Why we added an AI translation widget to a human translation agency's homepage

Twenty years ago, I built Tomedes on a simple premise: professional human translation, done right, at a price that makes sense. Today we serve over 120,000 clients across 270+ languages, and our translators have handled everything from legal contracts and medical records to government documents and global marketing campaigns.

So when I decided to put an AI translation widget front and centre on our homepage, I knew it would raise questions. This post is my answer to those questions, and the data-backed reasoning behind a decision that has shaped how we think about translation in 2026.

The market had already made a decision, we needed to catch up

Over the past two years, something fundamental shifted in how clients evaluate translation providers. The question is no longer simply "which agency has the best linguists?" It is "which partner understands how to combine AI efficiency with human quality, and can manage that workflow for me?"

Our internal data reflected this shift clearly. Clients who landed on Tomedes.com were increasingly arriving from searches that combined terms like "AI translation" and "professional translation" in the same query. They weren't looking for one or the other. They were looking for both.

At the same time, we were building exactly that capability. We had launched MachineTranslation.com (a standalone AI translation tool that runs consensus across 22 large language models) and we had developed a widget from that same technology. The question wasn't whether to integrate AI into our offering. We already had. The question was whether our homepage reflected the company we had actually become.

It didn't. And that gap was costing us.

What a fresh-eyes review revealed

We ran an internal review of the Tomedes homepage with one specific brief: read it as a first-time visitor who has never heard of us.

The exercise was instructive. The page featured a prominent AI translation widget on one side and a professional translation quote form on the other, but nowhere did a single line of copy explain what the relationship between these two things was. A sophisticated buyer looking for a managed AI + human workflow would not have found their answer on that page. Neither would a client who needed certified legal translation and was wondering whether we were still a professional agency or had pivoted into a tool company.

The lesson: When your product evolves faster than your positioning, you create confusion for exactly the clients you most want to attract.

This wasn't a failure of the product, it was a gap in communication. And the fix wasn't to remove the widget or to remove the human translation messaging. It was to write the sentence we had never written: Tomedes uses AI as a tool within a human-led translation process, not instead of it.

What the data told us to do

Before making any homepage changes, we looked at the performance data for the widget on the pages where it was already deployed.

Users who opened the AI translation widget and completed a translation converted at over 80%. More than four in five people who opened it used it. That is an exceptional completion rate for any interactive tool, and it told us the widget was not a distraction. It was a front door.