The Future of Localisation: AI, Sitecore, and the Path to Scalable Multilingual Personalisation
Global Ambition, Local Reality
Major brands have long grappled with a familiar challenge: how to speak to the world without sounding generic or worse, irrelevant. Whether it’s a global bank rolling out financial education tools or a retail giant launching campaigns across 20 regions, the ability to localise content with both speed and nuance is business-critical.
Traditionally, localisation has meant human-led translation. While this ensures linguistic accuracy and cultural sensitivity, it also leads to delays, inflated costs, and manual workflows that stifle agility. In the age of real-time personalisation and content velocity, is this still sustainable?
95% of all brands who use Translation historically rely on Google Translate and Human translators. AI has emerged as a game-changer. Tools like DeepL, Azure Translator, and ChatGPT-driven workflows promise instant, scalable translation. But the rise of AI introduces a new question: Has technology evolved enough to replace human translators completely? And how do platforms like Sitecore help brands operationalise localisation and personalisation at scale, without losing their brand voice?
Let’s unpack these questions and show you what tangible steps Marketing Leaders can take to deliver better, faster, and more localised experiences that drive conversion and loyalty.
Is AI Translation Enough?
The answer is: not yet…... but we are getting close.
AI translation has drastically improved, leveraging neural networks and contextual language models to produce fluent, coherent translations. According to a 2023 CSA Research study, over 70% of enterprise marketers use AI translation in some form, often as a first pass to accelerate delivery.
But there are caveats:
Take Amazon’s 2020 Swedish launch. Relying heavily on machine translation, the platform mislabelled products in ways that were not just inaccurate but offensive. The backlash was immediate and entirely avoidable with basic human QA.
Marketing takeaway: AI can accelerate localisation workflows and reduce costs but without human quality assurance, you risk brand damage at scale.
The best approach today is a hybrid model:
This model supports both agility and accountability especially when content needs to be live in 30+ languages within days, not weeks.
Sitecore: Built for Multilingual Complexity
Sitecore has long been a leader in enterprise-grade multilingual content management.
Sitecore XM Cloud (and XP before it) supports:
Why this matters to you? This means brands can operate global centralised campaigns with localised content variants from a single platform without duplicating content or fragmenting brand governance.
More importantly, Sitecore’s multi-language publishing model enables both “core” and “market-led” localisation strategies. For instance:
This flexible model works whether you are a bank operating in ASEAN markets or a fashion retailer scaling across the EU. You could be a Mining or Construction giant that needs different language and content in multiple geographies.
What About Personalisation?
Localisation and personalisation are often treated as separate workflows—but they shouldn't be. Real relevance comes when you combine both.
Sitecore Personalize allows real-time, session-based targeting by:
Marketer Insight: Combining localisation with behavioural data drives lift in conversion, engagement, and relevance, even in anonymous sessions.
So, a visitor in France could see content in French with CTAs geared toward mobile conversion, while someone in Canada gets a different layout in English with tax-incentive messaging and someone in Montreal, Canada could see it in French Canadian. This can be done without persistent user identity, ideal for top-of-funnel engagement.
But what if you want memory across sessions? That’s where Sitecore CDP enters the mix.
Sitecore CDP: From Goldfish Memory to Persistent Insight
Sitecore XM Cloud and Personalize offer powerful real-time targeting…. but they forget. Visitor data isn’t stored across sessions unless tied to a persistent ID. The experience resets after each visit or session for Sitecore XM Cloud or Sitecore Personalize on its own.
Sitecore CDP solves this issue with:
Let’s take a real-world example.
A logged-in banking customer from Malaysia visits your “Travel Credit Card” page. Next week, they’re browsing Instagram and see a relevant offer personalised to their location, income segment, and lifecycle stage, still in Bahasa Melayu.
That orchestration doesn’t happen with session-only tools. It requires a CDP that can store, segment, and activate customer data across touchpoints.
Why this matters: Persistent data turns reactive websites into proactive experiences, ones that know your customer, not just their last click.
Sitecore Stream: The Emerging AI Power Layer
What about content creation and translation itself?
