Most brands invest heavily in content creation, but how much of that content actually reaches global audiences in a way that feels authentic? With 94% of B2B buyers saying they are more likely to engage with leadership and conference videos in their local language, companies are missing a massive opportunity. How can AI-powered video localization remove barriers, preserve cultural nuance, and make video content truly global?
Joining me today is Guy Piekarz, CEO of Panjaya, a company revolutionizing video localization with AI-driven deep-real technology that provides seamless lip-syncing and natural dubbing across multiple languages. Panjaya is already working with global leaders like TED and JFrog, helping brands expand their international reach.
Guy’s journey includes time at Apple and founding Matcha, where he saw firsthand the inefficiencies in traditional video dubbing and closed captioning—processes that are often slow, expensive, and produce subpar results.
Resources
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Transcript
Greg Kihlström (00:00)
Most brands invest heavily in content creation, but how much of that content actually reaches global audiences in a way that feels authentic? With 94 % of B2B buyers saying they’re more likely to engage with leadership and conference videos in their local language, companies are missing a massive opportunity. How can AI-powered video localization remove barriers, preserve cultural nuance, and make video content truly global? Joining me today is Guy Picars, CEO of Panjaya a company revolutionizing video localization with AI driven deep real technology that provides seamless lip syncing and natural dubbing across multiple languages. Panjaya is already working with global leaders like Ted and JFrog helping brands expand their international reach. Guy, welcome to the show.
Guy Piekarz (00:45)
Thank you. Happy to be here.
Greg Kihlström (00:47)
Yeah. Yeah. Looking forward to talking about this with you before we dive in though. Why don’t you start by giving us a little more background on yourself and what led you to found Pangea.
Guy Piekarz (00:56)
Yeah, absolutely. I think that from the first job out of college, I’ve been working in the video space, early days of interactive personalized video storytelling. And then I run a company called Unisphere, which we did virtual conferences for about 10 years. Then afterwards, view discovery at matcha that turned to be the foundation of the new Apple TV. And we did this for about 10 years. So as much as I wanted to escape video, video has been chasing me my whole life.
And that’s probably my destiny. So at Apple, experienced firsthand the complexity involved in time to market for original programming. Also coupled with this old paradigm of how the dubbing is solved. And this problem can be solved. Time to market and quality will lead to better engagement and smart distribution. So realizing this firsthand, being in the video space for so long with the realization of AI and new models just made it so clear and natural that this should be the next level of video and AI helping distribution.
Greg Kihlström (01:54)
Yeah, yeah, love it. Well, yeah. And so, you know, to that point and then kind of how I entered the show, let’s talk a little bit about the future of AI and specifically in video localization. So demand for localized content is huge, yet brands are still overlooking it. Why do you think that video localization is so underutilized?
Guy Piekarz (02:16)
I think we’re starters at starting with awareness and what’s possible today. Somewhat there’s also fear of AI, which is diminishing by the day. But I would say most likely the quality of automated video localization powered by AI is a fairly new space. And just now we believe that we reached the threshold to making it from a cool new thing to something that is really in high quality and effective for businesses. And the one great example is all the work we’re doing with Ted, you know, for their perspective is they did not move into this space until they found the right partnership that can create the quality that meets their audience demand.
Greg Kihlström (02:55)
Yeah. So what are some of the biggest barriers that companies are facing? You know, they even if they understand that, you know, the opportunity there, you know, what are some of the barriers that they’re facing?
Guy Piekarz (03:06)
I would say that first and foremost is having people speak the language for the QC purposes. And I’ll explain while automation does 80 % of the job, brands will still like to verify and QC the content before it’s being delivered and associated with their brand to their audiences. And just having the right people in place with the workflows and practice is just something that’s evolving in improving by the day. But first and foremost, they need to have the talent on staff. Ideally, they’ll be able to provide this additional service for them. In other cases, it’s just a matter of, yeah, how do we actually do that? What do we need to do? Is this a service? It’s just all pretty new and it’s getting better. But we’re trying to help them to understand that.
Greg Kihlström (03:51)
Yeah, so I mean, you know, putting putting myself in their shoes, it would be like, OK, well, you know, we did it. You know, we did a video. We wrote a script in a language, you know, and in the language that we speak or whatever the people on the on the marketing team, let’s say, got the got got the voiceover or something like that. And then trying to think through to your point like, okay, well, who do we know that speaks this other language or these 10 other languages? So, you know, certainly this this sounds like a great use for AI, right? So, you know, talk a little bit about, you know, how how does an AI powered solution step in here where, you know, some people might have been traditionally thinking about, you know, getting multilingual VO people or things like that to do some of this work? Like, how does how does AI, you know, in your solution help in this area?
