Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, interviews Bryan Murphy, CEO of Smartling — and the strategic distinction Murphy draws is one most CEOs miss: AI is not a feature you add to your product. It is a structural foundation you build your company on top of.
Smartling now delivers guaranteed-quality translation for 60% less cost and six times faster than traditional methods. That result did not come from bolting AI onto an existing model. It came from rebuilding the model around AI from the ground up. Murphy has lived through the commercialization of the internet, cloud, and mobile. He says generative AI is the biggest and fastest of all of them — and the companies that treat it like a feature will fall behind the ones that treat it like infrastructure.
This episode is for CEOs who are deciding whether AI belongs in their product roadmap or at the center of their company’s operating model.
Key Takeaways
- AI is a structural technology, the same way the internet, cloud, and mobile were structural — companies that treat it as a feature rather than a foundation will be outpaced by those that rebuild around it.
- CEOs who mandate AI adoption without requiring teams to demonstrate measurable customer value — speed, quality, cost — produce internal theater, not transformation.
- Strategic focus at scale requires a fixed operating plan of three to five pillars, reviewed by every people leader every single week, with no hiding and no surprises.
- Murphy’s rule at Smartling: the CEO who actively seeks feedback from their board, customers, and team — and updates their decision-making in response — outperforms the one who mistakes force of will for strategic clarity.
- The most valuable companies in the next four to five years will not be the AI infrastructure providers. They will be the application companies that build on that infrastructure and create specific, measurable customer value.
CEOs Who Treat AI as Infrastructure Outcompete Those Who Treat It as a Feature
Glenn Gow opened this conversation by asking Bryan Murphy for the one scaling insight — the thing he would have wanted on day one at Smartling — when moving from a services-heavy model to an AI-first platform.
Murphy’s answer is worth sitting with.
“AI is not a feature,” Murphy said. “It’s a foundation. It’s a structural change. Kind of like in the same way, all those others — the commercialization of the internet and cloud and mobile — were not features. They’re structural. We’ve had to learn how to really adopt our software application and services to leverage this new structure — not only in the product itself, but in the way that we thought about developing the product and in our own operations.”
That distinction is the frame for everything else in this conversation. The question is not whether your company uses AI. The question is whether you have restructured your product, your development process, and your operations around it.
Murphy draws a specific analogy to make this concrete. In 2000, the most valuable company in the world was Cisco — the picks-and-shovels provider for the internet’s infrastructure buildout. The companies that generated trillions of dollars of value over the next two decades were not the infrastructure layers. They were Salesforce, HubSpot, Shopify, PayPal — applications built on top of that stack.
Murphy’s argument: we are at that same inflection point now. The foundational layer is being built. The application layer is just beginning. Smartling is an AI application — not an AI infrastructure play — and that is a deliberate strategic position.
| Technology Wave | Infrastructure Layer | Value Creation Layer |
| Internet (2000s) | Cisco (switches, cables, data centers) | Salesforce, HubSpot, PayPal, Shopify |
| Cloud | AWS, Azure, GCP | SaaS applications across every vertical |
| Generative AI (now) | LLM providers, GPU infrastructure | AI-native applications like Smartling, Cursor, Fin |
The companies that win are not the ones selling shovels. They are the ones building specific, measurable solutions on top of the shovels. For CEOs, the strategic question is: are you building the shovel, or are you building what the shovel enables?
How to Mandate AI Adoption Inside a Company Without Producing Internal Theater
Murphy operationalizes AI inside Smartling with a forcing function, not a suggestion.
“Every single team leader or function within the business I’m tracking is required to demonstrate how they’re using AI to improve efficiency,” Murphy said.
But the mandate alone is not the framework. The harder part is defining what “demonstrate” actually means. Murphy ties it directly to customer outcomes. At Smartling, the customer metrics that matter are speed, quality, and cost. Every AI initiative on the product roadmap must produce a measurable improvement on at least one of those three. If it does not, it does not advance.
“So I’ll give you an example,” Murphy said. “In our case, our customers care about speed, quality, cost — right? So every single initiative that we put onto our roadmap has to result in an improvement for our customers in speed, quality, and cost. So that’s how I was able to say when I talked earlier: today we’re able to deliver guaranteed quality translation for 60% less cost, six times as fast. That’s a result of implementing AI in a way that demonstrates real value for the customer.”
The internal accountability mechanism and the customer value standard are the same thing. They are not separate. When Murphy says every function leader must demonstrate AI use, the demonstration is not a Slack message. It is a measurable outcome against a customer-facing metric.
Glenn Gow added a parallel principle from his conversations with other CEOs: the accountability must extend to failures. “Not only share your successes, but let’s talk about why it’s not working in areas we would expect it to — because we need to learn. Is it the operator? Is it training? Is it the wrong LLM or the wrong tool? We shouldn’t throw it out because it’s not working. We need to learn why it’s not working.”
The AI mandate framework Murphy runs at Smartling has two layers:
| Layer | What It Requires | What It Produces |
| Product | Every roadmap initiative must improve speed, quality, or cost for the customer | Measurable, customer-facing AI value |
| Operations | Every function leader must demonstrate AI-driven efficiency gains | Internal accountability with customer-tied proof |
Neither layer is optional. And neither counts unless it connects to customer outcomes.
How CEOs Maintain Strategic Focus When Scaling Prevents Them from Doing Everything
Murphy runs a company with global clients, sits on multiple outside boards, and advises other organizations. When Glenn Gow noted that this sounds like drowning in a calendar, Murphy’s response was direct: the calendar is manageable because the operating plan is fixed.
