Key Takeaways

• HR leaders are managing increasingly complex workforces. Multilingual teams, accessibility needs, regional requirements, and changing business demands all need to work within the same employee experience.
• Language and accessibility barriers have measurable consequences. For LEP, Deaf, and hard-of-hearing employees, gaps can contribute to turnover, safety incidents, poor onboarding, and limited career growth.
• A language-accessible workplace enables every employee to fully participate and thrive at work, regardless of language, literacy level, or communication-related disability.
• An SGO replaces a patchwork of disconnected solutions. One strategic partner can bring language operations, interpretation, accessibility, and multilingual staffing together under a unified workforce strategy.

Language Is a Major Workforce Variable Most Organizations Do Not Measure

That is why the business case never gets made. HR leaders own every process where language decides an outcome: recruiting, onboarding, safety training, benefits enrollment, performance reviews, investigations. None of those processes were designed for the workforce they actually have. The cost is real, and it is already sitting inside metrics reported every month under other names: turnover, incident rates, workers’ compensation claims, time to productivity, engagement scores.

Ask an HR leader whether language barriers have cost them people and the answer is usually that they probably have, but there is no way to know. That is not a data problem. It is a missing field.

Roughly 68 million U.S. residents age 5 and older, about one in five, speak a language other than English at home. More than one in four U.S. adults lives with a disability. Both are already on your payroll.

Where Language Breaks Down for Employees with Limited English

Language does not fail in one place. It fails at every stage, and each failure lands in a number you already report.

• Recruiting: English-only job descriptions screen out qualified candidates before they apply, and interviews conducted in English disadvantage those who apply anyway.
• Onboarding: The HCM portal, new-hire paperwork, compliance training, employee handbook, and benefits enrollment are usually only available in English. Only 12% of employees strongly agreed their organization does a great job of onboarding, and that is before considering a language barrier.
• Training and safety: Language gaps can leave critical safety instructions misunderstood or missed entirely. In 2024, Hispanic and Latino workers had a fatal injury rate of 4.3 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers, compared with 3.3 overall, with more than two-thirds foreign-born. A single workplace fatality carries an estimated societal cost of roughly $1.5 million.
• Performance and advancement: Reviews and coaching are where careers open up or stall, and they are the touchpoints least likely to have language support attached. A high performer who cannot fully participate does not get advocated for.

While organizations have tried to address language barriers, gaps persist. Free machine translation often misses cultural context, technical language, and operational nuance. Multilingual HCM platforms may translate the interface while policies, handbooks, and training remain in English. Bilingual colleagues – or even employees’ family members – are left to interpret critical information like healthcare coverage. Treating language access as a diversity initiative rather than an operational imperative puts it under the wrong budget, while the costs show up in safety, turnover, and compliance.

Organizations spend years perfecting the customer journey. But the employee journey happens first. For millions of workers, that journey begins in a language that is not their own. The organizations that design for that reality, intentionally, systematically, and humanely, will build stronger teams, safer workplaces, and more resilient organizations.

Mary Grothe | Chief Revenue Officer, Piedmont Global

Where Access Breaks Down for Deaf & Disabled Employees

The same lifecycle with a different set of barriers across three groups: Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Blind and Low Vision, and Mobility and Physical Disabilities.

• Recruiting: Application platforms that do not work with screen readers, interviews offered without sign language interpretation or CART captioning, and digital portals that fall short of WCAG conformance.
• Onboarding: Orientation videos without captions or postproduction interpreting, benefits portals incompatible with assistive technology, and training materials built for employees who can see and hear them.
• Day to day: Meetings without interpreters or real-time captions, and internal communications in formats that assume full hearing, mobility, and sight as the default.
• Advancement: Performance reviews running on those same inaccessible systems, and development pathways that exclude people from the start.

The nuance that trips up most employers is that sign language is not one language. American Sign Language is a distinct language with its own grammar. Signed English (SEE) and Pidgin Signed English (PSE) are manual codes that follow English word order, and Protactile is a tactile mode used by many DeafBlind people. An interpreter who does not match an employee’s dialect fails to provide access.

The Americans with Disabilities Act, signed in 1990, required employers to provide auxiliary aids and services such as interpreting and captioning, and framed the obligation as “reasonable accommodation.” Reasonable was an enormous step then, and it became a ceiling: an entire service industry organized itself around clearing that bar rather than exceeding it.

Today, most organizations sit in one of three postures:

• Reactive: Requests handled informally as they arrive. Quality depends on who happens to be free.
• Policy-driven: Written policy, assigned roles, a list of vendors to call. Compliant in intent, still fundamentally response-driven.
• Proactive: Access built into standard operating procedure, so a new hire meets accessible systems on day one. Readiness is the default, not the exception.

The difference between reasonable and real-time is the difference between checking a box and actually providing accessibility. Your employees and your customers know the difference immediately.

Brian Birnbaum | CEO, Birnbaum Interpreting Services

Building a Language-Accessible Workplace

A language-accessible workplace ensures employees can fully engage with and thrive in their work regardless of the language they speak, their literacy level, or any communication-related disability.

The organizations that are really getting this right aren’t doing it because they have more resources. They’re doing it because they made language access a workforce strategy priority.

Leah Grant | VP of Staffing Solutions, Piedmont Global

Four moves get you there:

• Audit and design: You cannot prioritize what you cannot see. Map which languages your workforce speaks and which access needs exist, by location and team. Survey multilingual employees in their own language, and survey managers separately, because managers will tell you where communication breaks first. The question that reveals the most: where are bilingual employees already being used as informal interpreters? Then sequence by consequence rather than volume, starting with safety training and onboarding.
• Implement, for the written journey and the spoken one: Translated documents cover the paperwork. Interpretation covers the conversation. Start with the onboarding set, because the first 90 days are your highest-leverage window, and keep a workflow that updates translations when policy changes. Then put professional interpretation behind the moments where clarity is not optional: benefits counseling, disciplinary meetings, investigations, safety briefings, performance reviews. For Deaf and disabled employees that means sign language interpreting and CART captioning, intervener services, and WCAG conformance.
• Build internal capacity: The most durable fix is capacity you own. Recruit bilingual professionals into the roles where that competency changes the experience for a whole team, from HR generalists to first-line supervisors to safety officers, and build those roles into headcount planning rather than backfill.
• Sustain and measure: Track language and access alongside turnover, safety incidents, benefits utilization, and performance data. Identify which roles, teams, and locations carry the highest turnover and their language demographics. Set a baseline before you spend, because that baseline turns the second budget request into a straightforward conversation.

