From October 22-25, Clearly Local team members from around the world gathered in Hefei, China, for our annual company meeting.
This year’s annual meeting arrived at a pivotal moment for the content and localization industry. Artificial intelligence continues to reshape how content is created, translated, evaluated, and delivered. Customer expectations are evolving just as quickly.
Rather than focusing only on new tools, the event centered on a bigger question: how can we combine technology, expertise, and collaboration to achieve better outcomes for our clients, our teams, and our business?
That question was captured in the event’s central theme: “Empowered for Outcomes.” Building on the company’s previous strategic focus of “Pivot to Intelligence,” the theme reflected Clearly Local’s next stage of evolution, where technology enables people to create greater impact while human expertise remains at the center of everything we do.
A New Chapter Focused on Outcomes
In his opening remarks, Philippe Cao, Managing Director of Clearly Local, described this year’s annual event as the beginning of a new chapter for the company. The focus is not simply on adopting AI tools but on empowering employees with the knowledge, confidence, and autonomy needed to solve problems and deliver meaningful results.
He acknowledged that 2026 has been a challenging year, shaped by rapid technological change, rising customer expectations, and increasing competition. Yet these challenges also create opportunities to rethink how work gets done and how value is delivered.
To explain the annual theme, Philippe broke it into two key concepts:
- Empowered means giving people access to technology, AI, skills, and resources that enable them to contribute beyond traditional expectations.
- Outcomes means focusing on results rather than activity. Success is measured not by the number of tasks completed, but by the impact those efforts create for customers, employees, and the business.
Philippe also described empowerment at three connected levels:
- Individual: Stay curious, experiment confidently, and share what you learn. Technical expertise is not a prerequisite; progress starts with a willingness to try, iterate, and help colleagues learn together.
- Organization: Bring management, operations, technology, customer-facing teams, and HR together to redesign workflows. Challenge familiar routines and turn individual improvements into shared team capabilities.
- Customer: Look beyond requested deliverables to understand what customers are trying to achieve. Align resources with their goals, speak candidly when expectations are unrealistic, and focus on solving problems and creating value rather than simply completing tasks.
The theme is positioned within Clearly Local’s broader journey. From Innovate to Expanding Possibilities, Content 360, Pivot to Intelligence, and now Empowered for Outcomes, each annual theme has built upon the last, reflecting the company’s continuing transformation.
Adapting to Evolving Customer Needs
Customer Success Director Jill Huang opened her session by illustrating that outcomes do not always have to be dramatic breakthroughs.
Learning a new skill, building a Power BI dashboard, creating a Power Automate workflow, developing QA rules, or improving prompts can all be meaningful outcomes if they help people work more effectively.
Over time, these small improvements compound into larger organizational capabilities.
Jill’s core message was about how customer expectations have evolved. While price, quality, and speed remain important, clients increasingly expect better user experiences, faster product launches, workflow efficiency, system integrations, business impact reporting, and greater visibility into outcomes.
As a result, localization partnerships are changing. Customers are no longer asking only for translated content. They are seeking support with product adoption, launch readiness, quality risk management, automation, scalability, and overall global user experiences.
In response, Clearly Local is increasingly providing services beyond localization to accommodate the evolving needs of its clients. By expanding how it supports customers and adapting alongside their businesses, the company can help address a broader range of challenges and build long-term partnerships.
“The expectations of our customers are changing, and so must we. It’s no longer just about delivering services, but about understanding the challenges behind them and finding better ways to create value.”
— Jill Huang, Customer Success Director, Clearly Local
At the same time, she emphasized that human judgment remains indispensable. AI can accelerate content creation and support decision-making, but people still define strategy, verify information, apply expertise, and shape the overall narrative.
The Human Side of Transformation
Building on Jill’s emphasis on human expertise behind better outcomes, Community Director Alma Gomez invited attendees to consider the human side of transformation.
Using interactive exercises and visual examples, Alma explored how people can see the same situation differently based on their backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. What may look obvious to one person may appear completely different to someone else.
For a global company like Clearly Local, this lesson is particularly relevant. Teams collaborate across cultures, regions, languages, and professional disciplines every day. Understanding different perspectives is not just beneficial. It is essential.
Alma also connected this idea directly to AI adoption.
