Articles

News about Agentic AI

Progress Powers Its Vision for ‘Generative CMS’ with Agentic RAG and a Legacy of Innovation

matt-garrepy

Treasure Data Brings AI Marketing Cloud and ‘Super Agent’ Capabilities to AWS Marketplace

Forrester DXP Wave 2025: Welcome to 'The Agent Hunger Games.’ Are the odds in your favor?

<hr /> The CDP space continues to evolve – and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/hightouch">Hightouch</a> is hitting the gas as it moves into the agentic fast lane.When I recently spoke to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/briankotlyar/">Brian Kotlyar,</a> the company’s CMO, he was more than a little excited about their new <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://hightouch.com/platform/agents">Hightouch Agents,</a> an AI-powered toolset designed to help marketers answer questions, identify opportunities, automate workflows, and make everything work faster. How fast? Like 10x.Of course, Brian was already a fan of Hightouch before AI agents were a twinkle in anyone’s eye. In fact, when he first encountered the CDP four years ago while leading growth Marketing at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://newrelic.com/">New Relic</a> (an observability platform), he was smitten by its potential to automate and scale his marketing efforts.“I was really inspired by the idea of using the complete data in the data warehouse to power growth marketing, lifestyle marketing, ads, web personalization, everything,” he said. “And I was doing it in this very manual and archaic way with tons of data analysts, tons of software engineers. And then I discovered Hightouch as a way to bring all kinds of modern practices and software engineering practices together without needing these huge teams.”As it turns out, Hightouch was so compelling that Brian joined the meteoric scale-up in mid-2022, where he’s now tasked with marketing a product that's designed to help marketers. In many ways, he's marshalling his superpowers to help professionals like him to augment their human creativity with the power and potential of AI.As of late, we've seen significant changes in the customer data platform ecosystem, where DXP consolidation and pure-play reinvention have been the prevailing trends. Through it all, Hightouch has elevated above the noise, positioning itself around its unique composable attributes and AI decisioning as force multipliers for its value. That vision is why it nailed an <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/u-cant-touch-this-cdp-hightouch-nails-80m-series-c-to-power-its-ai-decisioning">$80 million Series C </a>earlier this year. Now, its Hightouch Agents represent the next step on their ambitious roadmap, giving marketers the ability to ideate and brief campaigns and build their strategies by asking customer data questions and receiving instant answers. Along with those core features, Hightouch Agents can do a whole lot more. They can analyze your creative and copy to distill what is and isn’t working, so you can optimize performance. They can cut through the chaos to find the right audiences and save hours in the process. As Brian explained, it’s a potential game-changer for marketers.“We transitioned to be the leading composable CDP company, and now we're introducing this next big wave of functionality where we grab onto the broader LLM trend and really bring it into the marketing workflow,” he said. “If you imagine the way that coding agents have totally transformed the day-to-day work of software engineers, we think something similar is happening with marketing, and we want to be the company that brings that capability to marketers.”Hightouch Agents come pre-trained with core marketing skills, giving you an out-of-the-box edge with their capabilities. They connect to your data, channels, and creative, and come preloaded with deep domain knowledge – enabling them to reason with precision around complex concepts like attribution modeling. It’s not a shocker to see Hightouch move in this direction. The company has been on a rapid rise, and I recently covered the hiring of AI industry luminary <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/hightouch-taps-ai-luminary-akilesh-bapu-to-accelerate-push-into-context-aware-marketing-agents">Akilesh Bapu</a> in early October to lead the company’s generative product development. This was a clear signal of its intentions to drive an agent-focused strategy – and that's precisely where they're headed.<h3 id="giving-marketers-an-agentic-boost">Giving marketers an agentic boost</h3>Marketing teams are really feeling the heat. Every day, they’re struggling with inefficient workflows across a range of considerations and coping with tasks that are labor-intensive and highly disruptive. That’s where Hightouch Agents come in. They promise to accelerate and automate a wide array of previously slow and manual tasks, so teams can bring their ideas to life. The company says this can translate into 10x the speed, and that could make a huge dent in the day-to-day rigors of operating a successful marketing machine. According to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/tejasmanohar/">Tejas Manohar,</a> Co-founder and Co-CEO of Hightouch, the problem is that there are too many manual steps to launch a marketing campaign. And yet, that's still the overwhelming reality for most enterprise brands. As such, Hightouch Agents are starting with data and insights because they’re a huge pain point.As previously mentioned, Hightouch Agents can be tasked with answering really complex questions with laser precision. For example, you can query which ad creative drove the most conversions last month, or whether new audience segments are emerging around a product line. You can even inquire as to which content-driven campaigns performed better when compared to discount promotions, or which Facebook ads are performing best based on CTR. <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:68.71%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/11/image-1762968106697.png" /></figure>Prompting performance questions from Hightouch AI Agents. Source: Hightouch website Brian told me that the quality of the answers is driving more questions – and that's revealing even greater insight. That's all due to the context that informs everything. Unlike generic AI tools, Hightouch Agents connect directly to a company’s data warehouse and marketing stack. This allows them to see all the data that powers marketing decisions, customer transactions, inventory levels, creative performance, and more, without manual uploads or constant context switching.