MAIDENHEAD, England,
December 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --
SDL (LSE: SDL), a global leader in content creation, translation
and delivery, today reveals that its Five Future States of
Content (#5FutureStates) have become a reality, after a series
of its innovations that have been incubated over the past year have
begun to deliver solutions based on artificial intelligence (AI)
and machine learning (ML). These developments, which span across
the content supply chain, not only help global brands move from
manual to autonomous futures as they evolve towards a global
content operating model (GCOM), but enable them to create
compelling content that drives continuous customer experiences.
"Early in 2018, SDL announced its Five Future States of
Content, a series of concepts predicting exciting prospects where
content will create itself, organize itself, secure itself, be
agile and be an organization's best salesperson, with some of these
predictions already a reality today," said Peggy Chen, CMO at SDL. "What makes the
difference in the accuracy of our predictions is SDL's unwavering
commitment to meet customers' needs and laser-focus on leading the
way in what's next on content creation, translation and delivery -
bringing to fruition concepts that were just a mere idea a little
over a year ago. To highlight where investment is needed, we also
provide insight into our upcoming research, which identifies
rising customer expectations in seamless experiences. Here's how
our predictions and research fared."
-
Content will create itself: Content
makes the digital world go around, and drives every stage of the
customer journey, from research through to purchase, product use
and ongoing support. And it needs to be available
24/7. According to SDL's
commissioned research, 82% of customers expect brands
to be available whenever needed. If it's not, a third
(27%) will simply stop their
purchase. However, for most companies, the biggest
challenge lies in keeping up with demand and finding better ways to
create, translate and deliver content. SDL predicted that with the
rise of AI, there was potential to get more value out of the
content already produced, by giving brands the ability to create
content derivatives which resonate with more audiences
worldwide.
What SDL delivered: Alongside people and advancing
processes, the launch of SDL Content Assistant, powered
by Hai, SDL's Linguistic AI, automates, accelerates and enhances
the derivative content creation process. The content assistant
quickly identifies themes, patterns and main ideas from source
documentation and extracts key topics; automatically identifying
key content elements such as quotes, facts and figures, and
providing content summaries, which can be used for blogs and social
posts.
- Content will be agile: Keeping up with
consumer demand means creating content around the clock in the
right formats. SDL's research shows 57% of consumers
surveyed read product/services specifications online and 39% read
product/service documentation (pdfs and paper manuals). To meet
consumer demand, companies must streamline handoffs between content
creation, translation, and delivery and create an efficient and
agile GCOM.
What SDL delivered: By combining new ways
of agile working with componentized content, automated and
integrated translation capabilities, and linguistic AI, brands can
enable agile content creation, translation and delivery like never
before. As an example, SDL's recently launched end-to-end
localization platform, SDL Language Cloud, changes the
traditional approach to managing content projects to achieve
greater agility, helping users think about their processes and
automate them.
- Content
will organize itself: While
everyone relies on content, too much becomes inconsumable and
unmanageable. When asked about their best digital experiences with
brands, SDL research respondents pointed out the following
features: Ease of website search and pre-filtered content, logical
categorization and clear, accurate product
information. However, 66% said they have abandoned
a purchase due to insufficient product information. AI will
help structure, classify and tag content in a way that it becomes
highly organized and searchable across the business.
What SDL delivered: With the new SDL
Tridion DX, which combines the power of SDL Tridion Sites and SDL
Tridion Docs, companies can today use shared taxonomies across
content types for marketing and product content, ensuring better
search results, targeted content, consistency with industry
standards and term bases, as well as better reporting. SDL's
Linguistic AI, Hai, also provides additional support to taxonomies
and tagging - all enabling companies to organize their content
better both internally and externally.
- Content will be secure: With nearly 60
million Americans affected by identity theft, according to a 2018
online survey by the Harris Poll (The Harris Poll,
2018), companies need to protect translation processes and
ensure they do not expose sensitive, protected or confidential
information through copying, transmission or use by unauthorized
individuals. AI will help apply the correct category tagging to
ensure regulatory compliance and ensure no personal data goes
through an insecure process.
What SDL delivered: SDL launched a series
of secure deployments for its Neural Machine Translation (MT)
platform, introducing Edge Cloud capabilities that seamlessly
connect the on-premises MT environment to provide secure
ground-to-cloud deployment flexibility. Additionally, SDL's Secure
Translation Supply Chain and Content Management technology is
designed with security in mind. Organizations concerned with data
breaches can work in the comfort of knowing their data is locked
down throughout the translation process.
- Content will be your best
salesperson: Online, every sale is ultimately built on
content. More sales increases demands and content complexities.
Today, more than 70% of consumers surveyed by SDL have
experienced issues with content online including language barriers,
lack of customization and inability to find the right
content. Brands will need to ensure their content is
impactful, and engages across the customer journey.
What SDL delivered: SDL has listened to the
recurring issues by consumers and has made it easier to meet the
increase in content volumes while also driving the customer
experience by scaling content creation, translation, and delivery.
By using SDL's network of in-country linguistic resources, combined
with content and translation technology, such as Linguistic AI and
Machine Translation, organizations can create content once and then
multiply the amount of content by the number of target languages
without risk to the brand or the relevancy of their message. This
is made easy with SDL Tridion DX, SDL Accessibility
Solution - which enables content accessibility across every
channel - and SDL Multilingual Website solution, which enables
organizations to experiment with automatically translated web pages
and identify which content should be sent for more refined human
translation… and all without having to increase headcount.
"Our ambition is to build a model for our customers that deliver
machine first, human optimized GCOM solutions, taking the content
operating model from manual to automated. Our 2018 predictions set
out a blueprint for this and paved the way for new solutions
designed to bring the five future states of content closer to a
reality. In 2019, we will take more steps in helping our customers
create exceptional customer journeys by making predictions on the
future content landscape, so watch this space," concluded Chen.
About SDL
SDL (LSE: SDL) is the global leader in content creation,
translation and delivery. For over 25 years we've helped companies
communicate with confidence and deliver transformative business
results by enabling powerful experiences that engage customers
across multiple touchpoints worldwide. Are you in the know? Find
out why 88 of the top 100 global companies work with and trust us
on SDL.com. Follow us
on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
SOURCE SDL plc