One Language at a Time: How GLS Built Trust in AI Translation

Every year, church leaders from around the world gather in Chicago for the Global Leadership Summit (GLS), the premier leadership event for the global church community. Hosted at Willow Creek Community Church, GLS welcomes over 7,000 attendees on site, with the event broadcast live across the world. For their international audience, they have one priority: everyone needs to understand the content in their own language, in real time.

Since 2023, they’ve partnered with LiveVoice to make that possible.

The Challenge

Running a live event of this scale means delivering flawless simultaneous interpretation to a massive, geographically scattered audience - on site and online - without adding complexity or driving up costs. Traditional interpretation setups are expensive, hard to scale, and dependent on booking and coordinating interpreters for every language, every year.

The GLS team needed a solution that could keep pace with a growing international audience while staying reliable, simple to run, and cost-effective.

The Journey: From Human Interpreters to AI Translation

2023: Getting Started with Remote Simultaneous Interpretation
GLS first started using LiveVoice for professional human interpreters working remotely (RSI). This laid the foundation for a smooth, and flexible multilingual experience for both the in-person and broadcast audiences.

2024: The First Step into AI
Looking to keep interpreting affordable, GLS became one of the first major events to test LiveVoice's AI translation technology. The results were promising enough to keep exploring what AI could do at scale.

2025: AI Takes Over, Except for One Language
By 2025, GLS delivered nearly all of its language channels through AI translation. The one exception was Portuguese, the leadership team overseeing the Portuguese audience was still cautious about trusting AI for the attendee experience.

2026: Full Confidence in AI
After seeing how well AI translation performed, GLS moved all four language channels of that year - Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Chinese - to LiveVoice's AI translation. What started as a cautious experiment became the standard for the entire event.

The Results

Switching to AI translation didn't just maintain the quality GLS attendees had come to expect but it improved the process behind the scenes:

• Lower costs, while making the high quality content understandable for non-English speakers
• Simplified logistics — no more coordinating interpreter schedules and bookings across multiple languages and time zones
• Consistent quality across all four languages, reassuring even the most skeptical stakeholders
• Positive attendee feedback, received through LiveVoice's on-site service point, where the team heard first-hand how well the translation worked for both in-person and online audiences
  

Looking Ahead

GLS's journey reflects exactly what LiveVoice was built for: giving event organizers a translation solution that grows with them, adapts to their needs, and removes barriers for audiences around the world.

With LiveVoice's AI Translation on Demand feature, GLS now has the opportunity to flexibly expand beyond their current four languages, opening the door to reaching even more communities worldwide without adding operational complexity.

As GLS continues to grow its international reach, LiveVoice remains the platform ensuring that language is never a barrier to leadership development - wherever attendees are watching from.