The Future of the TMS in the Age of AI
October 6, 2026
In this inaugural Signal Room Session, a new occasional series of The Signal Room Podcast that replaces the usual panel with a deeper look at one complex challenge, host Vincent Swan is joined by three translation management experts: Istvan Lengyel of BeLazy, Gabriel Fairman of wxrks, and Jeff Kent of Centific. Together, they bring more than 60 years of experience with TMS and automated workflow systems.
In this inaugural Signal Room Session, a new occasional series of The Signal Room Podcast that replaces the usual panel with a deeper look at one complex challenge, host Vincent Swan is joined by three translation management experts: Istvan Lengyel of BeLazy, Gabriel Fairman of wxrks, and Jeff Kent of Centific. Together, they bring more than 60 years of experience with TMS and automated workflow systems.
The panel explores the seismic behavioral shift from deterministic software to probabilistic AI, debating whether enterprise clients truly want to abandon their TMS or if they simply want invisible, frictionless orchestration. From treating AI models as billable vendors to untangling why the industry struggles with tech adoption, this episode lays out the exact roadmap for localization infrastructure in an AI-first world.
What You’ll Learn:
- Why the industry is shifting from deterministic software to probabilistic AI output
- How to treat AI models as vendors that you profile, cost, and evaluate the same way as human linguists
- Why AI is a bigger shift than NMT
- The parts of a TMS that won’t disappear
- What customers really mean when they say they want “no TMS”
- How moving away from rigid segment-by-segment translation could bring creativity back to linguists
Vincent Swan is Vice President of Innovation and Solutions at Centific, with more than 20 years of experience in media creation and localization. Over the past 15 years, he has held roles spanning localization engineering, project management, solutions architecture, and process design. He partners with clients and internal teams across Asia, Europe, and the US to build scalable, localization-first programs.
Istvan Lengyel is the Founder and CEO of BeLazy, which builds operations infrastructure for localization. BeLazy connects content, business management, translation management, and AI into one generalized integration layer rather than point-to-point connectors. Istvan comes from a linguist background and has spent years unifying how roughly 15 different TMSs work.
Gabriel Fairman is the Founder and CEO of wxrks, an industry-leading translation operating system engineered to scale the human soul in the age of generative AI. He studied philosophy of language, with a major in The Death and Re-Birth of Human Agency, and brings that lens to how we talk about and build AI.
Jeff Kent is the Director of Forward Engineering and Strategic Solutions at Centific. With about 25 years of experience in the localization industry, Jeff focuses on how enterprises are adapting to AI, particularly content risk assessment and decision-making within translation workflows.
Episode Highlights:
- 00:00 Introducing The Signal Room Sessions
- 01:10 Signal: Are Consumer AI Agents Ready for the Mainstream?
- 03:01 Signal: The Industry Is Getting Comfortable with Imperfection
- 04:17 Why Customers Want AI But Still Demand Predictability
- 06:38 Signal: Managed Outcomes and Why It’s Time for Service Companies to Step Up
- 10:00 Signal: Stop Talking About AI as If It Were Its Own Entity
- 11:42 Will AI Bring Creativity Back to Translation?
- 13:54 AI’s Many Roles
- 14:56 Treating AI as a Vendor
- 17:48 Is AI Just Another Evaluation?
- 19:53 “I Think We’re Terrible at Absorbing Technology”
- 22:58 Quick-Fire Round
- 28:25 Main topic: The LinkedIn Post That Started It All
- 33:26 The TMS as a Structured Source of Truth for AI
- 39:46 Workflow or Orchestration? The Panel Debates
- 43:28 Recommendations From the Panel
- 47:11 See You at the Signal Room Live Recording at LocWorld Vancouver