The payoff shows up in metrics you already report. Shorter time-to-fill, lower turnover in the roles where it runs highest, comprehension you can document instead of assume, and fewer incidents traced back to miscommunication.

Why One Partner Beats a Patchwork

Most organizations run this framework through disconnected vendors: one for translation, another for interpreting, a staffing agency for bilingual hires, and no shared strategy or data between them. When something goes wrong during onboarding or a safety briefing, nobody owns the full employee experience.

Piedmont Global is a Strategic Globalization Organization (SGO), which means one point of accountability across the whole framework rather than a different vendor at each phase.

• LangOps: Multilingual HR content with glossaries, style guides, and version control, so translations stay current when policy changes rather than after the next incident.
• Connexus: Our enterprise interpretation management platform offers on-demand and scheduled human interpretation across 300+ languages, including American Sign Language, alongside our Speech-to-Speech AI Interpreter. High-stakes conversations reach credentialed human interpreters, while routine volume runs on AI.
• MedConnect Staffing: Bilingual and multilingual placement across healthcare, government, and enterprise, so the competency resides within your team rather than on a vendor list.

An employee does not experience your vendor list. They experience one first day, one safety briefing, one benefits conversation, one review that either lands or does not.

If you want to talk through what a language-accessible workplace would take in your environment, all three contributors are reachable directly.

→ Mary Grothe, Chief Revenue Officer, on the multilingual employee experience and building the internal business case.

→ Brian Birnbaum, CEO of Birnbaum Interpreting Services, on accessibility infrastructure for Deaf and Hard of Hearing employees.

→ Leah Grant, VP of Staffing Solutions, on global talent strategy and bilingual workforce planning.

The post Building Workplaces That Work in Every Language appeared first on Piedmont Global.

More than 25 million people in the United States live with limited English proficiency. Rural hospitals and Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) carry a disproportionate share of that population, and they carry it with the thinnest staffing and the tightest budgets.

Here is the part that rarely gets said out loud: the problem is almost never a lack of willingness to solve the problem.

A rural clinic cannot keep a staff interpreter for every language that walks through the door. So it improvises – a phone line for one language, a video vendor for another, a bilingual medical assistant pulled off her own work, sometimes a patient’s own child. Every one of those carries a cost, and interpreting is one of the few clinical necessities that Medicaid and Medicare generally do not reimburse. You provide it because Title VI and Section 1557 require it and because it is the right thing to do, not because it pays for itself.

Where the Model Breaks

Walk a patient’s visit from the parking lot forward and the gaps land in the same places every time.

At the front desk, speed is what matters most. When a patient speaks a language the clinic can’t staff for – Somali, or Karen, a language spoken by many Burmese refugees – reaching an interpreter can mean calling one vendor, finding out they don’t cover it, then trying another and waiting on hold. While that plays out, the visit either stalls or moves ahead without a qualified interpreter, and the patient leaves without fully understanding their own care.

In the exam room, the stakes change. A medication reconciliation or a behavioral-health screen is not a place for a well-meaning family member. And after the visit, there is the part auditors care about: can you prove, encounter by encounter, that a qualified interpreter was used? For most clinics stitching vendors together, that record does not exist in one place.

None of this is a staffing failure. It is what happens when language access is bought one call and one vendor at a time.

What a Better Model Looks Like

Piedmont Global built this as one connected operation, not a single fix bolted onto the old vendor list. Our platform runs the day-to-day: one contract, one workflow, one record trail instead of a scramble of disconnected calls. Underneath it, our data intelligence work matches your interpreter and staffing plan to the languages actually walking through your door instead of last year’s grant application. And the workforce side of the model, covered further down, runs through that same operation rather than a separate hire-and-hope process.

• One usage-based contract: You pay for the minutes you use, with no monthly platform fee and no minimum. For a clinic whose volume swings with the season, the grant cycle, and the local population, the cost tracks reality instead of a flat line you pay whether you use it or not.
• 300+ languages including American Sign Language, on demand: Over-the-phone, video, and onsite interpreting from one network, so there is no per-language vendor to chase. ASL and Spanish run 24/7 on video; other languages vary by availability.
• Human interpreters for the moments that demand them: Clinical and high-risk conversations route to credentialed interpreters by design. For high-volume routine calls like scheduling and eligibility, the Speech-to-Speech AI Interpreter can carry the load in Spanish and English, with your team deciding by call type what goes to a human and what does not.
• A record you can hand to a reviewer: Every session captures interpreter credentials, language, duration, and encounter ID, exported in the formats HRSA, OCR, and the Joint Commission expect. Section 1557 evidence stops being a scramble.

One community health system that made this shift cut its annual language-access spend from roughly $3 million to under $500,000, and reduced communication-related errors in the process.

That’s the platform side of the model. The workforce side matters just as much, and it is where the provider in the room comes in.

The Provider in the Room Is Part of the Model Too

There is a workforce reality underneath all of this. Internationally trained physicians – foreign medical graduates – make up about 23% of the U.S. physician workforce, and rural, safety-net, and community settings lean on them far more heavily than that average suggests. In many low-income and rural counties, they are not a supplement to the care model. They are the care model.

A foreign medical graduate practicing as a physician or advanced practice provider (APP) often arrives with something you cannot recruit for on a spec sheet: the language and lived experience of the population the clinic serves. When a provider and patient share a language, patient trust measures higher than it does with an untrained family member interpreting, and about the same as care delivered through a professional interpreter. A Spanish-speaking family physician in an agricultural community, or an Arabic-speaking APP in a refugee-resettlement town, changes how care lands: fewer missed cues, and more of the quiet context that decides whether a treatment plan actually happens.

