The High Cost of Everything vs Global Events Growth - Wordly Saves Organizers $100M in Production

LOS ALTOS, Calif. - May 7, 2026 - PRLog -- Wordly, the pioneer in real-time AI translation and captioning, announced today that its platform saved the live events industry more than $100 million in production costs since its 2019 launch. These savings reflect increasing demand for multilingual event experiences, along with greater pressure on organizers to justify budgets through measurable ROI and cost efficiency.

Event organizers are facing rising costs across the board, from venues and travel to staffing and production. This pressure is forcing a fundamental rethink of how global events are produced and what budgets can realistically support. As a result, organizers are becoming more selective about where they invest, with language accessibility increasingly tied to attendance and overall event success.

"The $100 million in savings we've tracked represents a breaking point in event production economics," said Lakshman Rathnam, Founder & CEO of Wordly. "With costs rising everywhere, organizers are being forced to make tough choices. When multilingual access depends on multiple interpreters, travel, and on-site logistics, costs scale quickly, making it a prime area for meaningful savings."

Breaking the "Per-Language" Production Cost Model
Historically, every added language meant more interpreters, more equipment, and more coordination, driving up costs one language at a time. This "per-language cost" made it harder for large global events to offer broad accessibility.

Wordly replaces this model with a cloud-based system that delivers real-time translation and captions across dozens of languages simultaneously, accessible directly on attendees' devices. This eliminates interpreter teams, hardware deployment, and much of the on-site production overhead.

Since Wordly's launch, that shift has supported over 1 billion minutes of real-time translation across 120 countries, reflecting the rapid growth of multilingual event demand.

From Estimates to Measurable Event Investments

To address rising financial scrutiny, Wordly offers an ROI Calculator (https://wordly.ai/roi-calculator) that allows event organizers to model and compare traditional interpretation costs against AI-driven translation workflows. By inputting event hours and the number of languages used, organizers can generate side-by-side cost scenarios that reflect real production budgets.

"As events become more global, accessibility and economics become a common goal," said Rathnam. "What we're seeing is a shift where organizers want to reduce costs and expand reach in a way that is financially sustainable. AI translation makes both possible at the same time."

This convergence of cost efficiency and audience expansion is increasingly shaping how global events are designed, funded, and evaluated. It positions multilingual access as both a growth driver and a measurable line item in event ROI.