Some employees embrace new technologies enthusiastically. Others may feel uncertain, overwhelmed, or hesitant. Successful transformation requires understanding these different responses rather than expecting everyone to follow the same path at the same pace.
As AI continues to automate routine work, Alma argued that uniquely human strengths become even more valuable. Communication, empathy, curiosity, relationship building, collaboration, and perspective-taking will remain critical differentiators.
“In terms of people, communication, persuasion, and relationships, we are still the ones driving that.”
— Alma Gomez, Community Director, Clearly Local
The reminder resonated throughout the event: technology creates possibilities, but people create value.
Exploring the Next Generation of AI
A major highlight of this year’s event was the Agentic AI Workshop, led by Allen Xue, Kino Hu, and Lex Buot. Together, the three speakers explored how AI is evolving from a simple productivity tool into a powerful collaborator that can support complex business workflows while remaining guided by human expertise.
Allen focused on practical applications of AI in technical documentation and localization. Through real-world examples from client projects, he demonstrated how AI can assist with tasks such as quality assurance, terminology extraction, content analysis, and documentation modernization. His examples showed how AI can help teams work more efficiently while maintaining quality through human oversight.
Kino introduced attendees to the emerging world of AI agents and automation. His session highlighted how organizations can move beyond basic prompting to design agent-driven workflows that perform multi-step tasks, access information from different systems, and support business processes at scale.
Rather than viewing AI as a chatbot, Kino encouraged participants to think of AI as a digital teammate capable of executing defined responsibilities within a larger workflow. To put these ideas into practice, attendees then successfully completed three hands-on assignments, including building a tool that compares two versions of the same text and tells you exactly what changed.
Lex focused on what makes AI solutions successful in practice. He emphasized that strong results depend not only on the AI model itself but also on the surrounding ecosystem of context, processes, knowledge sources, and tools. He discussed concepts such as AI skills, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), organizational knowledge management, verification loops, and connected workflows.
Through practical examples, he showed how reusable instructions guide an agent’s work, connected tools give it the right context, and verification loops help it check and improve its results, illustrating that an agent becomes truly capable when given the environment it needs to carry out tasks accurately and reliably.
While each presentation approached the topic from a different angle, they shared a common message: the future of work is about combining human expertise, business knowledge, and intelligent technology to achieve better outcomes.
As AI capabilities continue to advance, success will depend on how effectively organizations design workflows that allow people and AI to work together.
Strengthening Connections Beyond Work
This year’s annual meeting was not only about strategy and technology. It was also about relationships.
Throughout the event, employees participated in a variety of team-building, wellness, and networking activities designed to strengthen connections across departments and regions. Activities included a 9-kilometer run along Hefei’s Chaohu Lake, yoga sessions, pickleball, board games, shared dinners, and informal networking opportunities.
Another memorable session, The Art of Understanding, encouraged participants to explore how their perspectives influence the way they see themselves and others. Through interactive exercises using the Points of You methodology, colleagues shared personal reflections, learned how others perceive them, and built deeper interpersonal connections.
These experiences served as a reminder that strong collaboration begins with understanding. In a business built around language, culture, and global communication, that understanding is one of Clearly Local’s greatest strengths.
Celebrating Hefei’s Culture and Innovation
The event also provided opportunities for employees to explore Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province and an important center for science, technology, and innovation in China’s Yangtze River Delta region.
Participants visited local cultural landmarks, including the Memorial Hall of the Crossing of the Yangtze River Campaign and the Anhui Provincial Art Museum. These experiences offered a deeper appreciation for the region’s history, culture, and heritage while creating memorable shared experiences for colleagues visiting from around the world.
Looking Ahead
As the event came to a close, one message stood above all others: AI will continue to change how work is performed, but its greatest value will come from how people apply it to customers’ needs.
Reflecting on the meeting and the opportunities ahead, Philippe shared his perspective:
“Under our theme, Empowered for Outcomes, I believe 2027 will mark one of the most transformative years in Clearly Local’s journey. By embracing agentic AI, we have an opportunity to fundamentally rethink how we manage projects, empower our people, and deliver value, not simply by working faster or more efficiently, but by contributing more directly to our customers’ business goals.”
— Philippe Cao, Managing Director, Clearly Local
The discussions, experiments, and new ideas explored in Hefei represent an important step toward that future. As Philippe put it, “Our journey has only just begun.”