Here is the trap, though. When a clinic has one provider who speaks the patients’ language, that provider quietly becomes the language plan. They get pulled into other clinicians’ visits to interpret and carry a panel weighted toward every LEP patient in the building. It burns them out, it does not scale, and it is not the job you recruited a clinician to do. A bilingual provider is also not a qualified medical interpreter by default. Conversational fluency is not the same as accuracy under clinical and legal stakes, which is why provider language skills should be assessed, not assumed.

That assessment is itself a staffing decision, and it is where Piedmont Global’s work extends past the platform. Our MedConnect team places bilingual physicians, APPs, and international medical graduates in permanent roles for exactly this kind of population, so language-concordant hiring becomes something a rural system can plan for rather than something it gets lucky into. MedConnect does not replace the platform side of the model, and a bilingual hire does not discharge a Title VI or Section 1557 obligation on its own any more than a professional interpreter contract does. It is the other half of the model, not a substitute for either half.

The right model uses both, on purpose. Language-concordant providers do what only they can do: deliver care with cultural fluency already built in. The platform covers the rest – every other language in the panel, the after-hours call, the ASL request, and the moment your one Spanish-speaking physician is already in another room. That is what lets a foreign medical graduate practice at the top of their license instead of serving as the clinic’s default interpreter, and it is what makes their impact on the population durable rather than dependent on one person never taking a day off.

We Have Run This Play Before

Step back and the through-line is hard to miss. Every problem above describes a clinic keeping a critical function alive by improvising: a medical assistant pulled off her own work, a provider’s personal fluency, a patient’s teenage son translating a diagnosis in the waiting room. Healthcare has outgrown this exact pattern once already.

Twenty years ago, patient information lived the same way – paper charts in a back room, a fax to the specialist, and the one veteran nurse who knew where everything was filed. It worked until she retired. The electronic health record did not replace her judgment. It stopped the practice from depending on any single person’s memory, and it left a record you could actually stand behind.

Language access is sitting where recordkeeping sat then. A language-concordant physician is that veteran nurse: invaluable, and exactly the wrong thing to build an entire system on. The work is to put infrastructure underneath your people, so the care model holds whether or not one clinician is in the building that day.

The Honest Part

Moving off a patchwork is real work, not a switch you flip. There is change management in getting front-desk and clinical staff onto one workflow, and it is worth being clear-eyed about that going in. You lived through the EHR rollout, so you already know the shape of it – this is a far smaller lift, but it is not nothing. The alternative, though – rising volume, flat budgets, and thin documentation – is not a strategy. It is a risk you are carrying whether you name it or not.

If you run language access at a rural hospital or an FQHC, I would like to hear how you are handling the cost side of this. It is the question I get asked most, and the reimbursement gap makes it a hard one. Comment below or send me a message.

And if you want to see how Piedmont Global handles the coverage, the routing, and the reporting for a center like yours, I am glad to walk you through it.

Preston Rasmussen, Business Development Representative at Piedmont Global | Book 20 minutes.

The post Rural Clinics Serve the Most LEP Patients & Get the Least Language Access Support appeared first on Piedmont Global.

Arlington, VA, August 3, 2026 – Piedmont Global, a Strategic Globalization℠ partner helping organizations lead globally, fluently, and confidently, today announced the appointment of James Rucki as Director of Commercial Sales, effective August 3. Rucki reports to Mary Grothe, Chief Revenue Officer, and will lead Piedmont Global’s Commercial Sales team, strengthening the company’s strategic partnerships in healthcare, manufacturing, insurance, financial services, and technology. 

Piedmont Global has established itself as a Strategic Globalization Organization (SGO) in a market that increasingly expects a single provider to bring together technology and solutions rather than a menu of disconnected, transactional language services. The appointment comes as the company expands its Elite 8 solutions and builds a unified commercial sales team.

As Director of Commercial Sales, Rucki owns the sales strategy and performance across the company’s direct commercial sales team and those of its acquired brands. He will develop new client relationships, grow existing accounts, and expand adoption of the company’s solutions. Additionally, he will equip the sales teams of Piedmont Global’s acquired brands with the company’s capabilities and architecture while preserving the brand equity that makes each one valuable to the clients it already serves.

“Rucki’s experience leading enterprise sales teams through complex buying cycles and his proven experience with acquisition integration is exactly what this stage of our growth calls for,” said Grothe, Chief Revenue Officer of Piedmont Global. “He’s building a culture of ownership, excellence, and disciplined execution, grounded in passionate problem-solving for our clients’ most complex language and cross-cultural needs. That same discipline extends to our strategic partnerships, creating new growth opportunities within existing relationships and building new ones across the portfolio.”

For Rucki, this growth starts with understanding what clients are trying to achieve and connecting them with the right capabilities across Piedmont Global’s expansive suite of cross-cultural multilingual operations.

“The opportunity at Piedmont Global is about much more than growth. It’s about helping organizations communicate, operate, and succeed across languages, cultures, and markets,” Rucki said. “My vision is to build lasting partnerships by deeply understanding our clients’ objectives and aligning the right people, expertise, and technology to help them achieve meaningful business outcomes.”

That approach also reflects a broader shift in the market, as organizations look beyond individual language services for partners that can support increasingly complex global operations.

“Piedmont Global is uniquely positioned for what’s ahead,” Rucki added. “Organizations today need more than translation – they need a strategic partner that can help them communicate effectively, navigate cultural complexity, operate confidently around the world and for domestic companies, address the diverse global landscape inside their four walls. The combination of exceptional people, deep expertise, and innovative technology creates an incredible opportunity to help our clients succeed.”

Rucki brings more than 14 years of sales leadership experience across healthcare, life sciences, technology, and enterprise SaaS, with a track record of building teams and driving growth at startup and growth-stage companies. He has helped scale one company’s revenue from $2 million to $25 million and guided another from $10 million to $20 million through an acquisition. His approach combines disciplined, metrics-driven execution with a strong focus on developing talent, strengthening team culture, and keeping customers at the center of growth.