“The reason why the answers are really good is because we have this notion of a context layer,” he said. “We map the data in their warehouse, we map the data in their channels, we map all their brand information. So the answers are just dramatically better than you get when you just throw the exact same question to a generic GPT. And it's this self-reinforcing loop, because if the answers are better, you're going to come back and ask more questions and start to move into much more exploratory, open-ended questions like, 'Hey, I need to move this metric. What do you what should I do? Hey, I've got a bunch of extra stuff over here. What should I do?'"<figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:77.63%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/11/image-1762978067150.png" /></figure>Hightouch Agents make engaging and ideating simple. Source: Hightouch By combining deep marketing expertise with this level of data-driven context, marketers can explore and analyze data independently, uncover new opportunities, and automate recurring workflows such as reporting or audience-building. Hightouch Agents also go beyond recommendations by taking action in key areas of the marketer’s domain, from running A/B tests to adjusting budgets.Hightouch is also more secure because no duplicate storage is required. It reads directly from your data warehouse, where your data remains guarded. That enables it to meet fierce regulatory governance around SOC, GDPR, HIPAA, and other data privacy benchmarks. Hightouch Agents extend the company’s vision for marketing AI by helping marketers access and act on intelligence faster. Future updates will expand agent capabilities into experimentation, content generation, and project management, further unifying marketing workflows under one intelligent context layer.With Agents, Hightouch is bringing the power of AI directly into the marketer’s workflow. According to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/guptakashish/">Kashish Gupta,</a> Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Hightouch, marketers no longer need to switch between tools or wait on data teams for these vital answers. Hightouch Agents make it possible to ask a question, get an informed answer, and take action instantly – all powered by the same trusted data foundation.<h3 id="evolving-cdp-for-the-agentic-era">Evolving CDP for the agentic era</h3>I’ve been watching CDPs with a close eye over the last few years as they’ve been tapped as critical layers in composable stacks and folded into the broader vision for a complete DXP. As Brian echoed, the category has always been a little “funny,” because it’s comprised of a hardcore data infrastructure that’s collecting behavioral events, processing them into identities, and pushing them around the ecosystem – all facets of data engineering. None of this tooling is really designed for marketers, so CDPs try to bridge the gap between engineering and enablement in what Brian calls “unnatural bedfellows.” And for better or worse, that’s sold as a CDP. But he sees the marketing side of the equation as fertile ground for scaling agentic workflows and capabilities – and that’s not necessarily a CDP story.“What we see happening increasingly is that other layer, the more marketer-facing layer, is a place where agents can be really, really powerful and augmentative of those self-serve workflows,” he said. “But it doesn't really stop there. I would say the big insight that is driving Hightouch’s Agent development is actually quite separate from the CDP.”To Brian’s point, marketers don’t actually live in the martech tools they use. They’re typically swimming in Google Sheets and Asana – so a lot of the work they need to do spans technology barriers. “People don't actually log into their email tool of their Meta back end all that much,” he said. “They work in spreadsheets. They work in Docs and project management tools. And it's all these myriad steps and procedures and handoffs and arguments and just waiting that's all happening. Where Agents get really exciting is in their ability to collapse so much of that.”And it’s a lot of stuff that’s creating cognitive overload for marketers. Between briefing agencies, begging data teams for metrics, and assembling weekly reports for stakeholders, they're overwhelmed. It’s in these areas that Brian and Hightouch see untapped potential for AI agents to ease the friction. “We think agents will do for marketers what they’ve already done for software engineers,” Brian said. “That's the real Nirvana we're pursuing.”<h3 id="built-with-composability-at-its-core">Built with composability at its core</h3>One of the big distinctions with Hightouch Agents is that they operate independently of its CDP. In other words, you don’t need their complete customer data platform to harness its Agents in your existing stack. This is a testament to the company’s core composability, but also a conscious decision to make it more portable and accessible to marketers – regardless of how their technologies are composed.  “What we observe a lot of our peers doing is forcing these huge software migrations in their core platform with unfair pricing mechanics and migration mechanics to get access to them,” Brian said. “We don't think that's right, and we don't think it’s actually necessary at a technology level. You should be able to unleash the benefits of Hightouch Agents across your whole workflow without having to change your whole underlying tech stack and all the decisions you've made previously.”As Brian went on to say, customers have that option, and Hightouch will offer some efficiencies with bundled pricing to make it a more compelling offer. But that’s not the central strategy. The bottom line is really a practical one, where enterprise IT teams want best-of-breed technologies without the pain of ripping out everything else. In his mind, the future is comprised of heterogeneous enterprise technology environments, and they don't want to make it hard to adopt Hightouch on any level. “If you want Agents, come knock on our front door,” he said. “We'll give you Agents, and they'll sit alongside everything else you're already doing, just like with our CDP.”<h3 id="the-verdict">The verdict</h3>Marketers, by their very nature, are a scrappy bunch. They're creative, driven, and often do their best work under pressure. But there's a breaking point. Right now, they’re under excruciating pressure to break through the noise and produce results – and they’re being crushed by dozens of tools that aren’t providing the insights they need. How can they be effective with so much to juggle? Agents offer a salve for the cognitive overload, and I’m already seeing that pay dividends in other platforms. But marketers need the next wave of intelligent AI assistants to be ready for battle, and that’s where Hightouch is bringing its purpose-built agents to the front lines. Imbued with a real understanding of marketing functions – and powered by your warehouse data and marketing stack – you now have the business context and an effective toolset for automating and executing with real impact.Can you achieve 10x speed? That remains to be seen. But given the precision that Hightouch Agents are promising and the agility to receive the answers and insights you're after, it seems less of a possibility and more of a probability. The bottom line is that marketers need the boost – and this could be part of the answer. One of the big gripes about agentic features is the need to migrate fully to a vendor’s platform to harness the features. By taking a composable approach that mitigates a wholesale migration, Hightouch is amplifying its extensibility with a real edge. They're also opening up a roadmap for future agent capabilities and delivering it with more flexibility and control.Trust is a key part of any AI strategy, and vendors will need to deliver on that. Given its focus on data and its integrity, Hightouch Agents have the best shot at reflecting the company’s ethos, and its mission for bringing trustworthy AI to the marketer’s workflow with intelligent, adaptive, and creative potential.Agents are making the promise of AI tangible and valuable, and Hightouch is moving in a solid direction. You can schedule a demo of these new features <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://hightouch.com/platform/agents">on their website.</a> <hr /><h4 style="text-align:center" id="looking-for-more-guidance-on-hightouch?-talk-to-an-expert.">Looking for more guidance on Hightouch? <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/contact">Talk to an expert.</a></h4><hr /> <h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <img style="width:29.67%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1761136749603.png" /><h4 id="live-webinar:-can-we-ever-get-composable-without-complexity?"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/webinar-cmscritic">Live Webinar: Can We Ever Get Composable Without Complexity?</a></h4>November 20, 2025 – 6 PM (CET) / 5 PM (GMT) / 12 PM (EST)Composable architecture promised to simplify digital experience creation by giving organizations the flexibility to combine the technologies that met their needs. But for many enterprises, it’s done the opposite, which has led to complex integrations, spiraling costs, and what some are now referring to as composable regret. In this live conversation, Umbraco CEO Mats Persson joins Matt Garrepy, Chief Content Officer at CMS Critic, for a candid exploration of what went wrong in the first wave of composable and what needs to change. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/webinar-cmscritic">Register for the webinar.</a> <img style="width:29.08%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1761594434824.png" /><h4 id="typo3-conference-2025"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://t3con.typo3.com/">TYPO3 Conference 2025</a></h4>November 25–27, 2025 – Düsseldorf, GermanyT3CON is the premier annual event for web professionals, developers, marketers, and decision-makers. Much more than just a TYPO3-focused conference, T3CON spotlights the latest trends, innovations, and leaders shaping the future of content management, covering everything from grassroots initiatives to new technologies, strategies, and success stories. The event is designed to empower businesses and organizations with the knowledge and tools they need to thrive in the evolving digital landscape. The conference culminates in an awards ceremony celebrating the best TYPO3 projects across various industries. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://t3con.typo3.com/">Get your ticket.</a> <img style="width:31.44%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/08/cms-kickoff-2026-logo.png" alt="" /><h4 id="cms-kickoff-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">CMS Kickoff 2026</a></h4>January 13-14, 2026 – St. Petersburg, FLMeet industry leaders at our fourth annual CMS Kickoff – the industry's premier global CMS event. Similar to a traditional kickoff, we reflect on recent trends and share stories from the frontlines. Additionally, we will delve into the current happenings and shed light on the future. Prepare for an unparalleled in-person CMS conference experience that will equip you to move things forward. This is an exclusive event – space is limited, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">so secure your tickets today.</a>

