Expanding into a new country has traditionally meant months of market research, expensive consultants, and difficult decisions about where to invest. AI is starting to dramatically shorten that process, but that doesn’t mean companies can simply ask ChatGPT which country to enter next.
In this episode of The Global Marketing Show, Wendy Pease talks with Klaus Wehage, serial entrepreneur, global expansion expert, and co-author of Global Class. The book was built on conversations with approximately 400 executives across 50 countries, including leaders involved in the international growth of companies such as Apple, Zoom, Airbnb, and other global brands.
Klaus has spent years helping companies determine where and how to expand internationally. Some of that strategy work once took his team an average of nine months. Today, his company Global Copilot uses AI to dramatically accelerate the research behind those decisions.
And this goes well beyond asking an AI chatbot a few questions.
Global Copilot brings tasks such as market sizing, competitive analysis, macroeconomic and political research, customer segmentation, regulatory tracking, expert identification, and analysis of existing company research into one workflow. The idea is to quickly narrow down which markets deserve deeper investigation and give teams a structured starting point for building their international growth strategy.
But faster research doesn't eliminate the need for human expertise.
In fact, Klaus warns against making an expansion decision based on a single AI-generated market analysis. Companies still need to validate what the technology finds with people who understand the market, industry, language, and culture.
Those local details can have very real business consequences. In Japan, for example, pricing and negotiation work differently than many foreign companies might expect. In the Philippines, employees receive a 13th-month salary around Christmas. Even language itself constantly changes. Klaus, who is Danish but has lived in the United States for more than a decade, describes sometimes returning to Denmark and struggling to understand new expressions and cultural references despite being a native speaker.
The conversation also explores companies that built international thinking into their businesses early. Japanese technology company Rakuten made English its official internal language as part of its push to become a global company. French ridesharing company BlaBlaCar changed its original French name and intentionally hired international talent before entering some of those employees' home markets.
The takeaway? AI can make global expansion research dramatically faster. But successful expansion still requires asking the right questions, validating the answers, and understanding the people on the other side of the market.
Once a company identifies the right market, it still has to successfully operate and communicate there. That means adapting everything from its go-to-market strategy and customer messaging to the language it uses to reach local audiences.
Rapport International helps organizations navigate that next step with professional translation, interpreting, and localization services in more than 200 languages. We help global businesses adapt websites, marketing materials, technical content, and business communications for the languages and cultures of the markets they need to reach.
Because AI can help you identify where to grow. Reaching the people who live there is another challenge entirely.