About Piedmont Global

Piedmont Global is a Strategic Globalization Organization (SGO). Enterprises and government agencies approach us because managing operations across different languages, cultures, markets, and systems places a coordination burden on staff who already have full-time jobs, causing the organization to act as an unofficial systems integrator for its own globalization efforts, whether that’s across borders or within its own four walls. 

To address that disconnect, we manage it as a single operation, drawing on eight integrated solutions: language operations, accessibility, staffing, data services, market intelligence, BPO, content, and consulting. Any one of the eight is easy to buy from a point vendor. Getting all eight to run to one standard, under one accountable team, is the challenging part. That’s what we’re built to do. 

Behind us sit 10,000+ globalization professionals working across 300+ languages and dialects, one set of certifications and security controls (ISO 27001, 9001, 17100, and 13485), and one delivery standard. 

Founded in 2013, Piedmont Global has earned Inc. 5000 recognition for three consecutive years and works with clients across government, healthcare, education, manufacturing, energy, insurance, and financial services. Learn more at piedmontglobal.com. 

Media Contact

Mary Grothe
Chief Revenue Officer
Piedmont Global
mgrothe@piedmontglobal.com

The post Piedmont Global Names James Rucki Director of Commercial Sales appeared first on Piedmont Global.

Arlington, VA, June 15, 2026 – Piedmont Global, a Strategic Globalization℠ partner helping organizations lead globally, fluently, and confidently, announced the appointment of Benjoe Markland as Chief Operating Officer, effective June 15.

In his new role, Markland will own delivery across Piedmont Global’s business units – including interpreting, localization, staffing, and data services – along with linguist credentialing, quality management, and the operational technology that supports them.

Piedmont Global wasn’t built as a collection of separate service lines. It was designed as a unified, multi-service platform where language operations, accessibility, data services, staff augmentation, content, and consulting come together to serve healthcare, government, education, and enterprise clients.

While competitors offer a menu of disconnected services, we offer one integrated partner with multiple ways to solve a problem: one operating model, many paths to value.

At this stage, the challenge isn’t adding new capabilities – it’s connecting them, so clients have a seamless experience no matter how many of our services they use.

That’s why the role of Chief Operating Officer is so critical right now. It exists to unify our operating model through shared systems, consistent quality standards, and an integrated delivery engine.

“This is not a traditional operations job of running departments; it’s an architect’s role, responsible for building the enterprise operating system that connects everything we do from shared customer relationships, shared delivery capacity, shared go-to-market strength, and shared technology, into scalable, repeatable growth. Finding a leader who could see the platform rather than the silos was our highest bar, and Benjoe cleared it. With him leading our operations, we’re not just scaling what we do; we’re compounding what makes Piedmont Global unique,” said Mohamed Hussein, CEO of Piedmont Global.

Markland’s goal is to make that scale feel consistent to clients: the same standard of quality in every language, modality, and time zone, capacity built ahead of demand, and direct visibility into performance.

“Piedmont Global has a scale that is hard to build: over 300 languages and more than 10,000 qualified linguists. My job is to make our operations as dependable as our people are talented, with consistent quality in every language and capacity in place before a client needs it. Our clients are making decisions where getting the language wrong has real consequences. Getting it right every time is the whole job, and it is what I expect to be measured on,” said Markland, COO of Piedmont Global.

Markland brings more than 20 years of executive leadership in global business process outsourcing (BPO), information technology outsourcing (ITO), and customer experience (CX) operations. He most recently served as president and chief operating officer of Focus Services, where he managed a multi-entity P&L of more than $65 million across 13 global sites and over 25 enterprise clients. He has scaled operations across the United States, Latin America, Europe, and Asia, led the integration of multiple acquisitions, and built AI-enabled delivery systems. Markland is also fluent in Spanish and holds a Bachelor of Business Administration in Finance.

This appointment marks another step forward as Piedmont Global continues helping clients navigate global communication needs through integrated solutions.

About Piedmont Global

Piedmont Global is a Strategic Globalization Organization (SGO) dedicated to making cross-cultural operations easier, smarter, and more human for enterprises and public sector organizations. The company provides Language Operations, Accessibility & ASL, AI Risk & Intelligence Assurance, Staffing, Data Services, BPO & KPO, Content Solutions, Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT), and proprietary technology platforms, including Connexus, an enterprise interpretation management platform, and CensIQ, a language access planning platform. Piedmont Global helps clients eliminate vendor sprawl, strengthen compliance, accelerate operational readiness, and expand their global reach with confidence. Learn more at piedmontglobal.com.

Media Contact

Mary Grothe
Chief Revenue Officer
Piedmont Global
mgrothe@piedmontglobal.com

The post Piedmont Global Names BenJoe Markland Chief Operating Officer appeared first on Piedmont Global.

CensIQ

Connexus

• CensIQ provides the intelligence layer, helping organizations understand evolving language access needs while aligning policies, plans, and resources to meet them. Connexus serves as the delivery platform through which human interpreters and AI-powered interpretation services are deployed, managed, and measured across every modality.
• Connexus responsibly consolidates human and AI interpretation within a single delivery model: Over-the-Phone Interpretation (OPI), Video Remote Interpretation (VRI), Onsite Interpretation (OSI), and the real-time Speech-to-Speech AI Interpreter – all in one browser-based platform with 300+ languages and American Sign Language (ASL) embedded across every modality. For healthcare clients, Connexus is designed to be the first EHR-agnostic interpretation platform with instant connectors, built to embed directly in the electronic health record.

Both platforms are built for small- to enterprise-level commercial and public-sector organizations that need compliant, defensible language access at scale across healthcare, financial services, government, education, and other industries where cross-cultural communication is mission-critical.

“For years, language access has treated planning and delivery as separate activities – one focused on what organizations think they need, the other on responding when demand arrives. Our view is that they should be part of the same system. CensIQ provides the intelligence to understand populations, anticipate needs, and continuously refine strategy. Connexus operationalizes those insights through a single platform that orchestrates human and AI interpretation across every modality, creating a continuous feedback loop between planning, delivery, and outcomes. This is our first public launch as a Strategic Globalization Organization, and it reflects how we think language access should work: planned against reality, delivered responsibly, and measured against results.” — Mohamed Hussein, Founder and CEO, Piedmont Global

How does CensIQ work?