At Smartling, the operating plan for the year is distilled to three to five strategic pillars. Each pillar has three key initiatives under it. That structure — a maximum of roughly fifteen tracked initiatives — is what the entire company organizes around.
“We stick sort of relentlessly with that until it’s completed or we achieve our goal,” Murphy said. “One of the things that, as a CEO, you have to be careful — you have to be consistent, and you have to be flexible — but at the same time, you can’t be coming up with new ideas every week. You have to be very consistent and drive operational success.”
The accountability mechanism is a weekly all-leaders meeting, run every Wednesday, structured like a scrum. Every people leader in the company walks through the plan and the status of each initiative. There is no editorial. There is no summary. There are no surprises.
“Every Wednesday, everyone knows: we’re going to go through this, and I’m either on track or I’m off track, and every single people leader in the company is going to know that. So it creates a forcing function that’s very focused.”
The Wednesday scrum does two things simultaneously. It keeps the CEO from diluting the plan with new ideas — because the plan is reviewed publicly every week and new ideas would require displacing something already in motion. And it prevents under-performance from hiding — because status is visible to every leader, not just the direct report chain.
Glenn Gow noted he ran into the same problem as a CEO: generating too many new ideas, and driving the team to distraction. His fix was giving the team permission to push back. “If I did that to you, you had to come back and say, ‘OK, Glenn, where does that fit on my priority list?'” The effect: it stopped him from acting on every idea because the trade-off became explicit.
The Scaling Executive Coaching Framework: What CEOs Who Scale Companies Do Differently
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence from this interview |
| AI is infrastructure, not a feature | Treat AI the same way you would treat cloud or mobile — not as an add-on, but as the structural layer your product and operations are built on | Smartling rebuilt its entire product and delivery model around AI, producing 60% cost reduction and 6x speed improvement for enterprise customers |
| Mandate proof, not participation | Requiring AI use inside the company is not enough — every function leader must demonstrate measurable efficiency gains tied to customer outcomes | Murphy requires every team leader to demonstrate AI-driven improvements against the customer metrics that matter: speed, quality, and cost |
| Fix the operating plan before you scale the calendar | Three to five pillars, three initiatives each, reviewed publicly every week — the plan is the forcing function that prevents strategic drift | Murphy runs a Wednesday all-leaders scrum at Smartling where every people leader reports on every initiative — no hiding, no surprises |
| Willingness to learn is a CEO’s hardest skill | The force of will required to succeed as a CEO can harden into resistance to feedback — the CEOs who scale are the ones who catch that pattern and correct it | After a mentor at eBay named specifically what Murphy was getting wrong, Murphy shifted his decision-making process to actively solicit dissenting input — a discipline he carried into Smartling and credits with enabling the 30-day pivot to a fully AI-first operating model |
Quotes from This Episode
- “AI is not a feature. It’s a foundation. It’s a structural change. Kind of like in the same way, all those others — the commercialization of the internet and cloud and mobile — were not features. They’re structural.” — Bryan Murphy, CEO, Smartling
- “Every single team leader or function within the business I’m tracking is required to demonstrate how they’re using AI to improve efficiency.” — Bryan Murphy, CEO, Smartling
- “By the time you get to the C-suite, as a CEO, you’ve got to be decisive. You’ve got to be a great listener. You’ve got to have a force of will — because our job as CEOs is to kind of bend the world to our will. Sometimes that hardens you up, and you may develop a reluctance to change.” — Bryan Murphy, CEO, Smartling
- “I sit on multiple outside boards, and I do that as a learning mechanism. Every single board meeting, I walk out with at least one thing that I’m going to do differently or one thing I’m going to make sure I avoid.” — Bryan Murphy, CEO, Smartling
Frequently Asked Questions
How should a CEO decide whether AI belongs in their product or their operations — or both?
Bryan Murphy’s framework at Smartling treats both as required, not optional. Every roadmap initiative must demonstrate measurable improvement in the customer metrics that matter — at Smartling, speed, quality, and cost are the standard, and that discipline is what produced guaranteed-quality translation at 60% lower cost and six times faster delivery. On the operations side, every function leader is required to demonstrate AI-driven efficiency gains. The test for both is the same: does this produce real, measurable value for the customer? If the AI initiative cannot demonstrate that improvement, it does not advance.
What is the biggest mistake CEOs make when trying to scale a company through a major technology shift?
Murphy argues that the most dangerous mistake is treating a foundational technology shift as a feature. The internet, cloud, mobile, and now generative AI are not capabilities to bolt onto an existing model. They require rebuilding the model. CEOs who approach AI as an add-on — rather than as the structural layer their product and operations are built on — will be outcompeted by those who restructure around it. Murphy made that call within 30 days of becoming CEO at Smartling, reorienting the entire company toward a turnkey AI-powered translation model.
How do CEOs maintain strategic focus when running a global company and sitting on multiple outside boards?
Murphy keeps the operating plan fixed at three to five pillars with three key initiatives each, and reviews that plan with every people leader in the company every single Wednesday in a scrum-format meeting. The fixed plan prevents new ideas from displacing in-progress work. The weekly public review prevents under-performance from hiding. Murphy also sits on outside boards deliberately as a learning mechanism — not as a distraction — saying every board meeting produces at least one thing he will do differently or avoid entirely.
CEOs Work with Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies by Scaling Themselves First
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach — he coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits. With 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital, Glenn helps leaders scale their companies by scaling themselves first.If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
