DeepL: How AI Transforms the Way Businesses Communicate

English is the global business language, yet only 20% of the world’s population speaks it fluently. In the enterprise environment, where effective communication can make or break success, that has a significant impact on leaders and their teams.

As businesses expand globally and scale into new markets, internal and external language barriers and the resulting poor communication are emerging as a key challenge according to Language AI leader DeepL.

The company, which uses a neural machine translation model that enables human-like written and spoken translation specifically for the enterprise environment, has outlined the financial impact of poor communication on business and the impact and value of Language AI tools.

The paper, ‘The Language Revolution: How AI Improves The Way Businesses Communicate’, finds that communication barriers are impacting businesses from a cost and growth perspective and that AI adoption can mitigate this.  

It explains that, as a result, 2025 will see companies looking to adopt AI solutions that bring ROI-positive value and that a large number of those surveyed (25%) will target specific tasks like translation.

The impact of poor communication

DeepL surveyed close to 800 global decision makers across EMEA and the US, as well as best selling business culture author Erin Meyer. 

It finds that market expansion (35%), engaging customers across borders (32%) and customer service (24%) are the leading language obstacles facing businesses navigating the global landscape. In particular, expanding into new markets is a challenge for European companies operating in locations with multiple official languages or that have export-driven economies. 

External communication is a major barrier to success, particularly around forging lasting connections with key global partners or customers. 

However, DeepL also highlights the importance of internal communication – which Language AI can also make more efficient – citing the cost impact of teams, regions and employees wasting time deciphering unclear communications.

Jarek Kutylowski, CEO and Founder of DeepL, says of the effects of poor communication: “It 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.”

AI driving business value

AI adoption isn’t slowing. According to DeepL, 72% of business leaders plan to integrate AI into their daily operations in 2025. In particular, leaders report looking more closely at how AI is bringing positive value to their organisations.

Across every region, AI budgeting allocations include business operations (28%), workplace tools (19%) and specialised 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%).

Language AI 

DeepL says that ‘organisations prepared to leverage AI stand to gain an enviable advantage’, adding that ‘across industries and countries, AI is proving its worth as a tool to augment, not replace, human expertise’.

In particular, it says, the rapidly growing need to improve communication means that language AI can equip organisations to drive new levels of productivity and break down language barriers. 

Effectively employing Language AI can impact every part of a business by streamlining communication and collaboration in multilingual environments. 

By adopting Language AI tools enterprises can efficiently and effectively reach everyone in their native language, streamline communication and collaboration across languages within existing workflows, empower marketing and comms, drive global sales and securely translate confidential information.

This brings several advantages. For example, the ability to translate high volumes of complex information quickly lowers costs and brings faster time to value. Streamlined translation workloads mean less reliance on costly translation agencies, while enabling employees to speak with colleagues and customers in their native language creates new business opportunities. 

DeepL says businesses are merging Language AI solutions with human expertise and oversight – particularly in highly regulated industries with high-stakes communications, like legal and manufacturing. 

This includes utilising Language AI alongside external translation agencies (32%) and supporting in-house translation teams with AI (31%), to embedding AI into key products (26%). 

To successfully adopt Language AI and take the first practical steps towards breaking down language barriers, DeepL makes several recommendations around defining strategies and use cases. 

These include: putting in place a formal approach to understanding where AI can drive business impact and ROI, begin by implementing internal use cases to train employees, address data privacy and IP security as a priority, develop governance frameworks, invest properly in skills and organisation-wide preparation.

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