products at Sun Microsystems and two early stage startups.

Shesh is an accomplished entrepreneur, investor, and startup mentor with over two decades of experience building and scaling companies. He has backed more than 10 pioneering deep-tech ventures across AI, semiconductors, infrastructure, and automotive technology, and previously led an accelerator program that honed his ability to identify and support high-growth startups. His investment portfolio includes category-defining companies such as Anthropic, Perplexity, Together AI, Twelve Labs, Inworld, and SambaNova.

Esther spent several years in France and Luxembourg for work and study, and has since returned to her native London. She has a strong languages background, having studied for degrees in French & Linguistics and Translation & Interpreting. She went on to pursue a career in the Language Services industry, where she gained PM, technology and management experience before joining the Slator team.

Esther spent several years in France and Luxembourg for work and study, and has since returned to her native London. She has a strong languages background, having studied for degrees in French & Linguistics and Translation & Interpreting. She went on to pursue a career in the Language Services industry, where she gained PM, technology and management experience before joining the Slator team.

Ian Evans serves as the CEO of XTM International. Based in the UK, Ian has 30 years of experience within the software industry, covering security, governance, data privacy, mobility and CRM technology. In his role he supports global growth programs across all functions. Most recently, Ian served as Managing Director of EMEA at OneTrust from 2017 to 2022, and prior to that as Vice President and Managing Director for EMEA at AirWatch from 2011 to 2017.