Hightouch Launches High-Performance Agents to Help Marketers Move 10x Faster

<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/critics/conor-egan">Conor Egan</a> is SVP Product at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/contentstack">Contentstack</a> and a CMS Critic Contributor.<hr /> In order for <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.contentstack.com/platforms/ai">AI</a> to become a truly revolutionary force in life and business, we’ll have to trust it with more than just our grunt work. We’ll have to outsource some of our decision-making as well.That’s where agentic AI comes in.An AI agent is a system you can interact with in plain language that has some amount of capabilities it can manage, including taking actions on your behalf. The simplest AI agents are “helper” agents, such as support agents or virtual assistants. (<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/504767/tragic-life-clippy-worlds-most-hated-virtual-assistant">Clippy</a> was the godfather of this sort of thing). You can ask these agents to book your plane tickets or revise some text, or which barbecue grill would best suit your needs. Other AI agents run when you're not doing anything. They’re constantly listening, and can take some action if they think it's necessary.That makes them close to what we used to call automations. The key difference between an automation and an agent is that the agent has more than one function, and can make its own decisions and interpretations of what it’s supposed to do.  Here are a few thoughts about the value of agentic AI as a force multiplier and facilitator, and why companies that are replacing human beings with AI agents are thinking about this technology the wrong way.<h3 id="why-should-we-use-ai-agents?">Why should we use AI agents?</h3>Not all tasks fit neatly into a simple binary. Think of a governance agent that’s supposed to enforce brand guidelines or highlight when content should get another review. You might want more complexity in its output than a cut-and-dried yes or no. Your AI agent might decide that the problems with a piece of content are egregious enough to block it from being published, or that it needs someone else to review it, or there’s some other review state it should go into. Based on what’s happening, it might decide which tools to apply for the job. There are multiple paths that an AI agent can follow, and it has some agency in deciding what they are. In the Old World, you'd have to account for each of those branching paths, and if the scenario didn't fall into one, then nothing would happen. The advantage of AI agents is that they’re equipped to deal with situations they’ve never seen before. They’re not forced to operate within what they were “programmed” to do.Of course, there's a time-saving aspect as well. Humans are very expensive, and compute is not, so there may be certain repetitive tasks that an agent is better equipped for in terms of resource efficiency.For example, sifting through a great amount of content, summarizing things, identifying outliers — these are all things that can be pretty time-consuming for humans to do. AI agents can do these tasks quickly, and even help you identify opportunities that you might not have discovered yourself.<h3 id="contentstack’s-rule-for-ai-development">Contentstack’s rule for AI development</h3>As <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.contentstack.com/">Contentstack</a> prepares to roll out new agentic AI features this fall, our Product team has benefitted from a simple guiding principle: If it doesn’t deliver significant user value, we don’t do it.So, what is “user value”? In my opinion, it’s anything that falls into one of these three buckets:Number one, it does something that you're already doing, but 10 times better. For example, instead of sifting through all my data and having to hand-identify all the audiences, an AI agent can break up my audiences based on lookalike models. I could have done this myself, but with AI I can do it (at least) 10X faster.Number two, it allows me to do something that I literally could not do before. It's not just helping me with what I could have done otherwise. The AI enables some net new capability that was not possible before. And number three, it can turn a regular user into a power user. Let’s say we wanted to add natural language search in our CMS, so you could type in and find what you’re looking for without having to figure it out through advanced search. Rather than having to become a search power user or rely on your developers, the AI functionality gives you the same abilities as the most skilled users of the platform. If an AI concept does not meet one or more of these criteria, then it's not worth our team’s investment. And by the way, none of those criteria boil down to “it allows your company to cut the size of its workforce.” Which brings me to my next point…<h3 id="why-ai-agents-should-enhance-human-effort,-not-replace-it">Why AI agents should enhance human effort, not replace it</h3>So far, companies have taken a couple of different approaches with agentic AI. One is trying to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dude-wheres-my-job-conor-egan-shj6e/">literally replace people</a>. So, if you have someone whose job is to do X, they’ll seek to create an agent that does exactly that.But I think we get a lot more value from AI agents when we use them as facilitators, not workforce replacers. You hired smart people to use their talents, right? If that’s the case, you should probably get rid of all the things they have to do in the course of the day that don't differentiate you and your brand. Are there capabilities that you can give a team member via an agent that provides a force multiplier or allows them to provide more value? Start there.We’re quickly entering a world where AI will be able to put marketing on autopilot. It will create the campaigns, it will write the content, generate the assets, etc. And my question