Guy Piekarz (04:41)
So it automates the majority of the work in a very simple solution. You upload your video, select the languages, and the platform takes care of the rest while giving you control over script, translation, and audio performance. So the result is you have a much faster and cheaper solution than traditional dubbing. And it produces better results where AI and innovation today enables you to take care of sync and authenticity, which creates a more engaging experience.
Greg Kihlström (05:08)
Yeah. sorry. Sorry. There’s a little lag on my end. It’ll it’ll the the recording will turn out fine though. So yeah. So you mentioned, you know, some of the some of the traditional well, let me start that. So some of the traditional ways of doing this, you know, video dubbing, closed captioning have been kind of those traditional solutions, as you kind of mentioned as an alternative there. But, you know, what are
What are kind of the biggest drawbacks of those more traditional approaches?
Guy Piekarz (05:36)
So let’s start with traditional dubbing. It’s expensive and the turnaround time is really high. So that on itself is a big barrier and many brands will just skip this altogether. And while there is entertainment content that requires to be dubbed, the results are just look like dubbed content the way we always perceive dubbed content lacking authenticity and lacking the sync and personality in many cases of
of their original acting. Now, to have captions, captions has been there for a long time. They lack the emotive power and they can be distracting. So while it’s become table stakes and people just do that because it’s easy, it not necessarily actually provides a solution where it lifts engagement and creates truly compelling stories told in other languages. I would say these are the main drawbacks of current solutions.
Greg Kihlström (06:24)
Yeah, and kind of building on that, you know, beyond beyond teams thinking about, know, purely just translation to, know, to build on that, you know, how do you ensure that cultural nuances or emotional tone kind of related to what you just said are preserved in localized content?
Guy Piekarz (06:43)
That’s big challenge and it’s one of challenges that we’re tackling is that we’re constantly working on improving the way we capture the original performance, preserving it as much as possible and adapting it. So we track nuances like pauses and then we recreate them in the target language to really maintain and capture the performance as well as much as possible.
And that’s something that we’re constantly working on improving and iterating on to make the authenticity of their original performance as good in the target language.
Greg Kihlström (07:18)
Yeah, yeah. And so you know, with that, I mean, it sounds like that’s that that I would imagine is a continual, you know, effort to improve and everything. What what’s the role of human oversight in, you know, not not only improving those things, but like ensuring quality, authenticity, all of those kinds of things. So how does how does human oversight kind of work together with AI?
Guy Piekarz (07:40)
So in our case, we created a pretty advanced human loop tool where allows them to review the output and they can control the script, control translation, and even deal with performance tuning. So they can insert pauses and make changes and adaptations in a way that they feel the target performance mimics as much as possible the original one. And we’re working on empowering, let’s call it the creators and and reviewers with as many tools as possible to augment A, wherever AI falls short and B, to integrate their creative act, which by definition, translation is a creative act. So we want to give them as much as freedom as possible.
Greg Kihlström (08:23)
Well, that’s a great segue to the next thing that I wanted to talk about, which is AI in the in the creative process. And, you know, there’s certainly a lot of people that I that I well, there’s a lot of fear around AI. But, you know, one of one of the fears is that AI is going to replace human creativity, not just the jobs and creativity, but the you know, we lose something if we lose if we lose some of the creative output, of course. But others argue, you know, that
AI can actually enhance it. And I am on that side of I’m more on the optimistic side, I guess you could say of things, but how do AI tools like Panjaya compliment the creative process rather than replace it?
Guy Piekarz (09:01)
So Punjaya is not a video generation solution. We take existing performances with all its creative elements and automatically adapts it to speak to more audiences. So we’re taking everything you’ve been investing into, the craft that you invested into, the original art, and we’re just helping you automate the process to make it available to a larger set of audiences. And…
In adaptation process, we automate all the boring and tedious tasks, allowing them in the loop to really apply additional creativity on the adaptation versus replacing them. So in general, would say in video adaptation, we’re leveraging the original creativity, giving you more tools to make it even more creative. But also, we’re not replacing anything that you would put into, all the craft you would put into the original performance.
Greg Kihlström (09:48)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, in essence, you’re creating a broader audience for the creative product, right? So yeah.
Guy Piekarz (09:55)
and giving you more time to spend on the creative ideas versus do all the operational tasks that are, would say, more boring and tedious that AI can help you automate.
Greg Kihlström (10:06)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So are there particular industries or use cases or things that stand to benefit the most from AI powered video localization?
Guy Piekarz (10:15)
think anything where content is in the center. So absolutely media entertainment. These are two areas where reaching global audience today, when they go to traditional dubbing, we believe that we’re talking about the lack of efficiency, the cost saving and the time to market and the quality of the output. And then there is all the audiences, which we call them more in the latent demand side of things where they wouldn’t have done that otherwise.
So it’s about your marketing and advertising. Think about global campaigns. Avoid reshooting. After you’ve spent so much time creating this ad, and something we see is very popular today, influencers-based ads. After testing this with our partners, they’ve seen that influencer-based ads perform better after localized by Panjaya and their target market versus their original ads with captions.
