The prediction that AI is putting linguists out of work doesn’t match what’s actually happening. As businesses get more sophisticated with AI, the role of linguists is evolving alongside. One area that has become apparent is linguists’ unique ability to help answer a question global brands are now asking: what do large language models actually say about us, once you leave the home market?
That’s easy to check where you know the language, the culture and how your own customers search. Across ten, twenty or thirty markets, a single translated prompt won’t get you there. It reads correctly everywhere, but the assumptions behind it, what it actually means to someone searching in that market, don’t travel with it.
Answering it properly has become specialised work: testing how a question performs across models like ChatGPT, comparing results, and judging whether an answer actually reflects how someone in that market thinks and searches, not just whether it’s technically correct. Even how people talk to AI shifts by country, an instinct that’s hard to build centrally.
This kind of prompt research is still early, and the methods for tracking it will keep maturing. What stays constant is the need for someone in-market to test and verify the results, because understanding what AI tells your customers starts with asking the question they’d actually ask.
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