AaGlobal puts power in its people to drive AI and IT improvements to services

A leading translation and interpreting businesses has acted to build on its investment in technology and people with two key appointments from the homegrown talent within its ranks.

Andrei Sparling, now promoted to managing director of AaGlobal Language Services, and his colleague Ignas Mikoliunas, who has rejoined the Hull-based firm as chief operations officer, are working on new projects which are designed to grow the business by developing new ways to enhance and deliver services.

CEO Kirk Akdemir said the moves will enable AaGlobal to further develop innovations using IT and AI which have already sharpened services for clients across the world – but affirmed the personal touch is the priority.

He said: “We have had world class developers working internationally on AI for several years but we have never seen it as an opportunity to reduce staff numbers. AI is only ever going to be as good as the person using it so our main focus is to keep improving our people.”

Andrei comes from Moldova and speaks English, Moldovan, Romanian, Russian and Spanish, having lived and worked in Spain and in the UK. He began his career with AaGlobal at the firm’s original office in Worcester and moved north in 2011, since when he has played a pivotal role in the firm’s expansion and in establishing Hull as the head office.

In Worcester, Andrei worked as an interpreter and then progressed to co-ordinating interpreters and liaising with clients to organise bookings. He continued those roles in Hull and then worked on recruiting and managing the team as it expanded to nearly 40 office-based employees and an international network of 15,000 translators and interpreters covering more than 500 languages.

Andrei became General Manager in 2018 and Director of Operations two years later. Also in 2018, Andrei and Ignas, who had joined the previous year and was the Special Development Projects Manager, led AaGlobal’s expansion from the original Hull office next to the marina to Stonefield House in the city centre. 

Ignas, who is from Lithuania, left the business in 2022 to broaden his experience of IT and software development but was tempted back by the variety at AaGlobal.

He said: “I am passionate about technology and at AaGlobal the challenge is always different - from organising an office move to working on track and trace with the UK Health Security Agency.

“The language services sector in the UK has been quite stagnant recently and we want to do something about that. AI allows us to do various things and we have numerous projects, some small and some big, which give us room to explore opportunities to grow the business.

“There is so much more we can offer and having a really good team here – people who are experts in this industry, very tech savvy and very much behind us – makes it even more exciting.”

Andrei added: “This is my 16th year and we have definitely grown not just as a business but also with people. We started with three in Hull and we now have 38, and everything is a lot more modern.

“As we have grown we have gained a lot of experience with a variety of clients all over the UK and across the world and that brings more responsibilities. As we have built our capabilities we have also advanced our technology.

“We have created our own systems to enhance our reputation of delivering high quality services in translation and interpreting and developing them round our client requirements and our linguist requirements.

“When Ignas left we were relying more on suppliers to develop our systems but his return has enabled us to change that. He can make the decisions and have more of a steer on the software development side, working with an in-house team is allowing him to spread his wings.”