Which is actually, if you think about it, it makes a of sense, but we believe that this is only possible if it reaches this threshold of quality that puts the audience at ease and it doesn’t feel fabricated or generated for them. So it feels authentic enough to create that reaction of engagement that…
that you would see that it’s useful more than any other solution. I would add to that training and education, also very big verticals that will benefit from that. Some examples, we have healthcare training and continuous medical education. see content that is being delivered pretty, the content which is very professional and very terminology heavy.
Being able to transfer this properly to other languages, especially where they’re non-speaking English countries or English is not their native language, has performed way better than the original language in English plus captions. So there’s a lot of good signs where with a high quality adaptation, you get better performance than all the alternatives today.
Greg Kihlström (12:11)
Yeah, yeah. Have you seen any unexpected use cases for this technology?
Guy Piekarz (12:16)
Yeah, actually, in fact, we have a market research company that they’re using this in a way that we haven’t thought about. they do, they do the interview local people in remote countries about their, specifically in this case, about their food tastes, affinity to spicy food. And what they were doing in the past, they would capture this locally and then bring translator to translate the content.
And they would use the content for their market research as a market research finding, but they lacked all the human performance. When people are actually talking about this with their passion and their intention, that completely went away. So they’ve been using this to capture these talks locally, transfer and translate this in their original intent to the target language where the researcher can actually process the data and generate some findings.
Greg Kihlström (13:05)
Wow.
Yeah, that’s great. Wow. So let’s talk a little bit about the future here and what you’re seeing. Having worked on this and continuing to work on it, what is the future of video localization look like in, let’s just say, five years?
Guy Piekarz (13:22)
in five years, it’s a long time. think, yeah, totally. Yeah, totally. Like many things will change in five years. But the way I see the future of this is starting with high quality one-click translation or any video, no matter if it’s a how-to movie, customer testimonial, Hollywood movie, ad, social media, podcast, within one click, you can translate the video.
Greg Kihlström (13:23)
Okay, we could scale it back a little bit.
Guy Piekarz (13:46)
while preserving the original performance and intent and messaging in high quality way. And I would say that some layers on top of it is getting into close to real time translations and furthermore personalization. So you will record your video or create your video in one language in one way, but you’ll be able to personalize the output in a very automated way where everyone will have their messages resonates with them very personally.
Greg Kihlström (14:11)
Yeah, yeah. That’s it might that might take five years, but that’s that’s no, I love that. That’s that’s great. Do you see, you know, with not only the the customers that you’re currently working with, but talking with others, do you see localization becoming a must have rather than a nice to have for global brands?
Guy Piekarz (14:31)
Absolutely. If you want to reach audiences heart, there’s this famous Nelson Mandela quote says goes like, if you talk to a man in language, he understands that goes to his head. But if you talk to him in language, in his language, goes to his heart. And we believe that we’re seeing people, even though English in our world is a global language, people resonate, they want to hear and they want to listen and they want to watch things in their own native language. And that becomes as the barrier to entry for brands and content creators lowers, it’s going to become just like any other activity they do today.
Greg Kihlström (15:06)
Yeah, yeah. What’s your advice for marketing and content leaders looking to make their video content more globally accessible today? Like where should they start and you know, any any anything they should avoid?
Guy Piekarz (15:20)
I think if you want to start and anything you you start with and test, you want to make it be successful. start where, you know, whether it’s specific use case that, you you can wrap your head around, how can I measure an ROI in this case? And if ROI is engagement, so make sure that you, there’s a certain area where, that you know how to measure it. You know where you have gaps today.
And I would even say look at areas where language is a barrier and you can currently either see low engagement or you’re doing a solution that is just subpar or more expensive and complicated for you. But just think about the use case and then from the use case, just drive back to how to actually do that.
Greg Kihlström (16:01)
Love it. Well, guy, thanks so much for joining today. One last question before we wrap up. like to ask this with to everybody. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Guy Piekarz (16:12)
I think you need to look at the end goal and think about where do you want to get with this and try to, on one hand, avoid some of the noise and the tactical interruptions. And while it’s super important to listen and iterate, but this still what really matters and prioritize short term versus long term, that feels like a big thing that is part of kind of modus operandus.
And I would say having a strong conviction on where you’re going helps you to do that. But adaptability is important and that’s around listening and iterating quickly. And last thing I would say is speed. So, you know, embrace iteration and trying to adjust as quickly as possible. And I would say that there is here a little bit of this dichotomy where previously working at Apple creating products that are well thought. We ship only the third or fourth version when you feel it’s really good. And in the startup, you want to ship early and iterate. But at the same time, we also want to stand for quality and make sure we ship is we manage to exceed the threshold of quality that will actually create adoption. So balancing between this quality and speed is a big thing that on a day-to-day conversation we’re having is how to really optimize this.
