Today’s MarTech Top Voice: RWS Group’s VP Marketing Emma Fisher.
In this interview with MarTech Insights, we sit down with Emma Fisher, a seasoned marketing leader with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of innovation, customer experience, and global brand growth. As a key figure at RWS Group, Emma shares her insights on how the company’s cutting-edge content solutions, AI-powered technologies, and deep localization expertise are helping brands like Canva scale their creativity and connect with audiences across the globe. From the evolution of RWS’s partnership with Canva to the growing role of AI in localization, Emma discusses the trends shaping the future of global content and the strategic value of localized experiences. Her perspective offers a compelling look at how AI and human expertise are transforming marketing and content strategy in today’s fast-paced digital landscape.
Dive into our exclusive interview with Emma Fisher from RWS Group as she shares insights on how AI, localization, and strategic partnerships are shaping the next era of marketing.
MarTech Insights (MTI): Hi, Emma. Welcome to the MarTech Top Voice Interview Series. We are inspired by the work you have done in your career. How did your background and experience shape the path that led you to join RWS Group?
Emma: Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be part of this series. My background spans over 20 years in the marketing agency world, where I led client strategy for both high-growth tech disruptors and complex, considered global brands. I’ve always been drawn to businesses that sit at the crossroads of innovation, customer experience, and global scale.
What drew me to RWS was its unique position in that intersection. Yes, we’re a global leader in content solutions like translation and localization – but what truly sets us apart is our technology excellence and the collective intelligence of our people. We’re a group of content, language and data experts who help brands grow by making them understood, everywhere.
I often describe RWS as the ‘hidden ingredient’ behind global understanding. From real-time translations powering the world’s most recognized stock markets to the localization of life-saving drug labelling – we’re not just adapting content, we’re enabling human connection, supporting innovation, and teaching machines through human language expertise.
In a world reshaped by AI and digital transformation, our mission has never been more relevant. And when you combine that with the scale we operate at and the cutting-edge technology we’ve developed in-house, joining RWS felt like the natural next step.
MTI: RWS has been working with Canva since 2016, and now you’re the Official Creative Localization Partner for Canva Create 2025. How has this partnership evolved, and what makes this latest milestone significant from a marketing and brand positioning perspective?
Emma: Our partnership with Canva has grown from traditional translation support into a deep, strategic collaboration that helps them scale creativity across hundreds of markets. Being the Official Creative Localization Partner for Canva Create 2025 is a signal of how localization is now seen as central element to global brand growth. From a marketing and brand perspective, this partnership demonstrates the trust leading digital platforms, like Canva place in RWS’s ability to blend human expertise, cultural nuance and AI technology to deliver seamless experiences, at scale.
MTI: Canva operates across 190 markets—how does RWS approach balancing consistency with cultural nuance when scaling such a global brand experience?
Emma: Canva’s mission is to democratize design and our job is to help that mission land meaningfully in over 190 countries. Our localization team works as a trusted partner with Canva’s own localization teams – we work hand-in-hand to align on everything from tone of voice to cultural nuance. This level of integration, paired with our in-country linguists who live and breathe their local cultures, is what makes global brand storytelling truly scalable and impactful. Great partnerships are built on trust, collaboration and a shared commitment to deliver quality outcomes that make content resonate in every market.
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MTI: Could you tell us about your martech stack for media and branding activities? What kind of expectations do you have from a global media publication platform such as MarTech Insights?
Emma: I see Brand as the golden thread that runs through every part of a business – it’s what drives consistency, recognition, and trust across the entire customer journey. A strong brand isn’t just about awareness – it’s a powerful enabler of buyer confidence and decision-making.
While we operate an integrated martech stack that fuels performance marketing, our brand amplification is powered by a content strategy rooted in buyer needs and informed by rich customer insight. We don’t just aim to push messages; we aim to build meaningful, useful narratives that ‘speak human, everywhere’ at every stage they need us.
Our martech ecosystem includes industry staples like Salesforce and HubSpot, complemented by tools like SEMrush, Meltwater, and Dreamdata. Together, they allow us to track brand impact, analyze behavior, and ensure every touchpoint is both relevant and resonant.
From MarTech Insights, I’m always looking for emerging trends, particularly around AI in marketing, the future of CX and how B2B organizations are innovating with intent. I’m also drawn to community-led perspectives that challenge thinking and shape how marketing can drive not just engagement, but real business growth.
MTI: With RWS’s extensive AI-related patent portfolio and experience, how is AI currently enhancing your localization workflows—particularly in a fast-paced creative environment like Canva’s?
