#5FutureStates of Content are Here: SDL's 2018 Predictions Come to Fruition
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) [https://www.sdl.com/resources/downloads/ebooks/five-future-states-of-content/year-in-review.html ] 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 [https://www.sdl.com/about/sdl/the-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 [https://www.sdl.com/resources/downloads/whitepapers/customer-journeys/e2e ], which identifies rising customer expectations in seamless experiences. Here's how our predictions and research fared."
1) Content will create itself:
[https://www.sdl.com/about/sdl/the-five-future-states-of-content/content-will-create-itself.html ]
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, [https://www.sdl.com/contact/content-assistant.html ] 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.
2) Content will be agile:
[https://www.sdl.com/about/sdl/the-five-future-states-of-content/content-will-be-agile.html ]
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
[https://www.sdl.com/contact/language-cloud.html ], changes the traditional approach
to managing content projects to achieve greater agility, helping users think about
their processes and automate them.
3) Content will organize itself:
[https://www.sdl.com/about/sdl/the-five-future-states-of-content/content-will-organize-itself.html ]
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
[https://www.sdl.com/software-and-services/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.
4) Content will be secure:
[https://www.sdl.com/about/sdl/the-five-future-states-of-content/content-will-be-secured.html ]
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.
5) Content will be your best salesperson:
[https://www.sdl.com/about/sdl/the-five-future-states-of-content/content-will-be-your-best-salesperson.html ]
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 [https://www.sdl.com/software-and-services/tridion-dx ],
SDL Accessibility Solution [https://www.sdl.com/contact/accessibility-solution.html ]
- which enables content accessibility across every channel - and SDL Multilingual
Website solution
[https://www.sdl.com/about/news-media/press/2018/sdl-multilingual-website-solution.html ]
, 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 [https://twitter.com/sdl ], LinkedIn [https://uk.linkedin.com/company/sdlplc ] and Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/sdlplc ].
SOURCE SDL plc