CensIQ is a core component of the intelligence layer within the SGO model. Most language access plans are built as compliance exercises – created once, updated infrequently, and disconnected from the realities of implementation. They often describe what an organization intends to do, but provide limited visibility into whether meaningful access is actually being delivered, measured, and improved over time.

CensIQ starts from a different premise: effective language access requires alignment. Population needs, policy requirements, regulatory mandates, organizational priorities, budgets, procurement decisions, operational capacity, and frontline service delivery all influence outcomes, yet they are rarely brought together into a single decision-making framework.

CensIQ combines demographic and limited English proficiency (LEP) trend intelligence at ZIP, county, and state levels with organizational data, benchmarking, agentic workflows, and consulting expertise to create a shared understanding of what meaningful access requires. The platform helps align policy with execution, federal and state requirements with local realities, leadership expectations with operational capacity, and community needs with measurable outcomes.

The result is more than a language access plan. CensIQ produces assessments, plans, roadmaps, governance frameworks, performance benchmarks, and strategic recommendations that help organizations understand where gaps exist, prioritize resources, establish accountability, and measure progress over time. Rather than treating language access as a static compliance document, CensIQ enables organizations to manage it as a living operational capability.

How does Connexus work?

The platform consolidates capabilities that have historically lived across two or three separate vendor relationships. OPI, VRI, OSI, AI interpretation, scheduling, interpreter management, call routing, audit-ready Joint Commission documentation, per-minute billing tied to call detail records, and real-time capacity analytics all run inside one browser-based platform. Pricing is usage-based with no monthly platform fees and no minimums.

The Speech-to-Speech AI Interpreter is linguist-led by design. Linguists with sector expertise own the glossary, the interaction guidelines, and the quality-assurance loop, and the service runs under the same accuracy target and audit trail as human interpretation. It supports 12+ languages at launch, with Spanish-English as the validated, domain-tuned pair, and targets 95%+ accuracy on domain-adapted language pairs through a pre-launch glossary build and ongoing linguist QA. Call types are routed by configuration, so high-stakes calls go to credentialed human interpreters and routine volume goes to the AI Interpreter. The AI is the engine; language professionals are in control.

“Buyers are not asking for another interpretation tool. They are asking for a partner who can absorb the operational complexity of running cross-cultural communication at scale – and prove it in records. That is why we built the SGO model, not just the platform. CensIQ tells clients where the language access gaps are. Connexus closes them. One contract, one SLA, AI scale where it earns its place, humans where the stakes demand it, and the data to defend every decision. That is what our clients are responding to.” — Mary Grothe, Chief Revenue Officer, Piedmont Global

What systems does Connexus integrate with?

Connexus integrates into the systems clients already run, without changing existing infrastructure.

• For healthcare clients, Connexus is HIPAA-compliant, Epic SMART on FHIR ready, and in final integration certification, with the Redox middleware path in progress to extend EHR connectivity across 95+ systems. The product is designed to be the first EHR-agnostic interpretation platform with instant connectors, built for the realities of multi-EHR health systems and federal healthcare agencies.
• For non-healthcare clients, Connexus integrates through SIP trunking, REST API, and direct connectors to Twilio Flex, Genesys, Five9, NICE, Talkdesk, Amazon Connect, RingCentral, and other major contact center platforms.

“We designed everything to embed inside the systems you already run – not to replace them. CensIQ draws its population intelligence from external data sources. Connexus then integrates through Epic SMART on FHIR for the EHR, SIP trunking and direct CCaaS connectors for the contact center, REST API for the data warehouse, and SAML federation for identity. The platform is browser-based, AWS-hosted, ISO 27001:2022 certified, and HIPAA-compliant. IT teams should expect both to fit, not to fight. That is what gets a platform from pilot to production, and what keeps it in the critical path once it is there.” — Jeremy Malara, Chief Information and Technology Officer, Piedmont Global

“What separates the SGO model is intelligence-first and hybrid by design. CensIQ tells you which languages and modalities to plan for, and it is built to keep that plan current as your population shifts. Inside Connexus, AI handles scale and human OPI handles the calls that matter, with the routing layer making the decision in real time based on confidence scoring. Clients see one dashboard, one accuracy report, and one audit log across both human and AI delivery. That is not how AI speech-translation vendors are building. That is how a language services company that has been credentialing interpreters for thirteen years builds it.” — Saba Dovlatabadi, VP of Product, Piedmont Global

How can enterprises and government agencies get started?

Connexus is available beginning today through Piedmont Global’s managed interpretation service and through cooperative purchasing vehicles, including the NASPO ValuePoint Remote Interpreting Services contract and the GSA Professional Services Schedule (Contract #47QRAA18D001Y). Piedmont Global holds ISO 27001:2022, ISO 9001:2015, ISO 17100:2015, and ISO 13485:2016 certifications and is a certified minority-owned business.

Learn more at piedmontglobal.com/connexus or book a demo today.

About Piedmont Global

Organizations quickly outgrow siloed language vendors and one-off interpretation and translation services. As a Strategic Globalization Organization (SGO), Piedmont Global replaces that fragmented, transactional patchwork with a single global operating system that combines strategic insight, cultural fluency, data intelligence, and technology. The SGO model rests on eight solution pillars – the Elite 8 – that cover the full span of cross-cultural work: Language Operations, Accessibility, Staffing, Data Services, BPO, Consulting, Content Solutions, and Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT). Together, they help enterprises and government organizations cut vendor sprawl, strengthen compliance, and connect with diverse domestic communities and global markets alike. Learn more at piedmontglobal.com.

The post From Population Intelligence to Real-Time AI Interpretation: Piedmont Global Launches Connexus appeared first on Piedmont Global.

A Turning Point for Language Access

Something happened in Washington this year that the language services industry has been working toward for a long time.

The Language Access for All Act of 2026 has been introduced in Congress. If enacted, it would, for the first time in federal law, require agencies to develop and publish language access plans, establish technical standards for multilingual communications, and create accountability mechanisms to identify and reduce barriers to access. This is not a proposed regulatory guideline or a departmental policy memo. It is legislation with specific obligations and a framework for enforcement.

