The 70/30 model: why the human always has the final say

Automation is powerful, but it's also easy to oversell. We use a simple principle to keep ourselves honest about what's actually happening: 70 % of the work is automated, 30 % is always a person. Not because it's a neat number, but because that's actually where the line falls between what a machine does well and what it shouldn't do alone.

The 70 percent: what should be automated

Automation is good at repetitive, rule-based tasks where consistency matters more than creativity. Things like:

• Building, publishing and deploying websites: the same checklist, every time, with no human slip
• Technical SEO monitoring: checking that load time, meta tags and structured data are actually in place
• Reporting: pulling numbers from several sources into one readable overview, with no manual copy and paste
• Lead follow-up: sending the right email to the right person at the right time, based on what they actually did

This is the part that lets us keep prices down without cutting quality: we don't spend time doing the same thing manually every time.

The 30 percent: what never gets automated

The last third is judgement, taste and responsibility, things a machine can't take over, no matter how good the technology gets:

• Whether a piece of text actually hits the right tone for this particular customer
• Whether an automated suggestion is good enough to actually be published
• Strategic choices about what to prioritise when resources are limited
• The last quality check before anything goes live: a real pair of eyes, every time

Why not just automate everything?

Because "fully automatic marketing" in practice means no one is responsible when something goes wrong. We have seen the result: generic content that misses the mark, emails sent to the wrong segment, a website that technically works but says nothing about the business behind it. Automation without human oversight isn't efficient: it's just fast at making mistakes at scale.

The result of the 70/30 model isn't that everything goes faster because a machine does it all. It is that the heavy, repetitive work goes faster, so people get more time for exactly the last third that actually needs a person.