Content touches everything. Content is our information, our communication, our experience. Content provides facts, answers questions, and expresses views. We are exposed to content via many different channels including digital displays, internet, television, audio, books, documents and events. Content drives actions, attention and retention… Content is the currency of any digital transformation… and in global businesses touches multiple cultures, contexts and languages. This becomes both a superb opportunity but also a significant challenge to manage and deliver.

We at SDL wholeheartedly believe in the power of Global Content opportunity. That is why we have kicked off our new year with the launch of our Five Future States of Content — declaring what we believe will be disrupting and driving content creation, translation, organization and delivery in 2018.

Being at the heart of every (customer) journey, content has reached new dimensions of importance. Having the content edge and arsenal to meet demands of a global audience is not only beneficial but critical in today’s digital society, and our five future states of content will take you a step closer to getting there.

So what do the Five Future States of Content mean to SDL?

Breaking through the noise requires your message to be understandable, digestible and compelling enough to make the viewer click or swipe. This is not easy in the tidal wave of information generation we live in today.

Adding to this, the parameters of effective content creation and communication has undergone a paradigm shift in the past ten years — making content not only easier to generate and translate but to display and access. Anyone can create, publish and access content in the age of the citizen journalist… artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are set to take content to the next level… but how can you do this across multiple content sources, multiple formats, multiple languages and multiple applications and services on multiple devices? Not easy at all. Then add a bit of volume and pace and this is even more challenging.

The solutions will require software, talented humans of many disciplines and we’ll find more and more that AI will be the ally we need to help organize, create, translate and secure content, and ensure it is interpreted globally. This process, with the help of AI, will allow for greater content agility and the ability to turn-on-a-dime when market forces require a course action or correction.

As a case in point, self-creating and organizing content may seem like something out of a science fiction movie, but advances in AI and ML make this and other exciting content developments in a reality for brands in 2018.

Our five future states of content highlight how by adopting the latest developments in technology and understanding more about how and what content customers consume on a human level, brands can capture a market in motion and meet the speed and volume of future content requirements both locally and globally, while complying with the most stringent security requirements and regulations.

The future is now — SDL’s Five Future States of Content!

Based on 15 years of research and development into machine learning, translation and content management technologies, over 45 patents and 200+ peer-reviewed industry papers, SDL’s Five Future States of Content provide unparalleled insight into content and how it can transform your business in 2018.

To kick off, we will address how content will create itself and enable brands to generate finely-tuned content from information stored in a variety of repositories across their business automatically — giving every customer their own, truly unique experience.

We cover how content will organize itself, with brands using machine learning to create taxonomies of all its company’s content to facilitate better search results, improving metadata, optimizing SEO and enabling better content discoverability to maximize reuse and return on already invested content creation efforts, helping form the next frontier of digital experiences.

We describe how content will be agile, structured and formatted in such a way so that it is machine ready. More companies will start to adopt a continuous global operating model, enhancing global content and localization teams with AI and ML capabilities. This includes authoring tools and machine translation to create and deliver engaging glocal content at scale and speed in response to our fast-paced society.

We showcase how content will be your best salesperson, with brands already shifting their sales priorities to focus on content creation rather than just selling, as content never stops talking to your audience. The creation, translation, organization and delivery of content will become as much as a priority as incentivizing and training sales teams. Content that sells will also expand beyond the traditional marketing materials to in-depth product information today’s customer now looks for.

Lastly, we explain how content will be secured. Upcoming legislation, including Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), means that businesses need absolute control of customer information, requiring transparency, audit trails and data custody. To organize and secure high volumes of data and content in 2018, brands will turn to on-premises ML technologies to translate, analyze and automate their content supply chains.

To learn more, download our Five Future States of Content eBook. In an era with excess information, relevancy and localisation quickly determines the signal from the noise. SDL presents the promise of enabling brands to sound that signal at every stage of the purchase journey without distraction. Every new block we build is based on the one before, constructing a more powerful and effective content tool which builds both global and local brands — from neural machine translation, translation memory and professional human translation to content and digital experience management and AI copywriting assistance — make content your power.

Our Five Future States of Content bring the future of content to you now, supporting brand globalization in 2018.