The implications reach far beyond federal agencies. Every organization that operates under federal funding requirements, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, or Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act has long had language access obligations. What this bill signals is that those obligations are moving toward a more formal, documented, and accountable structure. Organizations that have spent years treating language access plans as optional are running out of runway.

For those already doing this work, the legislation is validation. For those who have been waiting, it is a deadline.

With the Language Access for All Act, we see real Congressional action to codify language access as a right, and to ensure that federal agencies provide it and do it well. Companies like Piedmont Global have extensive experience providing language access at the front lines, and that experience will be incredibly valuable to agencies working on language access plans and policies. Bill Rivers | WP Rivers & Associates

The ALC and the Road to This Moment

Legislation of this scope does not arrive fully formed. The Language Access for All Act of 2026 reflects years of deliberate advocacy by the Association of Language Companies (ALC), led in significant part by Bill Rivers and the ALC Advocacy Committee. Through sustained engagement with congressional staff, direct policy input, and coordination with coalition partners, ALC worked to ensure that the language services industry’s perspective shaped the bill’s language, scope, and priorities.

The result reflects what ALC has long championed:

• Preserving federal language access requirements across agencies.
• Promoting professional standards for translation and interpretation.
• Supporting the responsible integration of AI and language technologies.
• Protecting a qualified, U.S.-based language services workforce.

As ALC President Josh Pennise wrote to members following the bill’s introduction, “Our members see every day how multilingual services connect people to health care, disaster assistance, housing, education, and economic opportunity. This legislation protects those connections and strengthens the systems that make them possible.”

For Piedmont Global, this advocacy effort is not abstract. The work we do every day, in courtrooms, clinics, and organizations serving diverse communities, is exactly what this legislation is designed to protect and, if enacted, formalize. We are proud to partner with and amplify the work ALC has driven on behalf of the industry.

If enacted, the Language Access for All Act will boost our industry by elevating language access as a right, requiring federal agencies to develop language access policies and plans, as well as standards for language access – all of which will lead to more business for companies providing language access, and for the linguists with whom they work. Real language access means comprehensive plans covering spoken and written language access, training for all levels of the organizations responsible for providing language access, and real accountability to consumers who need it. Bill Rivers | WP Rivers & Associates

Two Worlds, One Mandate

The Language Access for All Act can feel abstract until you see what it means on the ground. To bring it to life, we want to share two examples from our own consulting work, led by Piedmont Global VP of Product, Saba Dovlatabadi, MBA, MSc (Fin) , that illustrate what language access planning looks like in practice and what is at stake for organizations that delay.

A State Court System

A state court system serving a geographically dispersed population came to Piedmont Global, facing what we would describe as a structural access crisis. With more than 76,500 limited English proficiency proceedings estimated annually across its 15-county system, the court was operating without a coherent language access plan, without a credentialing framework capable of keeping pace with demand, and without a strategy to address the gap.

The system relied on a bifurcated credentialing structure that provided a formal certification pathway for Spanish-language interpreters but left all other languages, including Arabic, Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Russian, dependent on case-by-case approval with no structured certification pathway. The consequence was a compounding bottleneck. A shrinking pool of qualified interpreters, no structured mechanism to grow it, and rural counties facing acute shortages with no viable remote alternative. An examination process that was producing only a fraction of the qualified interpreters the system needed. A credentialing pipeline, in short, that was collapsing under its own structural weight.

The Piedmont Global Approach

Federal legislation defines the floor. What an organization builds above it determines whether language access becomes a compliance checkbox or a genuine operational capability.

At Piedmont Global, we approach language access planning as a strategic function, not a document exercise. That means combining population intelligence through CensIQ, consulting depth built on years of work in healthcare, courts, and other regulated industries, and language services delivery, including interpretation, translation, and credentialed remote access. When those capabilities work together, a language access plan does not just satisfy a regulatory requirement. It functions as core infrastructure.

The Language Access for All Act of 2026, if enacted, would require federal agencies to have a documented plan. But the organizations that will be best positioned, in healthcare, in the justice system, in social services, education, and across any sector serving linguistically diverse populations, are those that build one before the mandate arrives. A language access plan developed under regulatory pressure, against a hard deadline, is rarely as strong as one built with time, data, and strategy behind it.

The organizations we have seen navigate this well share a common trait: they treat language access not as a task that falls to compliance, but as a capability that belongs to operations, clinical leadership, and strategy together. They ask the harder questions. Not just “do we have a plan?” but “does our plan reflect who our population actually is, where demand is heading, and how our workflows will need to adapt?” Those are the questions CensIQ is built to answer, and the questions our LAP consulting is designed to address.

The post From Policy to Practice: Language Access Plans in a Landmark Moment appeared first on Piedmont Global.

This appointment underscores Piedmont Global’s commitment to building a future-ready organization – positioning talent as its most strategically designed asset. 

Arlington, VA, April 4, 2026 — Piedmont Global, a Strategic Globalization partner helping organizations lead globally, fluently, and confidently, highlights Sarah Hamilton’s role as Head of Talent Systems, leading the design and evolution of Piedmont Global’s talent architecture. From organizational design and workforce planning to leadership development and talent analytics, her work shapes how the company develops leaders and plans for the workforce ahead. She also drives Piedmont Global’s AI and future-of-work strategy – ensuring the company builds scalable, high-performance teams for where it is headed next. 

The appointment marks a deliberate evolution beyond traditional human resources, positioning talent architecture to lead the design and evolution in workforce planning to shape how Piedmont Global develops leaders and plans for the future of work. As skills-based operating models, AI-augmented workflows, and the demand for organizational agility accelerate, Piedmont Global recognizes that traditional HR frameworks were built for a different era. 

“The nature of work is changing faster than traditional HR frameworks can keep pace with,” said Mohamed Hussein, CEO of Piedmont Global. “Skills-based workforces, AI-Augmented operations, and the need for organizational agility demand a different kind of leadership – one that treats talent as a system to be architected, not simply a function to be managed. Sarah has consistently demonstrated this level of thinking, and elevating her into this role is a strategic signal about where Piedmont Global is going.” 

