#98 Lionbridge CEO John Fennelly on the Language Industry’s Growth Trajectory

John Fennelly, CEO of Lionbridge, joins SlatorPod to talk about the Super Agency’s journey  over the past 25 years since its founding by Rory Cowan.Fennelly recalls his path to joining Lionbridge in mid-2017 after leadership roles at Thomson Reuters and Hireright — and why he stressed the theme of simplification and relentless customer focus in his first years as Lionbridge CEO. He discusses how the 6,000-person company adapted quickly to a remote-first world.The CEO shares his views on the dynamics of competing with rival Super Agencies, as well as emerging tech-enabled, VC-funded players. He also shares Lionbridge’s motivation for selling its data annotation business, Lionbridge AI, to (again) become a core language and tech-services player.Fennelly talks about the various considerations when it comes to building, buying, licensing, and owning localization and translation management workflows and machine translation engines. He concludes with Lionbridge’s plans for 2022 in regards to M&A and strengthening growth verticals. First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, which saw AI video-generation provider Synthesia raise USD 50m in series B funding.Esther talks about Manchester-based DA Languages switching ownership from previous investor, Foresight Group, to IK Partners. In M&A news, UK-based Take1 acquired transcription and captioning company Verb8tm to strengthen its position in the US.