Emma: Businesses are all riding the AI shockwave at the moment, but AI is and has been deeply embedded in our workflows for a long time. In fact our adaptive machine translation (Language Weaver) has 45+ AI-related patents, and the team has been pioneering in this area for many years. Our latest innovation leverages purpose-built, linguist-annotated models to provide machine translation quality estimation. This enables us to automatically assess and prioritize the performance of machine translation output. We then use the power of Large Language Models to further enhance the output for accuracy and fluency before our language specialists finalise the translations for the highest standards of quality and accuracy.
Our Linguistic AI is embedded into our solutions and helps clients to refine output based on brand tone and context, we’re enabling real-time, scalable content transformation.
With clients like Canva, speed and creativity are essential, so our language solutions paired with our proprietary technology, enhanced by human-in-the-loop systems, allows them to go to market faster without sacrificing quality or cultural authenticity.
MTI: There’s a growing demand for real-time and on-demand translation services. How is RWS adapting to meet this shift, and what role do you see human-in-the-loop systems playing in the future of AI translation?
Emma: We don’t just see this shift as an opportunity -it’s a strategic imperative. In our ‘Riding the AI Shockwave 2025’ global research across 14 markets, three pillars of trust emerged as critical to closing the gap between consumer expectations and engagement: transparency, explainability, and human involvement. These aren’t just preferences – they’re expectations.
In fact, 96% of respondents said they now see real-time, automatic translation as a baseline expectation in customer service. At RWS, we’re meeting that need with always-on, real-time translation capabilities powered by our neural machine translation platform, Language Weaver, seamlessly integrated into customer ecosystems.
But I strongly believe that AI alone isn’t enough. Human-in-the-loop systems remain vital for ensuring linguistic accuracy, cultural sensitivity, and brand integrity, especially in high-stakes or regulated environments. Another powerful stat from our research: 82% of people say they trust content more when they know a human was involved in its creation or validation.
We call this approach Genuine Intelligence, the fusion of human expertise and machine efficiency. It’s what enables us to deliver content that doesn’t just translate words, but truly resonates. In today’s global marketplace, that human insight – combined with best-in-class AI – is the difference between being understood and being ignored.
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MTI: As the translation industry continues to evolve with AI, what do you predict will be the biggest disruption or trend shaping the next 3–5 years in global content localization?
Emma: I believe we’re heading toward a world of fully adaptive, intelligent localization. Think: LLMs trained on brand-specific content, our TrainAI team already work with clients on domain specific content, but a world where multimodal experiences translated in real time and AI agents that go to work to localize and test UX automatically. But the biggest disruption? The rise of localized content as a strategic growth lever, not just an operational function.
Smart CMOs and growth leaders are beginning to treat localization as an investment, not a cost – seeing ubiquitous understanding and hyper personalisation, a competitive advantage and a path to differentiated growth
MTI: From a marketing leader’s standpoint, how do partnerships like Canva’s influence RWS’s visibility, customer acquisition, and storytelling on a global stage? Are there similar partnerships in the pipeline?
Emma: Partnerships like Canva’s are brand-defining. They allow us to showcase our capabilities in action, helping the world’s most creative companies scale globally. These stories not only drive visibility but also give our team powerful narratives to connect with future clients. And yes, we are always working on strategic collaborations that aim to enhance our solutions and innovate for our customers.
MTI: Which events are you attending this year?
Emma: You’ll find us at major industry events like LocWorld, CLO exchange, ATD25, SlatorCon, DevLearn and Cannes Lions as well as key tech, content, IP and AI conferences where localization is increasingly part of the innovation conversation. I also participate at our own customer Q innovation days on content transformation and the role of AI in global growth.
MTI: Tag a marketing leader from the industry whose response you would like to see at the MarTech Insights Top Voice program:
Emma: I’d love to hear from Will Wright from Adaptomy — on his systematic approach to creating value, challenging convention, building great teams, his REACH model is very future looking and always insightful.
Thank you so much, Emma, for your time today! We look forward to having you again at our Top Voice Series.
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For media inquiries, you can write to our MarTech Newsroom at sudipto@intentamplify.com
About Emma
Emma Fisher serves as the Vice President of Global Marketing and Foundation Board Trustee at RWS Group, based in London. In this role, she leads the company’s brand and marketing strategy, with a focus on Business-to-Human (B2H) insights, digital content, customer behaviour trends, and content transformation strategies aimed at elevating customer engagement. Previously, Emma was the Head of Growth and an Agency Board Member, working for over two decades in B2B and B2C marketing agencies. During this time, she collaborated with some of the world’s largest brands, specializing in crafting engaging content and building strong global brands.
About RWS Group
RWS is a unique world-leading provider of technology-enabled language, content and IP services. Through content transformation and multilingual data analysis, our combination of AI-enabled technology and human expertise helps our clients to grow by ensuring they are understood anywhere, in any language. We work with 83 of the top 100 global brands, 19 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies and 19 of the top 20 patent filers worldwide.