“Talent Architecture is among the greatest indicators of our organizational velocity and our ability to deliver for our clients,” said Hamilton. “This role isn’t a departure from Human Resources – it’s a strategic layer built on top of the critical foundation our HR team provides, abstracting workforce design, skills architecture, and AI-Augmented capability into a system aligned directly to business outcomes. Traditional operating models weren’t built for this pace of change, and together we’ll focus on closing critical capability gaps, strengthening the leadership pipeline, and embedding talent analytics so every investment in people ties directly to business outcomes.” 

The appointment reinforces Piedmont Global’s commitment to building a future-ready organization capable of delivering innovative, scalable language and business solutions to its global partners, and to treating the people behind that work as the company’s most strategically designed asset.

About Piedmont Global

Piedmont Global is a Strategic Globalization Organization (SGO) for enterprises and public-sector organizations, dedicated to making cross-cultural operations easier, smarter, and more human. The company offers advisory services, language and cultural expertise, workforce and learning solutions, and tech-enabled platforms, all delivered as custom solutions to help clients reduce risk, accelerate readiness, and expand their reach with confidence. Learn more at www.piedmontglobal.com 

Media Contact:

Mary Grothe
Chief Revenue Officer
Piedmont Global
mgrothe@piedmontglobal.com

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This appointment reinforces Piedmont Global’s commitment to building scalable financial infrastructure to support continued expansion. 

Arlington, VA, March 30, 2026 — Piedmont Global, a Strategic Globalization partner helping organizations lead globally, fluently, and confidently, announced the appointment of Anthony “Tony” Cooch as Chief Financial Officer (CFO). 

In his new role, Cooch will lead the company’s financial strategy and operations, driving growth, scalability, and long-term value creation. 

Cooch brings more than 20 years of experience as a CPA and attorney, advising and leading finance organizations in growth-oriented companies. He has extensive expertise in mergers and acquisitions, capital structuring, and building scalable financial infrastructure. 

His appointment marks another step forward as Piedmont Global continues to scale its operations and expand its global impact.

About Piedmont Global

Piedmont Global is a Strategic Globalization partner for enterprises and public sector organizations, dedicated to making cross-cultural operations easier, smarter, and more human. The company offers advisory services, language and cultural expertise, workforce and learning solutions, and tech-enabled platforms — delivered as custom solutions — to help clients reduce risk, accelerate readiness, and expand their reach with confidence. Learn more at www.piedmontglobal.com

Media Contact:

Mary Grothe
Chief Revenue Officer
Piedmont Global
mgrothe@piedmontglobal.com

The post Piedmont Global Appoints Anthony Cooch as Chief Financial Officer appeared first on Piedmont Global.

For years, organizations have been told that “language access” is solved by buying services as needed — an interpreter here, translated documents there, maybe a localized website if expansion becomes urgent enough.

That model is no longer just outdated, it’s actively harming the end-user experience.

Patients don’t experience language in silos. Employees don’t learn in silos. Customers don’t engage in silos.

Yet, most organizations still operate with:

• One vendor for interpreting
• Another for translation or localization
• Internal teams split between departments
• And no professional solution for culturally fluent, multi-lingual video or digital content

The result? A fragmented, confusing, and often frustrating experience for the very people language services are meant to serve.

At Piedmont Global , we believe LangOps — interpretation, localization, content, and media —must operate under one roof, one strategy, and one operating system. Not as transactional services, but as a core component of a modern Strategic Global Operating System.

Let’s talk about why the old model fails — and what replaces it.

What’s Broken in the Traditional LSP Model

Transactional ≠ Strategic.

Most Language Service Providers were built to respond, not design.

You submit a request. They fulfill it. The job is closed.

But no one is accountable for:

• Continuity across touchpoints
• Consistency of voice, style, tone, dialect, and cultural norms
• The full lifecycle of the end user’s experience

Interpretation is handled reactively. Translation is handled separately. Video and digital content are an afterthought — or worse, outsourced to agencies with no language or cultural expertise.

Internal Silos Create External Friction

Inside organizations, language access is often split:

• Compliance manages interpreting
• Marketing manages localization
• HR or Ops manages training content
• IT manages portals, chat, and automation
• Each team may do its job well, but the end user feels the seams.

Different terminology. Different tone. Different cultural cues. Different levels of quality.

Language stops feeling supportive and starts feeling disjointed.

Why Culturally Fluent ≠ Translated

Translation answers the question: “What does this say in another language?”

Cultural fluency answers a different, more important one: “How should this be experienced by this person, in this moment, in this context?”

Cultural fluency accounts for:

• Dialect, not just language
• Tone, formality, and trust cues
• Regional norms and expectations
• Health literacy, education level, and context
• Visual cues, pacing, and delivery style

A word-for-word translation can be technically correct and still fail, because it doesn’t resonate, reassure, or guide behavior.

That’s why translated content without cultural fluency often leads to confusion, mistrust, disengagement, and risk.

What Changes When LangOps Lives Under One Strategy

At Piedmont Global, LangOps isn’t a menu of services — it’s an operating system.

Interpretation, localization, content, and multilingual media are designed, governed, and measured together so every interaction reinforces the next.

Here’s what that looks like in the real world.

Use Case 3 | Contact Centers: Moving Beyond Traditional OPI 

Contact centers are where fragmented language access fails the fastest and most visibly.

The modern customer journey includes:

• Website browsing
• Chatbots
• Knowledge bases
• On-demand training
• Self-service portals
• Live calls and chat
• Video instructions and walkthroughs

Traditional OPI forces language switching:

• The LEP pauses
• The interpreter relays
• The agent waits
• The conversation slows
• Frustration increases
• Trust erodes
• Call abandonment increases
• Customer attrition grows
• Customer satisfaction plummets

The future is simultaneous AI:

• The customer speaks in their native language
• The agent hears English in real time
• The agent responds verbally or via chat
• The customer hears their language — instantly

When paired with localized websites, culturally fluent videos, and translated self-service flows, the experience becomes seamless.