is always, “If everybody has the exact same tools, how is a great marketer going to beat a good marketer?” Because if you have a system that can spit out average content and everybody's doing it, things are going to be very noisy.It's not that AI can't help you develop novel experiences. But if you're creating content for other humans, then humans need to serve as the judge of taste. When AI tools are generating the same campaign ideas, the most successful marketers are the ones who will be better at deciding which ideas to pursue. <h3 id="looking-ahead:-ai-agents-will-eat-more-tasks-from-the-bottom-up-(and-that’s-a-good-thing)">Looking ahead: AI agents will eat more tasks from the bottom up (and that’s a good thing)</h3>Whether it's industrial farming or computers, new technology always eats jobs from the bottom up. It could be literal jobs that you have to do, or those “jobs” could be abstraction layers.In the early days of code, we were interacting directly with the hardware itself and writing in ones and zeros. Then we added operating systems, and now you can use a mouse, which is a layer on top of an operating system. We used to have to manage our infrastructure by taking racks to a server farm and plugging in the cables, and installing the software, and now we have cloud services. We used to write JavaScript and HTML by hand. Then we developed code frameworks where you don't even need to know the underlying JavaScript. AI is the latest layer on top of all this. Soon, you won't necessarily need to know how to use Contentstack. Our platform is an abstraction of an abstraction of a database that you used to have in order to do all these jobs. AI agents are simply the most recent iteration of what technology has been doing for a long time. The real purpose of AI — just like all the advancements that came before it — is to get you to the value part faster. You can now spend most of the hours in your day doing the high-value things that are going to have an impact, and less time figuring out how to learn the software. <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <figure class="image image-style-block-align-left image_resized" style="width:28.08%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1759840698475.png" /></figure><h4 id="raise:-lifting-content-into-the-future-with-agentic-cms"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://kontent.ai/events-and-webinars/raise/">RAISE: Lifting Content into the Future with Agentic CMS</a></h4>November 11, 2025 – London, UKJoin Kontent.ai at RAISE: Lifting Content into the Future with Agentic CMS, a premier free event for forward-thinking marketing and technology leaders shaping the way today’s most ambitious brands create and deliver content. Expect bold ideas, discover innovative strategies, engage with industry leaders, and gain insights that will lift your content strategy to new heights. At RAISE, you'll learn how to deliver faster, more engaging content experiences while AI does the busywork of audits, compliance, and localization with Agentic CMS, built to give you and your teams more time on creativity that matters. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://kontent.ai/events-and-webinars/raise/">Reserve your seat today.</a> <img style="width:29.67%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1761136749603.png" /><h4 id="live-webinar:-can-we-ever-get-composable-without-complexity?"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/webinar-cmscritic">Live Webinar: Can We Ever Get Composable Without Complexity?</a></h4>November 20, 2025 – 6 PM (CET) / 5 PM (GMT) / 12 PM (EST)Composable architecture promised to simplify digital experience creation by giving organizations the flexibility to combine the technologies that met their needs. But for many enterprises, it’s done the opposite, which has led to complex integrations, spiraling costs, and what some are now referring to as composable regret. In this live conversation, Umbraco CEO Mats Persson joins Matt Garrepy, Chief Content Officer at CMS Critic, for a candid exploration of what went wrong in the first wave of composable and what needs to change. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/webinar-cmscritic">Register for the webinar.</a> <img style="width:29.08%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1761594434824.png" /><h4 id="typo3-conference-2025"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://t3con.typo3.com/">TYPO3 Conference 2025</a></h4>November 25–27, 2025 – Düsseldorf, GermanyT3CON is the premier annual event for web professionals, developers, marketers, and decision-makers. Much more than just a TYPO3-focused conference, T3CON spotlights the latest trends, innovations, and leaders shaping the future of content management, covering everything from grassroots initiatives to new technologies, strategies, and success stories. The event is designed to empower businesses and organizations with the knowledge and tools they need to thrive in the evolving digital landscape. The conference culminates in an awards ceremony celebrating the best TYPO3 projects across various industries. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://t3con.typo3.com/">Get your ticket.</a> <img style="width:31.44%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/08/cms-kickoff-2026-logo.png" alt="" /><h4 id="cms-kickoff-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">CMS Kickoff 2026</a></h4>January 13-14, 2026 – St. Petersburg, FLMeet industry leaders at our fourth annual CMS Kickoff – the industry's premier global CMS event. Similar to a traditional kickoff, we reflect on recent trends and share stories from the frontlines. Additionally, we will delve into the current happenings and shed light on the future. Prepare for an unparalleled in-person CMS conference experience that will equip you to move things forward. This is an exclusive event – space is limited, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">so secure your tickets today.</a>

