Most organizations plan carefully for what they are building. Almost none plan for what maintaining it will cost them. Drawing on insights from Elaine Barsoom, who built Nike's first AI Center of Excellence, and Phrase CEO Georg Ell, this article examines why the build vs buy decision is fundamentally an ownership question and what that means for organizations scaling AI across global markets.

Your brand and your existing playbook will earn you a foothold in a new market. What they won't do is carry you to sustained growth. Kevin O'Donnell on why international expansion requires more than translation -- and where most companies lose momentum.

The real opportunity in AI isn't faster output -- it's reaching audiences that were previously too niche or too expensive to serve. Kevin O'Donnell explains why hyper-localization is becoming a baseline expectation for international growth teams.

When no single leader owns international performance, investment scatters, team priorities diverge, and the signals that would tell leadership where to act never surface in a coherent way.

When AI generates and adapts messaging across dozens of markets at a scale no human team can review in full, the failures are rarely dramatic. They show up quietly, as declining engagement, higher drop-off, and underperformance in markets leadership thought it had covered.

For many localization teams, video still sits outside the system. Text moves through mature workflows, while audio and video rely on separate vendors, tools, and review processes. The next step is not simply localizing more video, but integrating it into the operating model for global content.

The assumption that content which reaches customers will also win them is costing global organizations more than most of their dashboards will ever show. Georg Ell, CEO of Phrase; Dr. Arle Lommel, Senior Analyst at CSA Research; and Chris Dell, who built and led a 400-person global content organization at Booking.com, have each watched that assumption fail at scale, and their diagnosis of why it keeps failing points to decisions being made long before a single word of content is written.

Enterprise AI is advancing fast, but many organizations are failing to translate experimentation into real advantage. Alvarez & Marsal’s Raf Postepski explains why success depends on leadership, strategy, and redesigning how businesses operate, make decisions, and scale globally.

Gaming companies that integrate compliance into product design, localization workflows, and go-to-market planning can reduce launch delays, avoid regulatory penalties, and access more markets simultaneously. Rather than treating legal alignment as a final-stage review, embedding it early turns regulation from a cost into a competitive advantage.