Every new market multiplies the content budget. A catalogue refresh means re-translating everything. A correction to one product specification is made once in the PIM and then hunted down by hand across six market storefronts, or more likely it is corrected once and stays wrong everywhere else.
The CMO is asked by the board whether the business is AI-ready. The honest answer is that agency copy takes weeks and machine-generated copy sounds like nobody. Legal will not approve publishing AI content without a compliance trail, and the board wants a business case with a cost baseline they can measure against.
Launch a market and you are still waiting for translations when competitors are already trading there. Every market has invented its own category names, so nothing rolls up in reporting. A Swedish shopper clicks a Danish search result, lands on a page in the wrong currency, and leaves before the redirect even loads