Agentic AI 101: What's an AI agent and when should they be used?

conor-egan

Shock and AI Awe: Sitecore Unleashes SitecoreAI, its Next-Gen AI-Powered DXP

Welcome to the 'Agent Ecosystem': MACH Alliance unites tech leaders to build the future of enterprise AI

<hr /> When I spoke to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/filipbech/">Filip Bech-Larsen</a> before Umbraco’s <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/sowing-the-seeds-of-love-umbracos-codegarden-2025-celebrates-20-years-of-community-and-innovation">2025 Codegarden event,</a> he was ecstatic about a lot of things. And rightly so. The open source content management system – which has long been dubbed<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/about-us/values/why-the-friendly-cms/"> "The Friendly CMS”</a> – was on a roll. Along with a years-long stretch of remarkable growth and an expanding ecosystem of offerings, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/umbraco">Umbraco</a> was plotting an ambitious course in the evolving landscape of AI.Of course, as an open source vendor in a landscape of proprietary solutions, Filip reminded me why Umbraco’s approach to AI was markedly different from other commercial solutions.  “Our strategy is a little bit different to most of our competitors, and it basically comes down to Umbraco being a platform that you build on top of, instead of being the tool that does everything for you,” he explained. “Like the Lego bricks metaphor, we give you the base plate, and all the blocks, and then you build whatever you want on top of that. And since we're open source, we can't really take a commercial dependency and just integrate directly with ChatGPT because that's not how open source licensing works. So we have a few different tracks around this.”And the primary vehicle for accessing these tracks is the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://marketplace.umbraco.com/">Umbraco Marketplace,</a> which features a wide range of artificial intelligence plugins, from translators to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/tinymce-brings-advanced-ai-to-cms-text-editing-interview-with-fredrik-danielsson-elise-bentley">TinyMCE’s</a> premium package that includes a super handy accessibility checker. He went deeper into the details, which you can <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/sowing-the-seeds-of-love-umbracos-codegarden-2025-celebrates-20-years-of-community-and-innovation">read about here.</a> Along with these advancements, Filip also shared the first glimpse of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/blog/unveiling-umbraco-mcp-server/">Umbraco’s new MCP server,</a> crystallizing the company’s bold steps into the realm of agentic AI. In fact, since Codegarden, MCP has exploded in adoption, with <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro">thousands of options</a> now available across a multitude of servers. Now, with MCP reaching a fever pitch and becoming a central part of the agentic horizon, Umbraco is doing what it has done over the past twenty years: looking to its open source community. There have already been sparks of AI innovation from across Umbraco’s 250,000 contributors and its international network of digital agency partners. Now, the company’s core team has brought dedicated talent to its inner circle to accelerate the MCP frontier. Effective today, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/phil-whittaker-82481716/">Phil Whittaker</a> has been appointed Senior Software Engineer at Umbraco, where he will be focused on the continued development of its MCP server and the maturing of its overall AI strategy.  <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:77.21%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1760413085606.png" alt="" /></figure>Phil Whittaker. Source: LinkedIn With over 25 years of experience, Phil brings a deep resume to the role, having held positions as a software developer, digital agency founder, CTO, and lead engineer. He’s also worked extensively with Umbraco, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://ucommerce.net/">uCommerce</a>, and other platforms to build complex, highly integrated websites and digital experiences. Phil is also a prominent fixture within Umbraco’s open source software ecosystem, sharing his knowledge with fellow developers and organizing Umbraco user meetups. His commitment to the community has earned him an <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://community.umbraco.com/mvp-program/current-mvps/">Umbraco MVP</a> five times. “Being part of the Umbraco open-source community over the past fourteen years has made a huge difference to me professionally and personally,” he said. “I’m delighted to join a team of people whose work I have admired for many years.”“Phil Whittaker is a major contributor within our open-source community and is at the very heart of Umbraco MCP Server development,” said Filip Bech-Larsen. “We’re excited to be able to work alongside him at Umbraco HQ to support organizations as they learn how to harness the power of agentic AI, while retaining full control and transparency over its operation.”<h3 id="focused-on-mcp">Focused on MCP</h3>A quick reminder if you’re new to MCP: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro">Model Context Protocol</a> is an open standard that enables large language models to connect and communicate with external tools, data sources, and other services. Think of it as a USB-C port for AI, providing a vehicle for LLMs to access and share information. This, in turn, enables the development of rich AI agents that can be enlisted to perform complex, real-world actions – and that runs the gamut from ecommerce transactions to wildly imaginative tasks.Despite all the fervor, the phenomenon of MCP is still pretty fresh. In fact, the standard was <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol">launched by Anthropic</a> in November of 2024 and made available as an open source framework. But it caught on quickly, and by spring of this year, the buzz around agentic commerce was palpable – and MCP was seen as a gateway for expanding the agent-to-agent vision.As Phil explained, he was already developing AI apps and harnessing AI for content generation and coding before ChatGPT was launched. This gave him more of a solid foundation as MCP came on the scene. “I started