That’s where Sitecore Stream is gaining traction. Still evolving, Stream introduces generative AI into the Sitecore stack as a “co-pilot” for marketers and authors. It’s not just a gimmick, it unlocks practical advantages for multilingual content delivery:
Imagine entering a product brief in English, and Stream returns draft versions in Spanish, German, and Simplified Mandarin, aligned with tone and audience. Editors simply review, refine, and publish.
For brands with hundreds of product pages or campaign variants, this radically reduces time-to-market.
Marketer Insight: Stream reduces manual lift in content production, accelerating go-to-market timelines while still staying on-brand.
Real-World Applications
1. Retail: Local Promotions at Scale
A global fashion retailer launches seasonal sales in 15 countries. Historically, the local marketing teams handled content editing in spreadsheets, passed to translation agencies, and fed back into CMS. This took weeks.
Now, they could use:
Time-to-live would shrink from 120 days to less than 15 days.
2. Finance: Hyper-Personalisation in Regulated Markets
Lets take another hypothetical example and this time a major brand in the Financial Services space in Europe that uses Sitecore CDP to unify data from website, call centre, and mobile app. It creates:
By combining CDP and Personalize with localisation, they could boost engagement by at least 15% and reduced unsubscribe rates by a number they would be very happy with!
Can We Do Hyper-Personalisation in Multiple Languages?
Yes, with the right architecture.
It requires:
The result? A visitor in Tokyo and a shopper in Madrid can each receive messages tuned to their language, behaviour, lifecycle stage, and channel preference.
Marketer Insight: But success depends on governance, training, and tooling. Hyper-personalisation across languages isn’t just a tech challenge, it’s an operational one. And it’s one that delivers!
Cade Whitbourn , 3 time Sitecore Strategy MVP had this to say, “MCP is potentially a game changer in AI translation. Sitecore’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) combined with LLM agents can automate and dramatically simplify content translation workflows within Sitecore — reducing effort to just a few natural language prompts, with minimal manual configuration or coding.
Beyond translation, its an approach that can unlock real agentic AI doing all sorts of things directly in Sitecore via prompts, abstracting out the role of content authors, developers, marketers and many more.”
Why Human Oversight Still Matters in AI-Driven Content
AI is accelerating how we localise and personalise digital experiences, but let’s not confuse speed with precision. While generative AI can help scale content creation and translation, the human touch is still essential for quality, trust, and brand alignment.
Real but basic Examples: 3 Videos, 3 Levels of Intervention
To illustrate this, I ran an experiment. I had three videos created using AI tools — and each showed why human intervention makes or breaks the result.
The lesson? At least today in 2025, AI needs human guidance, not just for fact-checking, but for tone, visual relevance, compliance, and audience fit. Without human intervention, you risk amplifying inaccuracies at scale.
A Phased Maturity Model
Brands don’t leap to multilingual hyper-personalisation overnight. A smart progression looks like this:
Crawl
Walk
Run
This maturity model ensures you don’t over-invest too early but build capability as your teams and data evolve.
You could also have Sitecore Stream at the Crawl stage and learn how to use it before you start to walk or run! It can be super powerful.
Marketer Insight: You don’t have to go all-in at once. Start with a quick win, prove the value, and scale from there.
The Future: AI, Localisation, and Brand Empathy
The future isn’t about eliminating humans; it’s about elevating them. AI handles scale. Humans handle empathy, nuance, and judgement. Together, they enable brands to operate with speed and soul.
With Sitecore’s composable stack including XM Cloud, Personalize, CDP, and Stream; brands can move from disconnected silos to unified, multilingual customer experiences.
The real challenge isn’t just translating language, it’s localising meaning. True localisation means speaking to your customer in their language, yes, but also in their context, tone, and moment of need.
Ready to Scale but also want a super Localisation strategy?
Our Sitecore Strategy MVP-led team helps enterprise brands:
· audit localisation workflows,
· evaluate readiness for CDP and Stream,
· and design scalable, multilingual personalisation blueprints.
If you’re unsure where to begin or want to turn global ambition into real-world traction - get in touch. We’d love to help you build a roadmap that blends AI with human empathy.