Why we won Best Use of AI, and what it means for our clients

Comtec has been named the winner of Best Use of AI at the 2026 National Digital Awards for our AI-led translation approach, including Pronto, our self-service AI translation platform, and the MTAP service that sits behind it.

Of course, recognition matters to us. But what matters more is what the award recognises: a deliberate choice about how a translation business should respond to AI, and how technology can be used to improve speed and efficiency without losing the human expertise that protects quality, brand and trust.

Comtec’s CEO, Sophie Howe, with the award

Translation has been one of the sectors most exposed to AI. As AI-led machine translation became widely available, clients understandably began to ask why they should pay for a service they could approximate for free. Budgets tightened, the perceived value of translation fell, and agencies faced a genuine question about their future.

There were two ways to respond. The first was to defend the traditional model and hope the disruption would pass. The second was to accept that the technology was here to stay and find a way to use it that genuinely served clients. 

We chose the second.

When we set out to build our AI-led translation approach, the obvious route was to compete on the things AI does well on its own: lower cost, faster turnaround, greater efficiency. Pronto and MTAP deliver all three, but a solution built only around those metrics would have missed the point. 

Generic machine translation is fast and cheap because it strips out the human judgment that protects a brand. It doesn’t understand your terminology, your tone of voice, or the difference between how a message should land in one market versus another. Left unchecked, it produces output that is technically passable and commercially risky.

We built our approach on a different principle: AI does the heavy lifting, and our linguists govern it. Through our proprietary MTAP (Machine Translation with Automated Post-editing) service, our linguists configure terminology, tone of voice, style preferences and quality controls for each client, so the technology works to a defined standard rather than a generic default. Pronto then gives clients a self-service way to access this approach for content that suits AI-led translation, while our wider MTAP workflows can also be adapted around specific client systems, content types and internal processes. 

The result is localised content that is fast and affordable, and still sounds like it was written by someone who understands the brand.

We treat AI as a tool that amplifies what our people can do, not a replacement for them. That conviction shaped Pronto and MTAP from the first design decision, and it is why our linguists are involved at every stage, from configuration through to ongoing quality checks.

This care and thought underpins our whole raison d’etre; our clients trust us to represent their brand in languages they often cannot read themselves, and that trust is the most valuable thing we hold. A translation tool that could shave a few hours off a deadline kind of misses the point.

The National Digital Awards recognised how thoughtfully we have integrated AI into our translation services, not as a shortcut, but as a way to improve speed, consistency and control while keeping expert human input at the centre.

The judging panel for National Digital awards 2026

It confirms what we suspected when we started: that the best use of AI in our industry is neither the cheapest nor the fastest. It is the one that uses technology to raise quality while keeping people in control.

In a nutshell, we turned what was a concerning period for the business into a growth story, without compromising on the quality standards we’ve spent 40 years building.

If you want to see what AI translation looks like when it is configured around your brand rather than left to generic defaults, you can try Pronto for free.