In global enterprises, knowledge should flow freely across offices, teams, and time zones. In reality, it rarely does.

One of the most overlooked reasons? Language.

When a company has locations in Tokyo, Milan, São Paulo, and New York, each site produces valuable documentation: procedures, project notes, lessons learned, customer insights. Yet often writes them in the local language. This feels natural in the moment. Teams write for their colleagues nearby, not for someone in another country.

Over time, this creates silos that aren’t about access or permissions, but about comprehension. The information exists, but for many in the same company, it might as well not.

 

The hidden cost of multilingual knowledge silos

The problem surfaces in small ways:

• An engineering fix documented in German takes days to be rediscovered in Singapore.

• A safety procedure written in French never makes it into the manuals for the plant in Mexico.

• A brilliant sales pitch created in Spanish never lands in the hands of the U.S. team chasing a similar client.

The knowledge is there, but it’s not reusable outside its language boundary. This has consequences:

• Time lost — Teams spend hours redoing work that’s already been solved elsewhere.

• Inconsistent processes — Different locations reinvent their own “best practices,” leading to uneven quality.

• Missed opportunities — Market insights in one country never inform strategies in another.

• Operational risk — Critical information doesn’t travel where it’s needed in emergencies.

And the real kicker? The company keeps paying for this knowledge over and over — in salaries, in project delays, in mistakes that should have been avoided.

 

The “better than nothing” fix, and why it’s not enough

Companies try to bridge this gap with translation policies. Some use internal bilingual staff to translate key documents. Others outsource to translation vendors. A few enforce English-only documentation rules for “global” visibility. Some other even drops sensitive documents in google translate or chatGPT.

These methods help, but they come with their own problems:

• Translation bottlenecks — Only so much content gets translated, often weeks late.

• Loss of context — Nuances get lost when a technical expert isn’t the one doing the translation.

• Human cost — Skilled employees spend time translating instead of solving problems.

• Partial coverage — Many documents never make it through the process at all.

• Security risks – Some sensitive documents may even up being used to train the next AI model

The result is a slow, selective, and expensive approach that still leaves large portions of the company’s knowledge locked away in languages that most of the workforce can’t use. At least in the best of cases.

 

The better way: language-agnostic knowledge

The real solution is to make knowledge language-agnostic from the start. That means storing the meaning and relationships between pieces of information in a way that is independent of any single language.

With modern AI, this is finally possible at scale. AI models can understand the underlying content of a document — whether it’s in Japanese, Portuguese, or Russian — and make it searchable, linkable, and retrievable in any language. When someone searches or asks a question in their own language, the AI delivers the answer in that language, even if the source material was written in another.

Instead of translating entire repositories, the system translates only what’s needed, when it’s needed, preserving accuracy while keeping knowledge accessible in real time.

 

How Phlow solves this

Phlow’s knowledge graph is built to be language-agnostic. It doesn’t just store text,  it maps meaning, context, and relationships, regardless of the language in which the knowledge was created.

When someone queries the system in Italian, Phlow returns the answer in Italian, even if the source documentation was originally in Korean or Spanish. The focus is on making knowledge reusable across the enterprise without language being a barrier.

In a multilingual global business, that’s not just convenient, it’s the difference between acting fast and falling behind.