experimenting with Model Context Protocol at the start of this year and was hugely impressed by its potential when combined with a CMS,” he said. “This led me to the development of an MCP Server for Umbraco. It’s incredibly powerful, while providing strong control. We’ve built the right tool in the right way at exactly the right time. As a developer, you don’t come across anything this momentous more than once or twice in your career.”In September, Phil wrote about the beta release of the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/blog/announcing-the-beta-release-of-the-developer-mcp-server-for-umbraco-cms/">Developer MCP Server for Umbraco CMS,</a> which provides a pathway to AI-powered content management capabilities directly in the Umbraco CMS workflow. This was a milestone moment in the continued development of Umbraco’s MCP strategy, signaling his future role in shaping the continued trajectory. <h3 id="why-it-matters">Why it matters</h3>MCP is a clear game-changer as we move full throttle into the era of agentic AI. For CMS and DXP vendors, having an MCP server has become a strategic imperative, and Umbraco is taking a sage course by elevating an experienced AI pioneer from its own community to shape the next steps of its MCP evolution.Umbraco continues to enjoy a unique position within the CMS category as the most widely-used open source content management system built on .NET. The platform is trusted by well-established global enterprises like Rubbermaid, but is also a go-to for public sector organizations – reflecting its secure, scalable, and future-proof posture. Umbraco’s commitment to accessibility and sustainability is also a testament to its culture, and further reinforces the loyalty of its highly-engaged community of users and developers – clearly one of its strongest attributes. It has also made some smart moves with the rollout of its <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/">Umbraco Cloud</a> strategy, which features enterprise-grade scalability and regional hosting. While Umbraco is cementing its position as a CMS with MCP capabilities, it’s important to understand your own agentic goals as you evaluate solutions. What I like about the elevation of Phil to the UmbracoHQ team is his proven track record of documenting the value of these tools through a legacy of proven Umbraco experience – and that should translate into greater confidence. <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <img style="width:31.61%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/08/storyblok-joyconf-2025-logo.jpg" /><h4 id="storyblok-joyconf-2025"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://joyconf.storyblok.com/">Storyblok JoyConf 2025</a></h4>October 14-15, 2025 – Amsterdam, Netherlands November 4, 2025 – New York, NY November 6, 2025 – Los Angeles, CAJoin us at JoyConf 2025, where the future of content meets the people shaping it. Built for developers, marketers, and digital innovators, this free conference goes way beyond product updates or yet another strategy playbook. It’s where you’ll get inspired, get real, and get connected – to ideas, to the community, and to what’s possible when you build joyfully. Whether you're building lightning-fast frontends or launching cross-channel campaigns, this is where content becomes connection and collaboration becomes second nature. Come for the talks. Stay for the community. Leave with joy. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://joyconf.storyblok.com/">Save your spot.</a> <img style="width:28.9%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/08/sitecore-symposium-2025.jpg" /><h4 id="sitecore-symposium-2025"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://symposium.sitecore.com/">Sitecore Symposium 2025</a></h4>November 3-5, 2025 – Orlando, FLAt Sitecore Symposium, you’ll learn how to meet your customers where they are – across channels, moments, and touchpoints that didn’t exist a year ago. You’ll hear how the boldest brands in the world are transforming content into outcomes and creating experiences that are fast, relevant, and human. Join 1,500 marketers, digital leaders, and technologists in Orlando to see what’s possible when personalization scales, AI accelerates creativity, and trust becomes your competitive edge. This is the Third Wave of the Internet. And this is your moment to lead in it. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://symposium.sitecore.com/">Get your tickets today.</a> <figure class="image image-style-block-align-left image_resized" style="width:28.08%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1759840698475.png" /></figure><h4 id="raise:-lifting-content-into-the-future-with-agentic-cms"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://kontent.ai/events-and-webinars/raise/">RAISE: Lifting Content into the Future with Agentic CMS</a></h4>November 11, 2025 – London, UKJoin Kontent.ai at RAISE: Lifting Content into the Future with Agentic CMS, a premier free event for forward-thinking marketing and technology leaders shaping the way today’s most ambitious brands create and deliver content. Expect bold ideas, discover innovative strategies, engage with industry leaders, and gain insights that will lift your content strategy to new heights. At RAISE, you'll learn how to deliver faster, more engaging content experiences while AI does the busywork of audits, compliance, and localization with Agentic CMS, built to give you and your teams more time on creativity that matters. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://kontent.ai/events-and-webinars/raise/">Reserve your seat today.</a> <img style="width:31.44%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/08/cms-kickoff-2026-logo.png" alt="" /><h4 id="cms-kickoff-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">CMS Kickoff 2026</a></h4>January 13-14, 2026 – St. Petersburg, FLMeet industry leaders at our fourth annual CMS Kickoff – the industry's premier global CMS event. Similar to a traditional kickoff, we reflect on recent trends and share stories from the frontlines. Additionally, we will delve into the current happenings and shed light on the future. Prepare for an unparalleled in-person CMS conference experience that will equip you to move things forward. This is an exclusive event – space is limited, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">so secure your tickets today.</a>

