VivaTech 2026: Why learn German when AI can talk for you, asks DeepL CEO

DeepL's CEO believes AI can erase the language barrier in business interactions entirely — but says learning a language is still worth it, because behind every language is a culture AI cannot translate. Imagine being in a meeting room with colleagues from Greece, Russia, Egypt and Germany, each speaking their own language, each hearing everyone else in their own language, too. That is the world Jarek Kutylowski, co-founder and CEO of DeepL, believes is within reach. Speaking to Euronews Next at VivaTech in Paris, Kutylowski laid out his vision for real-time translation in international business. Kutylowski said he wants, especially in a business context, for both sides of a conversation to speak their own language. "If you are conducting an interview in Portugal, [I want] for you to be able to speak your language and the interview partner to be able to speak their language," he said, adding that the goal is "a totally fluent conversation, where you both not only understand each other, but where you also feel safe and confident." The technology is designed for everyday business use, particularly in the video calls that now dominate international work. "A lot of the conversations that are multilingual nowadays actually happen virtually," he said, noting that platforms like Microsoft Teams or Zoom make integration simple because "the microphones are already there, the loudspeakers are already there." For a multilingual meeting, the process is designed to be effortless. "You just select the language in which you want to hear everyone... and everything else is handled magically in the background," Kutylowski explained. "You invite DeepL into your meeting." This Cologne-based company is a leader in the field. According to a 2026 independent assessment by Slator, DeepL Voice, the company's real-time AI voice translation product, outperforms Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Meet on accuracy, fluency and reliability, scoring 96.4 out of 100 on quality. From meeting rooms to conferences Kutylowski's ambitions are currently focused on business clients, including in more demanding environments. To do that, his company just acquired Mixhalo, a San Francisco-based real-time, ultra-low-latency audio platform. The idea is to deploy their tech at major events like VivaTech, plus apply it to customer support settings and other international business workflows. Kutylowski says of the deal: "The Mixhalo team has solved one of the hardest problems in live audio, which is delivering high-fidelity sound to thousands of people at once with basically zero latency." His ambition is for language to disappear entirely as a business constraint. "If you're running a French business, you can go and start selling in Germany tomorrow, and you don't have to waste a moment thinking about the German language at all," he said. "It just kind of solved transparently in the background." The limits of translation Despite his confidence in the future of AI-powered translation, Kutylowski is lucid about the subtleties that remain difficult to capture, especially across very different cultures. "You can't do that perfectly because certain things, it is even impossible to tell them in another culture because that culture hasn't gone through maybe some historic moments in the past," he admitted. He points to his own background as evidence of how deeply culture and language intertwine. Born in Poland and raised between Poland and Germany, he says the two countries' divergent histories shaped how he sees the world. "It was something incredibly helpful for me to just understand these two ways of living, and these two ways of growing up," Kutylowski continued. That gap, he argues, is precisely why language learning still has value, even as AI improves. "It's worth learning a language because you're learning the other culture with it," he highlighted. Kutylowski compares learning languages to learning maths. Schools still teach children to add and subtract by hand even though computers do it better, "because that's really essential for our growth as humans," he said. As for his own next language, the DeepL boss has his eye on one notoriously difficult to master. "I think Japanese, it's a fascinating one," he said. "It is so complicated, but at the same time it's so beautiful and it's different, that it would be like a really big, big nice challenge."