Global BPO to Buy Lionbridge Data Annotation Business

TELUS International announced that it would buy Lionbridge's artificial intelligence business unit in a deal worth US$935 million that is expected to close by December 31st. Let's first explain what Lionbridge AI does, review the deal, analyze what it means to the language services and technology sector, and show what it represents to investors. Here's a quick synopsis: Lionbridge's private equity investor will sell a non-core business unit for a sizeable return on its 2017 purchase price, thus allowing it to position the core language service business as a pureplay LSP - and maximize the value of its remaining asset in one of several ways. Lionbridge AI is a business unit of Lionbridge Technologies (#2 in CSA Research's 2020 global list of leading LSPs) that processes multilingual data used in training artificial intelligence algorithms – that is, human-annotated data for text (for example, semantic, sentiment, intent, named entities like places, company names, and phone numbers), images (captions, keywords), audio (transcription and time stamps), videos (outlining objects – think of the incessant reCAPTCHA challenges to prove you're not a robot). "Processing" takes a variety of forms.