Build or Buy? What to Consider When Investing in AI Translation

Modern customers expect to engage with brands in their own language. Whether browsing a knowledge base, reading product reviews, or messaging a service team, language access is now a core part of the customer experience. According to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer, 88% of consumers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services.
But meeting this expectation at scale requires technology. That raises a critical question: should your company build an in-house translation solution, or buy a proven platform like Translation Studio?

Why Translation Is a CX Imperative

• One in three consumers will walk away after a single bad experience—even if they loved your product (PwC).
• Gartner’s 2025 Hype Cycle shows AI agents and customer technology platforms are transforming service delivery, creating both efficiency and differentiation.
• For global brands, delivering content in every customer’s preferred language isn’t optional—it’s essential to building trust and loyalty.

Build vs Buy: 8 Key Considerations

1. Time to Market

Build: Creating an in-house solution means designing architecture, integrating AI engines, testing workflows, and securing compliance approvals. This can take months—or years. Delays mean missed opportunities to serve customers in their preferred language.
Buy: Translation Studio can be deployed in weeks, not years. Because it’s Salesforce-native, it integrates directly into Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, Knowledge, Messaging, and Email without custom connectors.
Bring Your Own AI: Our platform lets you choose and switch between engines (DeepL, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI) without lengthy IT projects.

2. Cost & Technical Debt

Build: SalesforceBen highlights the hidden costs of customization: what starts as a simple custom flow can balloon into technical debt as complexity grows. Seasonal Salesforce releases often break customizations, requiring costly fixes. Over time, you’ll spend more maintaining the system than building it.
Buy: With Translation Studio, pricing is predictable and maintenance is handled by our team. Your IT staff aren’t pulled away from revenue-generating initiatives to patch translation workflows.

3. Talent & Expertise

Build: Recruiting engineers who understand both AI translation and Salesforce architecture is difficult and expensive. Even if you secure them, their time is consumed by ongoing maintenance instead of strategic innovation.
Buy: Translation Studio gives you instant access to industry leaders:

• TransPerfect, the world’s largest provider of human translation services, offering compliance-ready review for regulated industries.
• DeepL, known for unmatched AI translation quality.

You get the best of AI and human expertise without building from scratch.

4. Customization & Flexibility

Build: Custom solutions often lock you into one AI model, making it hard to adapt when better engines emerge.
Buy: Translation Studio is designed for flexibility. With Bring Your Own AI, you can route content to the engine best suited for the task—DeepL for nuanced articles, Amazon for scale, or TransPerfect linguists for critical workflows. This future-proofs your investment.

5. Integration with Salesforce

Build: SalesforceBen warns that customizations frequently break when Salesforce releases updates. Each release cycle adds risk and cost.
Buy: Translation Studio is Salesforce-native and AppExchange-vetted. It’s continuously updated to align with Salesforce releases, ensuring reliability and security.

6. Risk & Security

Build: According to Gartner, 25% of IT projects fail outright, and up to 50% require major rework. Security and compliance risks are your responsibility.
Buy: Translation Studio has undergone Salesforce’s AppExchange Security Review and leverages TransPerfect’s compliance expertise for industries like finance, healthcare, and government. You reduce risk by relying on a vetted, proven solution.

25% of IT projects fail outright, and up to 50% require major rework.

Gartner

7. Ongoing Maintenance & Support

Build: Every bug, API change, or security patch falls on your team. The opportunity cost is significant: IT spends time firefighting instead of innovating.
Buy: With Translation Studio, our team manages updates, patches, and enhancements. Your internal resources stay focused on growth and CX, not break-fixes.

8. Continuous Innovation

Build: Even if you succeed at launch, your solution risks becoming outdated. Customer expectations, compliance requirements, and AI models evolve rapidly.
Buy: Translation Studio evolves with the market. Our roadmap includes new AI connectors, expanded workflows, and ongoing enhancements. Smaller, agile tech partners like 1440 are able to pivot quickly to ensure you always have the latest capabilities.

88% of consumers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services.

Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer

The Bottom Line

The choice between building and buying isn’t simple, but the trends are clear:

• Building carries hidden costs, long timelines, talent challenges, and significant risk.
• Buying delivers faster time to value, predictable costs, security, and continuous innovation.

With Translation Studio, you don’t have to compromise. You get:

• Salesforce-native integration
• BYO-AI flexibility (DeepL, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI)
• TransPerfect human expertise for regulated workflows
• Security and innovation without the technical debt

Translation is no longer just about words—it’s about customer trust, global scale, and future-proof CX. Why reinvent the wheel when the right solution is already built, tested, and ready to grow with you?

Ready to scale multilingual CX?

Visit Translation Studio on the Salesforce AppExchange or request a demo today.