Shipping AI across three countries and three languages
Iran, Germany, Italy. Persian, English, Italian. What building AI in three countries taught me about the part of the job that has nothing to do with code.
My career has crossed three countries: research and engineering in Iran, two roles in Germany, and now several years building production AI in Italy. I work in Persian, English and Italian, often in the same week. This was not a plan — but it turned into the most useful part of my skill set, and almost none of it is technical.
AI in a company is a translation problem before it is a modelling problem. Not between human languages — between the language of the business and the language of the system. A production manager describes a scheduling headache in the vocabulary of the shop floor. A financial advisor describes a portfolio review in the vocabulary of compliance. My job is to translate that into a model, an interface, a pipeline — and then translate the result back into something they trust. Having done literal translation between three languages every day made me better at the figurative kind.
Working across cultures also recalibrates what "done" means. German engineering culture taught me rigour: a battery-test pipeline is not finished until the edge cases are documented and the units are exact. Italian SME culture taught me pragmatism: the perfect model that ships in a year loses to the good model that ships next month and earns trust. Iranian academic training gave me the theoretical floor to know which corners are safe to cut and which are not. The combination is more useful than any one of them alone.
The practical lesson for anyone building AI in a company that is not their home culture: spend the first weeks listening, not proposing. The workflow you are about to automate encodes decades of decisions you do not yet understand, in a language — literal and cultural — you are still learning. Respect that, and you build something people adopt. Ignore it, and you build a technically correct system that quietly goes unused. The code is the same in every country. The listening is the whole job.