One conversation. Two languages. Zero friction. Increased revenue and competitive edge.

Why Piedmont Global Is Different

We didn’t bolt services together. We built LangOps as a strategic global operating system.

Interpretation. Localization. Content. Multi-lingual media. Simultaneous AI.

All under one roof. All under one strategy. All designed to support the full human experience — not just individual transactions.

Expert Perspectives: Inside Modern LangOps

Localization & Cultural Fluency | Olena Martynova

Interpreting as Part of an Ecosystem | Kimberly Miranda

Multi-Lingual Media & Simultaneous AI | Gilbert Segura

The Future of LangOps Is Here

Organizations that continue to treat LangOps as transactional will fall behind because their customers, patients, and employees already feel the gap.

Those who integrate interpretation, localization, and multi-lingual media under one strategy will lead with clarity, trust, and cultural intelligence.

That’s the future of LangOps. And it’s already here.

This article was originally published as part of Piedmont Global Pulse, our LinkedIn newsletter where we share timely insights and industry trends. To stay ahead of the conversation and receive future editions directly in your LinkedIn feed, subscribe to Piedmont Global Pulse.

The post Your Language Strategy Isn’t Working — And Your Customers Know It appeared first on Piedmont Global.

Why Strategic Global Operations Is Reshaping How Organizations Scale

Listen in as Mary Grothe, Chief Revenue Officer at Piedmont Global, shares her insights on January 22’s newsletter.

For the last several years, organizations have been solving global challenges one request at a time. And “global” no longer means what it used to.

For some organizations, globalization shows up across borders — serving international customers, managing multilingual operations, or scaling teams across regions.

For others, globalization is happening inside their four walls.

• Hospitals serving increasingly diverse communities.
• Classrooms with dozens of languages represented.
• Manufacturing plants staffed by multilingual workforces.
• Call centers supporting customers across cultures.
• Public agencies navigating access, equity, and compliance every day.

Different environments. Same pressure.

A translation request here. An accessibility accommodation there. A staffing gap. A compliance concern. Another vendor added to the mix.

On the surface, things appear to be “working.” Underneath, leaders feel the friction.

Costs are rising. Risk is harder to see. Outcomes are harder to measure. And teams are stuck reacting instead of operating strategically.

If you’ve ever thought, “We’re not a global company — so why does this feel so complex?” You’re asking the right question.

Because today, global operations aren’t defined by geography. They’re defined by people, systems, access, and execution — and nearly every organization is navigating that reality, whether they realize it or not.

The problem isn’t language. It’s fragmentation.

Most organizations don’t have a translation problem. They don’t have an accessibility problem. They don’t have a staffing problem.

They have an operational clarity problem.

Language, accessibility, content, staffing, compliance, and data all live in different silos — owned by different teams, managed by different vendors, measured in different ways.

The result?

• Disconnected decision-making
• Inconsistent experiences for employees and customers
• Higher compliance risk
• Slower execution
• And leadership teams are forced into constant tradeoffs

What leaders are feeling today isn’t inefficiency — it’s structural misalignment. And the market has finally reached a tipping point where that misalignment can’t be ignored.

Why Strategic Global Operations had to exist

Strategic Global Operations (SGO) was not created as a framework or a rebrand. It emerged because organizations changed faster than the industry supporting them.

Global operations no longer happen “over there.” They happen inside organizations — every day.

In hospitals and clinics, in classrooms and universities, in manufacturing plants, in call centers, and across public agencies and institutions.

Language access, cultural fluency, accessibility, content, and staffing are no longer edge cases. They are core operating requirements.

SGO exists to unify what has been fragmented. It connects:

• Strategy and execution
• Systems and people
• Compliance and experience
• Cost control and outcomes

Not by adding more layers — but by designing operations intentionally, from the start.

The market forced a new model

For years, organizations were forced to stitch together solutions:

• One vendor for translation
• Another for accessibility
• Another for staffing
• Another for content
• Another for data

Each solved a narrow problem. None solved the whole. Leaders were left managing the gaps.

SGO is our response to what the market demanded but never received: A single operating model that treats global execution as a strategic function — not a collection of tasks.

This is not about doing more. It’s about finally doing things in the right order.

Introducing the Elite 8: a unified operating system

At the core of Strategic Global Operations is what we call the Elite 8 — eight interconnected solution areas designed to work as a system, not standalone services. They include:

• LangOps: Interpretation, Translation, and Localization
• Accessibility & ASL
• Content & Media
• Data Services
• Consulting
• OSINT
• Staffing
• KPO/BPO

Each addresses a critical operational need. Together, they eliminate fragmentation.

This is not a menu of offerings. It’s an operating system for scale — designed to reduce risk, improve outcomes, and bring clarity to complex environments.

Over the coming months, we’ll explore each of these areas in depth — why they exist, the problems they solve, and how they apply across each specific industry use case.

What this means for leaders

For executives and operators, SGO changes the conversation. It means:

• Fewer vendors and clearer accountability
• Better visibility into cost, performance, and risk
• Consistent experiences for employees, patients, students, and customers
• Operations that can scale without breaking
• AI and predictive data to get ahead of critical decision-making

Whether you lead in healthcare, education, manufacturing, contact centers, or the public sector, the challenge is the same:

How do we operate globally, compliantly, and human-centered — without creating chaos?

SGO is the answer to that question.

What’s coming in 2026

This newsletter marks the beginning of a deliberate, monthly deep dive into Strategic Global Operations. Here’s what’s ahead:

• February: LangOps + Content — where execution breaks down
• March: Data Services — turning complexity into intelligence
• April: Consulting — designing systems that actually scale
• May: Accessibility — building access by design (National Accessibility Month)
• June: OSINT — turning global signals into strategic foresight
• July: Staffing — The right people, in the right roles

Each month, we’ll focus on one core pillar — grounded in real market signals, real operational challenges, and real outcomes.

Stay connected

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→ Our newsletter for monthly insights

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Strategic Global Operations isn’t a trend. It’s the next evolution of how organizations operate and compete.

And at Piedmont Global, we’re proud to be building it — intentionally, transparently, and in partnership with the organizations shaping the future.

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