Perhaps nothing has poisoned the brains of bosses more than LinkedIn, a place where opportunities for “synergy” are abundant and everyone is on the lookout for a “ninja” to fill a role. But if you’re not in a management role, this might as well be a foreign language. Kagi, an AI-powered translation tool, treats it like it is. In a recent update, the application introduced the ability to reverse engineer corpo communication into something that you can actually understand, among other options.
You may have seen some of Kagi’s translations going viral in recent weeks. The tool, which first introduced its “LinkedIn Speak” feature back in February, became a go-to tool for turning phrases like “I pooped my pants” into LinkedIn-ready posts about “navigating an unexpected personal challenge that required an immediate pivot and resource management.” But, importantly, it can also take LinkedIn Speak or corporate jargon and turn it into plain English.
For instance, here’s a recent statement from Jeff Ettinger, interim chief executive officer of Hormel Foods, announcing the company would be selling off its turkey business: “Our strategy for sustainable, profitable growth centers on expanding our value-added protein portfolio to meet evolving consumer needs, while reducing our exposure to more volatile, commodity-driven businesses.”
Here’s how Kagi translates it: “We’re focusing on selling more high-margin processed meat products to grow the business steadily, while moving away from the unpredictable raw meat market.” Not bad! (Though the auto-detect language feature did stick with English rather than “Corporate jargon.”)
Kagi has a few other modes, too, like “Gen Z slang,” as well as fantasy and sci-fi favorites like Klingon and Elvish. It appears they previously had a mode called “Horny Margaret Thatcher,” but that seems to have disappeared. Maybe they’re fine-tuning it with some unearthed dirty journal entries or something. But it’s the corporate translator that provides a true service.
Researchers at Cornell recently published a paper on what they call the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR)—basically, a measurement of how susceptible you are to empty boardroom semantics. The researchers, who defined corporate BS as a “specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way,” found that the more likely you are to find this style of speaking to be appealing, the worse you probably are at doing your actual job. Basically, corporate speak is an obfuscation tool to bury a lack of practical skills behind a smokescreen of meaningless nonsense. Now you’ve got a tool for seeing through it.
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