Bossard automates translation for 16 languages with Contentful AI Actions

Most people don’t think twice about what holds things together (like bicycles, microwaves, and airplanes) until they fall apart and lead to problems big and small (like a fall, cold soup for lunch, or vacation delays).

Bossard is a leading strategic partner for industrial fastening and assembly technology solutions to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) globally. As a top global distributor in its industry, Bossard has amassed thousands of long-term customers and boasts over $1B in revenue every year. But even the strongest systems have breaking points, especially when it comes to digital infrastructure.

For more than 10 years, Bossard relied on its long-standing content management platform to power the website. When the system version reached end‑of‑life in late 2025, Bossard seized the opportunity to replatform and adopt a next‑generation, high‑performance solution capable of integrating with Bossard’s other tools.

Finding a foundation that easily fastens tools together

Bossard’s Marketing team kicked off procurement by evaluating leading vendors. Collectively, they chose Contentful. Its composable infrastructure and clean interface improved daily operations while modern capabilities increased speed to market, including:

• AI-driven translations - With Contentful’s bespoke AI tool (AI Actions), translations were automated, making it easier to scale their brand to new geographic markets.

• Enhanced workflow  - Bossard saved time and reduced bottlenecks with unique user roles and automated handoffs from one step in the production cycle to the next.

• Natively-headless - Contentful’s  API-first solution made it easy to integrate their digital experience, including the ecommerce portion of their site.

• Marketplace apps - There are hundreds of apps that can be integrated with the click of a button to increase efficiency and support new use cases or projects.

Bossard took a strategic approach to its replatform, using it to clean up stale content that had stacked up while working with an unwieldy platform, instead of lifting and shifting all their existing content to the new platform.

While the Digital Marketing team developed Bossard’s content model, the Content team audited website content, purging or editing it in alignment with their current brand and product offerings in English. This streamlined their messaging and created a more cohesive and current brand experience.

Manufacturing faster translations with AI 

The next step was to scale that content for Bossard’s global audience, which meant supporting 16 languages and 38 locales. The Marketing team put Contentful to the test, using AI Actions, a built-in tool that helps teams write, translate, and optimize content fast — to automatically draft translations. 

The impact was immediate. Bossard Marketers saved an estimated 1,000 hours of work over four months, as the tool eliminated the most tedious steps of the production cycle. With the former system, Bossard’s Global Marketing team of 30 had to copy and paste the original content into a Word document or Excel sheet, send it to a translator, review and edit the content, then copy it onto the website. 

Sulzberger and the rest of the team also like that they can configure custom rules in AI Actions to increase the accuracy of generated content. For example, Bossard created a rule to ensure that certain product names are not translated, to maintain alignment with global corporate messaging.

They are also using AI Actions to generate alt text and SEO, making their content more accessible and discoverable, without overloading the team.

Securing streamlined handoffs with Workflows

Contentful is also decreasing production times by automating the step-by-step hand-off that comes with creating new content. 

“We just added Workflows, and it’s made a big improvement. Instead of communicating handoffs via email or Microsoft Teams, we can automate it step by step: The content creator drafts content, then it’s passed to the content master for review, then it goes to AI Actions for translation, then it goes to a local marketer to approve and publish,” said Sulzberger.

Governance is also playing a role in production by defining who has access to edit and publish content. Contentful users at Bossard fall into one of two roles: content creators or proofreaders, keeping content accurate and consistent, and roles defined. 

Bossard’s marketers like working in Contentful a lot as it’s more modern and intuitive to use. Also, it provides greater flexibility than the former CMS. They took some time to ramp up on structured content and build reusable components. As a result, daily work is much simpler,” Sulzberger said.

Finding new, riveting use cases 

Thanks to the increased speed of content localization, Bossard saved 600 hours of localization work during their replatform, which amounts to savings of € 27K. Bossard is eager to implement even more of the features offered in Contentful. Its Marketing team already has a list of other capabilities to sample to increase efficiency further and maximize the impact of their content.

“We’re excited to check out Analytics and A/B testing in the near future,” Sulzberger said, emphasizing the importance of measuring performance and using those insights to iterate on existing content or inform future strategies.

Bossard also plans to add a digital asset manager to its tech stack. When the time comes, integration will be seamless with Contentful’s headless architecture.