The Blackbird Roost | Issue #7 | August 2026

👋 Hi, this is Brunó and Team Blackbird with a subscriber-only issue of The Blackbird Roost Newsletter. Six issues in and we're still here, which in newsletter years makes us practically an institution.

If you're reading this from Europe, congratulations on being one of the twelve people still checking email in August.

Everyone else will presumably discover this newsletter sometime in September, tanned and confused about why their inbox has four digits next to it.

Let's get into it.​

Amsterdam. September 10. Let's talk orchestration.

We're teaming up again with our friends at TAUS, this time at Booking.com's rather gorgeous Amsterdam headquarters.

The topic: The Power of Quality Estimation & AI Orchestration.

It's an exclusive, highly practical half-day workshop about turning multilingual content operations into automated, scalable pipelines. Less theorizing about what AI might eventually do. More building things that actually work.

We'll explore quality estimation, AI, and orchestration, and how they fit together in real-world content operations.

We still have a few spots left.
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​Join us in Amsterdam →

Figma is essential to localization. Its localization integrations shouldn't suck.

Around 95% of Fortune 500 companies use Figma.

And yet localization in Figma can still feel surprisingly primitive.

Strings get exported. Files get passed around. Connectors handle the obvious bits while ignoring much of what makes Figma Enterprise interesting in the first place.

So we built something better.

Our new Figma Enterprise integration treats Figma Variables as localizable content and makes the entire process automatable.

You can:

→ Trigger workflows automatically when source variables change
→ Translate and update language modes directly in Figma
→ Keep Figma strings synchronized with GitHub, GitLab, and your product
→ Plug in your preferred AI/LLM, QA, and human review processes

The interesting part is what the designer experiences.

Almost nothing.

Designers can switch between languages directly inside Figma. Localization happens behind the scenes.

Which is, we think, exactly how infrastructure should work.

▪Blackbird x Figma Landing Page​
▪Technical documentation​
▪Demos and tutorial videos on YouTube​

Files vs. Flights: one year in

What happens when you stop thinking about localization as moving files and start thinking about the entire process?

After a year at Blackbird, our Senior Solutions Architect Alex Terekhov reflects on the workflows, customers, and lessons that changed how he thinks about localization automation.

​Read Alex's full workiversary interview →

Why should localization operate in a separate universe?

The localization team works in a TMS.

Meanwhile, the rest of the enterprise lives in Jira, Workfront, ServiceNow, Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Slack, Notion, and whatever else someone added to the technology stack last Tuesday.

The result is predictable.

Fragmented processes. Duplicated records. More data silos. And people manually carrying information between systems that were supposedly purchased to eliminate manual work.

There is another way to think about this.

What if the enterprise platform remained the control hub?

A localization request starts in Jira. So does the approval. The status lives there. The decisions live there. The record stays there.

Blackbird handles what happens between the systems.

With Blackbird Checkpoints, a workflow Bird can pause while a translation finishes, a stakeholder approves something, an external system responds, or a long-running AI process completes. Then it continues automatically.

Localization doesn't need its own operational island.

It can become part of the enterprise workflow.

Dan has become slightly obsessed with this idea, particularly with turning ordinary task-management platforms into localization and AI operations hubs.

The results are worth seeing:
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​Smartsheet as a Content Operations Hub:

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In this demo, see how Blackbird transforms Jira into an AI-powered localization command center:

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Build a Localization Request Portal in Asana with Blackbird:

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Orchestrating Content Operations Across Workfront, AEM & Phrase:

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Three big integrations walked into Q3...

In July, I teased three major integrations coming to Blackbird:

Figma Enterprise. ServiceNow. Veeva.

​Figma Enterprise brings Variables support and connects design much more directly to automated localization workflows.

​ServiceNow filled one of the last major gaps in our enterprise work and project management roster.

We shipped both within a month.

Which leaves Veeva in our crosshairs.

Veeva represents something different for us. It's our first serious step into life sciences and healthcare, an industry where content workflows come with rather more consequential requirements than "please update the homepage by Friday."

Governance matters. Auditability matters. Process matters.

Sounds familiar.

And because apparently two major integrations weren't enough, we also deployed Document360, Salsify, and glossary support for Intento.

Oh, and we quietly passed 200 public repositories on GitHub.

But who's counting?

(We are.)

Agents discover. Orchestration operationalizes.

One of our favorite ideas from LocWorld55 came from Marcus Casal, CTO of Lionbridge:

We've been thinking about that line ever since.

Agents are extraordinarily good at exploration. Give them a messy problem and they can reason through it, try different approaches, and help discover what the process should be.

But eventually you discover the process.

And once you know what should happen, having an AI reconsider the same decision for the ten-thousandth time starts to look less like intelligence and more like an expensive habit.

That's where orchestration comes in.

Agentic orchestration combines AI, human expertise, business rules, and governance into repeatable processes. Instead of merely automating individual tasks, organizations can govern the intent and flow of the entire content lifecycle.

Marcus explored this idea at LocWorld55 in Dublin while moderating a panel with Luciana Martins Franco, Sr. Director of International Engineering at Microsoft; Ari Karampour, Sr. Manager Strategy, Technology, and Automation at Indeed; and our own Dan Milczarski, VP of Solutions.

The model is increasingly becoming a component.

The workflow is becoming the product.

​Read the full blogpost >>​

Overheard

We like benchmarks.

We especially like benchmarks we didn't produce ourselves.

​Edwin Trebels is founder and Chief Growth Officer of LangOptima, a systems integrator that helps organizations connect platforms, tools, data, and people.

Recently, LangOptima put some numbers behind improvements we've been making to Blackbird's logic capabilities and variables.

For one client, the results were:

41% reduction in file-classification logic
​21% reduction in document-conversion logic
​17% reduction in translation-management logic
​62% reduction in Trello update logic

That's interesting because "fewer workflow nodes" isn't normally a metric that gets anyone invited onto a keynote stage.

But it matters.

Smaller logic trees are easier to understand, easier to modify, and easier to troubleshoot.

And these aren't toy workflows. The client publishes around five million words per year across ten languages through them.

As Edwin put it:

Sometimes innovation looks like adding something.

Sometimes it's deleting 62% of something.

We'll happily take the latter.

​Read the whole post →

That's it for August.

Thanks for reading and for being part of the Blackbird community.

We'll be back in September with more from the increasingly blurry intersection of content, AI, language technology, and enterprise operations.

Until then, keep building.

Brunó & Team Blackbird​
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Each issue of The 'Roost brings a curated mix of what matters: practical insights from the field, fresh thinking on where content and language operations are headed, product updates you can actually use, and a bit of fun along the way. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here. If you'd rather not know, unsubscribe anytime, no hard feelings, we'll assume you've found peace elsewhere.

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