If you are an independent contractor and you work for Lionbridge, then there is some news that just came out recently that you should be interested in. However, keep in mind that this is only the division of Lionbridge Technologies, Lionbridge AI. 

The company from Canada, Telus Corporation announced that Telus International, a digital customer experience innovator that designs, builds, and delivers solutions for global and disruptive brands like Tesla, Smarter, Airbnb, Uber, etc, has said it has entered into an agreement to acquire the separate division of Lionbridge Technologies, Lionbridge AI, for $935 million dollars, and closing of the deal is supposed to happen just a day before the New Year on December 31, 2020. 

From the looks of things, Telus is acquiring Lionbridge AI so that it can accelerate the digital transformation and strategic growth of the company, and adding key capabilities and diversity to Telus Internationals suite of next-generation digital solutions. 

If you want to know what all that fancy talk means in laymans terms, this big company is adding Lionbridge AI, the data annotation portion of the business to its ranks. As you may already know, Lionbridge is one of only two globally-scaled managed training data and data annotation services providers in the world. This includes data in text, images, videos, and audio in more than 300 languages and dialects for some of the world’s largest tech companies in social media such as Facebook and Twitter, search engines like Google, and retail and mobile. All this data labeling and annotation is used to develop artificial intelligence models. 

There’s no doubt that Telus is also after the proprietary data annotation platform that is used in combination with the crowdsourced community of more than a million professional annotators and qualified linguists. By adding Lionbridge to the company, they can take advantage of fast-growing new economy services market as the need for high-quality multilingual data annotation continues to increase. 

Nothing happened to Lionbridge, they aren’t losing money or anything like this for sure. In fact, the company had strong financial growth, and that is likely what attracted the purchase. Lionbridge AI generated $230 million dollars in a 9 month period, and that’s up 29% over the last quarter. Not only that, but you may have noticed that Lionbridge survived COVID-19 and was resilient where other companies and businesses were shut down forever. Those of you who work for Lionbridge were incredibly lucky to keep your jobs. 

So you might be wondering at this point what will happen to Lionbridge, how it will change, and if this means that people will lose their jobs. Keep in mind that this is only for the 700 or so people who work in the data labeling and annotation part of Lionbridge. 

At the moment, the whole deal sounds like a friendly acquisition and Darren Entwistle who is the President and CEO of Telus said that he was looking forward to welcoming Lionbridge AI’s skilled team members to the TELUS family while they elevate their world leading customer service and innovative technologies for the brands they partner with around the world. 

So nobody will be losing their jobs for sure. Most of Lionbridge will continue to work as it always has and you might not even notice the acquisition at all. However, since it is a company that offers some of the same services, there could be a chance for more jobs to become available, but this isn’t certain. Chances are, Lionbridge will continue to operate as normally. 

Lionbridge AI president Ed Jay did issue a statement where he said they are thrilled to be joining the TELUS International team, and that they share the same commitment to innovating for their clients and he is quoted as saying “We are looking forward to working together with TELUS International to continue delivering the most valuable AI training data and platform for our clients, and to build upon the scale and momentum we have achieved through our crowd of contributors spanning diverse languages, cultures and geographies.” 

There is one thing to keep in mind at this point though. Like all acquisitions, things can change and the deal is subject to inherent risks and uncertainties, and there is no assurance at the moment that the acquisition will be completed as expected. 

But, there is some useful information here for those who are in the stockmarket as Telus Internation plans to go public in the first quarter of 2021. That would mean that now is a good time to get ready to buy stock in the division as it too has been doing very well. 

It will be interesting to see what happens with the division Lionbridge AI at this point. 

If you happen to work for Lionbridge AI, and you’ve heard something that we don’t know, we’d love it if you would reply in the comments and let us know how things go in the next month or so. 

If you have any questions, please let us know, and leave comments and we will reply to them as soon as we can. 

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