The AI-Ready Localizer #7: Flying Smarter

Orchestrating Multimarket Blog Adaptation with Blackbird.io

🔥 Hot off the press: my latest post on The AI-Ready Localizer is free to read — but only until Tuesday, July 8th. After that, it’s paywalled. Catch it while you can!

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In this post, I’m sharing my hands-on experience testing Blackbird.io — a powerful orchestration platform built to streamline and automate global content workflows. From blog adaptation to multilingual SEO, I put its capabilities to the test to see just how far it can take content teams beyond traditional translation models.

If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you probably know there are two core ideas I keep hammering on about.

First, that most marketing content should never have been translated in the first place.

And yes, there are some companies that have followed this approach — but they’ve always been the exception.

Apple has long understood that marketing and product content require fundamentally different approaches.

While product content typically follows a standard translation process — with strings stored under string IDs in a translation memory for reuse sprint after sprint — marketing content is handled very differently. You won’t see localization team members translating marketing materials word-for-word. Instead, marketing is treated as a freshly created artifact for each target market, crafted by local creative copywriters rather than translators, and this has been Apple’s practice for years.

Creating new campaigns and marketing materials from scratch for each market, while preserving the core message and brand voice, was simply too complex and costly for most organizations to sustain. But that’s no longer the case.

Now, with the help of AI, orchestrating the creation of compelling and engaging marketing content for multiple markets has become dramatically faster and more affordable. While you still need someone to coordinate these efforts, this approach is no longer just possible — it’s the smartest way forward.

Still, many content and global marketing teams face a familiar challenge: while AI tools are available, they’re often pieced together with ad-hoc prompts, endless copy-pasting, and fragile manual handoffs. This patchwork approach leaves workflows chaotic, hard to track, inconsistent, and painfully slow.

As a result, even though creating fresh, market-tailored content is clearly the best path forward, many companies remain stuck with their legacy TMS systems, outdated “transcreation” processes, and the same repeated mistakes in marketing adaptation.

The second idea you’ve probably heard me repeat time and again is this: your AI strategy is only as strong as the quality of your data assets.

A crucial pillar for successful AI-powered content production is having high-quality, curated data foundations. That means maintaining a well-managed multilingual glossary — ensuring product names, feature terminology, and style guidelines are consistent across languages.

Equally important is a cross-market product availability matrix, which tells the system where specific features or products are available, future-available, or unavailable in each market.

These resources act as the backbone for accurate, culturally relevant, and legally sound content, enabling AI systems to make correct decisions without human rework. When these assets are in place, AI can truly accelerate content production while safeguarding brand voice and compliance worldwide.

On top of that, what’s needed is a centralized system that connects all the dots and brings structure to AI-powered content production.

This is where Blackbird.io comes in. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in New York with a growing team across Budapest and Toronto, the company has a bold mission: to eliminate silos between CMSs, TMSs, AI services, and people, and orchestrate multicultural content workflows in a unified, AI‑enabled platform.

The name—Blackbird—is inspired by the migratory bird that effortlessly bridges continents. Similarly, Blackbird.io’s low‑code visual platform (nicknamed “Birds”) connects systems, automates processes, and empowers human‑in‑the‑loop oversight wherever needed. With deep integrations—over 160 apps including Contentful, WordPress, Notion, DeepL, Azure AI, and more, and pre‑built AI prompt sequences for translation, SEO, glossary checks, and QA, Blackbird.io delivers the technology backbone for modern content orchestration.

In short, Blackbird.io was created to bridge the gap: offering companies a way to orchestrate AI‑driven content workflows end‑to‑end, with transparency, consistency, and speed.

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Algorithms on social media can be a pain — serving you content that makes you think “Why on earth am I seeing this?” — but once in a while, they truly deliver. They connect you with someone so like-minded, someone who shares a vision you thought was uniquely yours, that you start wondering if you might have a lost half-brother hiding somewhere in Hungary.

That’s exactly how I connected with Bruno Bitter. The algorithm decided we had something in common, and sure enough, once we hopped on a call, we discovered that “thing in common” was a shared vision for how global content operations should work. In particular, we both challenged the usual assumption that every piece of content has to be translated. Instead, we argued for creating content from scratch, designed for each market, which resonates locally and does the heavy lifting of technical SEO behind the scenes.

Blackbird.io isn’t a tool you understand at first glance. When I opened our call by asking about his connectors, Bruno’s face turned serious — and he was quick to clarify: this isn’t about connectors, it’s about orchestrating complex AI workflows in a truly low-code, no-code way. And honestly, to really appreciate Blackbird.io, you need two things:

✅ A willingness to test and experiment hands-on
✅ An architect’s mindset to map workflows and spot opportunities for massive efficiency gains

Bruno kindly offered me a sandbox environment, and I’ve been putting it through its paces — rebuilding my most common global content scenarios. And you know what? I haven’t touched a traditional MT engine once, and I haven’t missed it for a second.

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END-TO-END FLOW FOR LOCALIZED BLOG REWRITING & PUBLISHING

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✅ Step 1: Article Ingestion