Zalán Meggyesi
GALA Board Candidate, 2027-2029 Term
Professional Information
Brief Bio
Diplomat, scuba diver, solutions engineer. Generally the person who makes problems go away. I work where language meets technology, turning messy challenges into elegant systems — most recently the ones AI keeps creating faster than anyone can document them. At Easyling I'm Chief Solutions Engineer; at GALA I sit on the 2027 Program Committee. I think in systems, ask uncomfortable questions early, and prefer to fix things quietly rather than announce them. What I'd bring to the Board is a technologist's eye and a diplomat's patience, in an industry that currently needs both.
Have you served on a board, committee, or working group before? What surprised you about it?
I moderate GALA's AI Use Cases SIG. The surprise was how much of the work is reconciling individual interests with the community's: a member keen to present their own product, a topic one person finds essential and everyone else finds niche. None of it is bad faith, people bring the problem in front of them, which is exactly why they're worth having in the room.
Which skills do you possess that would make you valuable as a board member?
Technological and AI expertise, bridge-building between technical and business stakeholders, a European perspective on a global membership.
Describe your experience with setting strategy.
As Chief Solutions Engineer at Easyling I've had a real hand in setting direction for the company and the product. I drove through a feature using statistical and AI methods to separate genuine content from the bogus material nobody should be paying to translate, over our lead developer's objections, and by conceding points that didn't impair what the feature was for. That is most of the work: balancing goals that compete for the same resources, knowing which battles to lose to win the war, and occasionally making a stand for the organization's good against people I respect.
Candidate Perspective
If you had to give GALA a new tagline to convey the association's future-readiness, what would it be?
Beyond good enough, together
What should GALA look like in 3 years if change keeps happening at the current pace? Who should we serve? What should we offer? What value should we deliver?
If the pace holds, three years from now the per-word business will be a smaller share of what our members sell, buyers will be doing more themselves with tools they only half understand, and the gap between what our people know and what the work demands will be wider than today. GALA should be the answer to that gap.
Our membership is already the whole industry in one room: providers, buyers, technologists, academics. That mix is an asset, and serving it well means resisting the pull toward whoever is loudest or largest. Where some can buy their answers, everyone else needs GALA to supply them, which is where our attention should go.
What we should offer is education with teeth: an Academy and credentials that certify capabilities the market actually pays for; forums where competitors can compare notes honestly, under rules that make honesty safe; and clear-eyed guidance on technology, including a candid account of what it cannot and should not do.
In a world where everyone is being sold a version of the future, GALA should be where you find out what's actually true, from people who have tried it and will tell you honestly what broke.
Which GALA programs have you personally participated in over the past few years? Describe any volunteer roles you've had at GALA.
Over the past two years I've attended the GALA conferences in Berlin and Montreal, where my session was the second most-listened of the program; moderated the AI Use Cases SIG; and joined the 2027 Program Committee. I'll speak on the GALA track at TCWORLD in Stuttgart this November. On the Program Committee I represent technology, bringing the technical perspective to a deliberately diverse set of voices. With AI consuming mind share and market share alike, that mostly means asking what a tool actually does before we build a session around what it is said to do.
What is GALA doing today that you would stop doing?
I would stop the drift toward becoming a marketplace matching agencies with content owners. It puts GALA in competition with events built and funded for exactly that, and it changes the room: people stop saying what actually went wrong once there's a prospective buyer listening. Our comparative advantage is that we are not a sales floor, we are the floor where practitioners compare notes honestly and where a credential means something. Every step toward matchmaking spends a little of the candor that makes everything else worth attending, and candor is the harder thing to rebuild.