What AI has fixed, and what it hasn’t fixed
On written communication, the gains are undeniable. In a few seconds, we can now:
- translate technical documentation or product docs;
- summarize a thirty-page paper before actually reading it;
- rephrase a message to give it the expected tone.
The problem is that’s not where the bottleneck lies. What AI still cannot do for someone is speaking up in a meeting, live, without a safety net. A client call that drifts into a technical question, a progress update with a distributed team, an interview: no one reaches for a translation tool in the middle of a sentence. A study conducted in 2026 by the Circle of Languages measures it: 67.7% of French respondents say they have avoided speaking up in a professional setting for lack of confidence in English. A figure that machine translation won’t budge, because the problem has never been comprehension. It’s about taking the plunge.
What it means concretely for a tech team
On the written side, the switch has happened: turnaround no longer depends on a translation published three weeks after the fact, and an English prompt often yields a crisper result.
On the oral side, nothing has changed. A stand-up with colleagues in Bangalore or Warsaw, a technical review with an English-speaking contractor, an interview with a foreign candidate: these are still the same moments of hesitation. And it’s often the same teammate who ends up “translating” for others.
Structuring a response at the team level
It’s no accident that 36.1% of French people think they have already lost a job, a promotion, a contract, or a deal because of their English level, according to the 2026 study by the Circle of Languages. A job interview, a negotiation, a decisive client check-in do not leave time to open a tab.
Facing this, two options: let everyone fend for themselves, or structure a genuine collective upskilling. Corporate English training has, in fact, evolved a lot on this point: rather than restarting grammar from scratch, they begin with real-life situations. This is the stance of the Circle of Languages, whose trainings rely on this situational pedagogy. From now on, the real variable is no longer technology: it’s the time a team is willing to devote to it.
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