Sheriff Issaka from African Languages Lab, took home the 2025 Innovator of the Year – USA Award at LocWorld’s 19th Process Innovation Challenge, which took place on the 15th of October 2025 at LocWorld54 in Monterey.

Sheriff won the PIC with the innovation “MansalLLM: A Unified AI Model for African Language Translation and Localization” which showed an amazing project to build a model for LLMs in Africa, as well as reminding us that 1/3 of the world’s languages are in that continent. 

The runner-up this time was Gabriel Fairman, Bureau Works, with “Articulated Suggestions”. Second runner-up was Klaus Fleischmann, Kaleidoscope GmbH, with “Model Context Protocol for Terminology Augmented Generation”. 

On behalf of LocWorld and the Process Innovation Challenge, we would like to take this opportunity to recognize all finalists. This was an amazing final in front of a live industry audience of over 350. 

The PIC dragons this time were Olga Blasco (Lion People Global), Celine Halpert (Canva), and Salvo Giammarresi (Airbnb).
Marina Pantcheva (RWS), and Dave Ruane (Lion People Global) produced and hosted the event with support from Erika Jeffries (LocWorld). We would also like to thank Multilingual Magazine, LocWorld, Lion People Global, and RWS for supporting this event.

The innovators and innovations at the final of the 19th PIC were:

  1. Sheriff Issaka, African Languages Lab, “MansalLLM: A Unified AI Model for African Language Translation and Localization”
  2. Marina Sánchez Torrón, Smartling, “Code – Not Write – Prompts at Scale for Self-Optimizing AutoLQA”
  3. Gabriel Fairman, Bureau Works, “Articulated Suggestions”
  4. Andreas Ljungström, XTM International, “LLM-driven Diagnostic Quality Estimation with Intelligent Score”
  5. Klaus Fleischmann, Kaleidoscope GmbH, “Model Context Protocol for Terminology Augmented Generation”
  6. Konstantin Savenkov, Intento, “From Translation to Language Governance”

Congratulations to all 6 outstanding finalists on a competitive and entertaining competition as well as the 27 innovators who participated in the earlier 3cubed preliminary round! 

Do you have a localization process or technology innovation for the PIC “stage”? Contact Dave Ruane or Erika Jeffries directly for information, and watch out for the CFP for our next event (June 2026 in Dublin, Ireland) which will be posted during early 2026.

Dave and Marina