The volume of content that enterprises produce has passed a threshold that most organizational structures were never designed to handle. Content now flows continuously from marketing, product, support, and compliance teams across every channel and market, at a pace that has accelerated sharply over the past two years. According to Canto’s 2026 State of Digital Content report, a survey of 434 content and creative professionals found that 82% of teams increased their content output last year, with nearly one in three reporting a significant jump. That acceleration shows no sign of slowing, and it is reshaping how organizations think about content operations, staffing, and infrastructure.
Despite the scale, most organizations still manage content operations with a project mindset. A campaign launches, content is created, it ships, the project closes. The next campaign restarts the entire cycle from scratch. This worked when content volume was manageable and the number of markets was small. It does not work when an organization operates across twenty or more languages and content must be updated continuously rather than periodically.
Why just ‘good enough’ will cost more
Scott Kinka, Chief Strategy Officer at Bridgepointe Technologies, has spent three decades advising enterprises on technology decisions. On Phrase’s In Other Words podcast, he described a pattern he sees repeatedly when organizations expand globally. They invest heavily in the customer experience for their core market and then accept something visibly worse everywhere else. He described a global media company that took the opposite approach.
“The way they answer a customer interaction is going to be the same wherever they are and in whatever language they choose to communicate.”
That commitment required infrastructure, connecting AI-powered content systems with human expertise across languages, so that the experience held up regardless of market.
Most organizations have not made that commitment, and the gap shows. Style guides go stale and terminology drifts across markets. Quality standards vary by team, and the institutional knowledge about why certain decisions were made disappears when people move on. The longer content is managed as a series of one-off efforts, the more expensive it becomes to bring it back into alignment.
The enterprise content management market reflects this growing recognition. Grand View Research projects the ECM market will grow from $44.7 billion in 2026 to $110.4 billion by 2033, a trajectory that signals enterprises are starting to invest in content with the kind of rigor they have long applied to financial systems and supply chains.
When automation is not enough
The instinct when content operations start breaking down is to buy tools, adding more automation and faster workflows powered by better AI. But tools layered onto a fragmented process tend to automate the fragmentation itself.
Elaine Barsoom, who built Nike’s first AI Center of Excellence and appeared on In Other Words to discuss the build vs. buy decisions that define how global brands scale, identified the real gap.
“Most leaders think they’re buying automationWhat they’re actually trying to buy is coordination. How do we get teams to work from the same system instead of stitching things together manually?”
Her observation extends well beyond the question of technology purchasing. It describes precisely what happens when content operations scale without shared infrastructure underneath them. Teams adopt their own tools and create their own processes, producing content that meets local needs but fragments the organization’s ability to operate coherently across markets.
Scott makes a related observation on the podcast about what separates organizations that extract value from platform investments from those that do not.
“The ones that do it well understand what they’re hoping to get out of it. It’s really a use case development strategy… there is an ongoing relationship between the line of business and IT on their use of the application.”
For global content operations, this means treating the platform that manages multilingual content as foundational infrastructure, not as a tool bolted on at the end. The right platform gives organizations visibility into how content is performing across markets and the intelligence to route content through the right combination of AI and human expertise based on what each market and content type requires. It automates quality evaluation at scale so teams can identify what is resonating and what needs attention before inconsistency becomes a customer experience problem. The organizations that have embedded this into their content operations are the ones seeing measurable gains in both speed and market performance.
What infrastructure actually looks like
The shift from project-based content to content-as-infrastructure requires a change in how organizations think about the output itself. Phrase CEO Georg Ell made this argument at SlatorCon London 2026 when he said that no one is actually interested in a translation. The point was not intended to be dismissive of the work involved. Customers and internal stakeholders care about the experience that content delivers, and the process behind it is invisible to them. When that experience is inconsistent across markets, the cause is almost always a problem with infrastructure.
What this looks like in practice is visible in how KuCoin, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency platforms, restructured its content operations. Operating across 200 countries with more than 40 million users, KuCoin faced a challenge familiar to any organization managing high-volume, time-sensitive content in regulated markets. The company’s content operations had relied on spreadsheets and manual workflows, a project-based approach that could not keep pace with the volume or speed the business required.
KuCoin’s decision to treat content as infrastructure, adopting the Phrase Platform to build automated pipelines connecting its CMS directly to structured translation and content workflows, produced measurable results. Content volume increased by 400% without any additional headcount. On-time delivery rates rose from 45% to 95% across all markets. Annual content operations costs dropped by more than $500,000. And user satisfaction with localized content climbed from 72% to 86%.
“We needed a scalable platform to get content out faster and with greater accuracy,” said Head of Localization Adam Yuan. “Speed is one of our biggest KPIs and our existing approach just couldn’t keep up.”
The consistency test
Scott offered a useful diagnostic for leaders wondering whether their content operations have crossed from project territory into infrastructure territory. When discussing global expansion on the podcast, he was characteristically direct about the standard organizations should hold themselves to.
“Don’t accept good enough as it relates to standards across international operations.”
The implication is that every market deserves the same standard of content experience as the core market, and any gap between them is an infrastructure problem worth solving before it becomes a competitive liability.
The content infrastructure question has become whether organizations can afford to keep operating without it. As content volumes continue to rise and the number of markets and formats keeps expanding, the organizations that have built genuine content infrastructure are pulling further ahead with every quarter. Those still running on project-based workflows and manual coordination are spending more to deliver less.
Watch the full conversation
Building tech internally? Scott Kinka calls it a hamster wheel you can never get off. In this episode of In Other Words, Scott shares why build vs. buy matters more as businesses expand into new markets. They cover partner ecosystems and where AI is creating value for organizations investing in platforms they can build on.
