Automating a Manual Content Production Operation for a French Agency
A Paris-based content and SEO agency was delivering content services entirely through manual processes — human coordination, spreadsheet tracking, and fragmented tooling. We designed and built a fully automated production platform from the ground up, and staffed the entire delivery through an outsourced engineering team.
Context & Challenge
The agency operated a content-as-a-service business, producing SEO articles, product pages, translations, and social content for a portfolio of clients. Every stage of production — briefing, writing, review, SEO scoring, translation, and delivery — was handled manually by a growing internal team.
As client volume scaled, the model broke down. Coordination overhead multiplied, quality consistency suffered, and the cost of delivering each piece of content kept rising. The agency needed to move from a people-heavy operation to a platform-driven one without disrupting live client delivery.
Our Approach
We took full ownership of the platform — from architecture through to deployment — through a dedicated outsourced team embedded with the client. Rather than adapting an off-the-shelf tool, we built a purpose-built SaaS platform that mirrored and then automated the agency’s existing workflows: content generation, SEO optimisation, AI-assisted translation, multi-client project management, and publishing.
The platform was built to replace manual effort at every stage while keeping human editors in control of final quality.
Technology & Architecture
The platform was built on a modern, cloud-native stack designed for reliability, scalability, and real-time performance:
- Azure AKS for containerised workload orchestration and scalable deployment.
- Spring Boot for robust, service-oriented backend architecture.
- React for a responsive, editor-focused frontend interface.
- Apache Kafka for asynchronous event streaming across production workflows.
- gRPC for high-performance internal service communication.
- Redis for caching and session management.
- Elasticsearch for full-text search and content indexing.
- Azure Cosmos DB & Microsoft SQL Server for flexible and relational data storage.
- Azure AI with RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) for context-aware, brand-consistent AI content generation.
- Stripe for subscription and billing management.
Key Features Built
- AI Content Generation with RAG — Content produced by AI models grounded in each client’s brand guidelines, past content, and SEO objectives, eliminating generic output and ensuring consistency at scale.
- Custom Brand Agents per Client — Each client’s tone, vocabulary, and editorial rules encoded directly into the generation pipeline, removing the need for manual briefing at the writer level.
- Automated SEO Optimisation — Semantic scoring, keyword integration, and structural analysis embedded into the content workflow, replacing a separate manual SEO review step.
- AI Translation & Localisation — Multilingual content produced natively within the platform, removing dependency on external translation vendors.
- Multi-Client Project Management — A centralised dashboard for briefing, assignment, review, approval, and publishing, replacing spreadsheets and email chains across the entire operation.
- Subscription & Billing Automation — Client plans and usage managed through integrated Stripe billing, enabling the agency to offer tiered service packages at scale.
Impact
The platform eliminated the manual coordination layer that had been limiting the agency’s growth. What previously required a large operational team running across multiple disconnected tools was replaced by an automated, event-driven system, with human editors focused exclusively on quality control and client strategy.
Delivery Model
This project was delivered through full team outsourcing — we provided the complete engineering team, including backend, frontend, DevOps, and AI/ML expertise. The client retained strategic direction while we owned technical execution end-to-end, from architecture design through to production deployment.
Expertise Demonstrated
- Cloud-native architecture on Azure (AKS, Cosmos DB, Azure AI)
- AI integration with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
- Event-driven systems with Kafka and gRPC
- Full-stack product development (Spring Boot, React)
- SaaS platform design and multi-tenant architecture
- IT team outsourcing and embedded delivery
Vision
This project represents the kind of transformation increasingly critical for service businesses: replacing manual, people-dependent operations with intelligent platforms that scale without proportional cost growth.
By combining AI, modern cloud infrastructure, and a fully outsourced engineering model, the agency moved from a constrained service operation to a platform-driven business — positioned to grow its client base without growing its overhead.