Umbraco Accelerates AI Transformation by Appointing Senior Software Engineer to Focus on MCP

Agentic CMS: Why Kontent.ai’s Vision for the Future of Content Management is Inspiring 

Optimizely’s New Agent Orchestration Gives Marketers a ‘Magic Wand’ for Building Custom Workflows

<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/critics/nishant-patel">Nishant Patel</a><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/critics/amit-aggarwal"> </a>is the co-founder and CTO at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/contentstack">Contentstack</a> and a CMS Critic contributor. <hr /> When the internet first went mainstream, it was innovative just to have a website. Later, it was a blog. Then a mobile version. Each step felt like a leap forward in how brands showed up online.But we’ve entered a different era. With the rise of AI, simply “having a presence” doesn’t stand out to customers anymore. What does stand out is how adaptive that presence can be.By emphasizing personalization, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.contentstack.com/resources/case-study/land-olakes-boosts-conversion-rate-by-38-with-lytics-cdp-personalization?utm_campaign=fy26_glb_os_thought-leadership&amp;utm_medium=press-link&amp;utm_source=cmscritic&amp;utm_content=nishant-cmscritic-october">Land O’Lakes</a>’ animal nutrition brand Purina increased conversions to an average of 30% and improved its ability to keep visitors on the website for longer. That’s the power of experiences designed for individuals, not audiences.So what does the future look like? Two words: context management.<h3 id="content-vs.-context-management">Content vs. Context Management</h3>For years, brands doubled down on producing and managing content. But with the technology available and the siloed way data was collected, they were mostly guessing what a segment of people wanted. A brand can crank out endless content, but if that content isn’t in response to an individual’s real-time signals, what good will it do?Content management won’t cut it today. Context management is the only strategy that will reach and move audiences to action. (This, coming from someone who created the first <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.contentstack.com/resources/report/complete-headless-cms-guide?utm_campaign=fy26_glb_os_thought-leadership&amp;utm_medium=press-link&amp;utm_source=cmscritic&amp;utm_content=nishant-cmscritic-october">headless CMS</a>.)Unlike content management, context management seeks to piece together the full story of the problem or desire that the customer wants to solve, based on signals they send. For example, a Gen Z customer might see a product they like on social media. From there, they might quickly search that product—via a search engine or LLM—and land on your website. Imagine they click “shop” and see the exact product they’ve been searching for in front of them, without any deep dives. That’s a brand experience just for that individual, adapted instantly after a quick scan of their browser history. In the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.contentstack.com/blog/announcements/welcome-to-the-context-economy?utm_campaign=fy26_glb_os_thought-leadership&amp;utm_medium=press-link&amp;utm_source=cmscritic&amp;utm_content=nishant-cmscritic-october">Context Economy</a>, the value of a brand no longer comes from the volume of content published, but from how intelligently a brand’s experience adapts to the customer’s signals. Is your digital experience technology equipped to handle it?<h3 id="where-context-meets-agentic-ai">Where Context Meets Agentic AI</h3>Brands have been moving towards context management for a long time. According to the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://content.martechday.com/state-of-martech-2025.pdf">2025 State of Martech report</a>, the center of the Martech stack has shifted over the last two years to data warehouses and customer data platforms. I like that because you can’t be smart without data. But I also think it's a curious choice, because data can never act alone. Brands need to pair data systems with a CMS to turn data into insights, activate those insights, and connect with customers. What happens if you supercharge that with automation and agentic AI? Here’s what a true <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.contentstack.com/blog/ai/agentic-ai-101-whats-an-ai-agent-and-when-should-they-be-used?utm_campaign=fy26_glb_os_thought-leadership&amp;utm_medium=press-link&amp;utm_source=cmswire&amp;utm_content=nishant-contentcon?utm_campaign=fy26_glb_os_thought-leadership&amp;utm_medium=press-link&amp;utm_source=cmscritic&amp;utm_content=nishant-cmscritic-october">agentic AI</a> ecosystem might function like:A flash sale is about to go live. Instead of scrambling across teams—marketing, legal, supply chain, development, brand—AI agents handle the campaigns.One agent writes the copy. Another ensures it’s on-brand. An anti-hoax agent flags suspicious assets, while a supply chain agent checks inventory. Once the plan is greenlit by humans, a promotion agent takes over to launch the campaign, update the homepage, and email the right audience. As performance data rolls in, yet another agent optimizes the campaign in real time, ensuring it reaches the right people in the right moments.Again, keep in mind this shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all experience. Individual A receives one version, while Individual B receives a completely different version, based on the context they provide. Both move the customer to form a deeper connection with the brand in different ways.This is not a distant future. Contentstack enables that reality today.<h3 id="embrace-agentic-with-contentstack’s-agent-os">Embrace Agentic with Contentstack’s Agent OS</h3><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.contentstack.com/academy/content/adaptive-personalization-with-agent-os">Contentstack’s Agent OS</a> is a breakthrough in agentic AI that allows AI and automation to operate with full brand and customer context to drive one-to-one interactions. Agents tap into a brand’s content, voice, audience insights, and existing Contentstack tools to handle predictable tasks and enforce on-brand outputs where it matters. Automations remove the need to switch between tools, set up manual workflows, and configure repetitive, low-value AI prompts.This is context management: combining data, content, and brand intelligence in real time to enable customer-driven experiences at scale.<h3 id="how-to-get-your-context-in-order">How to Get Your Context in Order</h3>So how do you prepare for an agentic future, today? <ol><li>Know your customer. Make sure customer data is being captured with the right systems, and that you’re pulling in real-time signals you can actually act on. That might require getting marketing and IT together in one room until that’s figured out. Even better, use data systems already <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.contentstack.com/platforms/real-time-cdp?utm_campaign=fy26_glb_os_thought-leadership&amp;utm_medium=press-link&amp;utm_source=cmscritic&amp;utm_content=nishant-cmscritic-october">embedded in your CMS</a>, so you don’t have to configure complicated integrations and fixes to connect data and content.  </li><li>Know your brand. This isn't just about logos and tone and voice. Understand how your brand is most relevant to your customer and adds value to their life. Do they want to be educated? Entertained? Make sure you’re fulfilling that need.  </li><li>Commit to the moment. Once you understand the intersection between customer and brand, use AI and LLMs to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.contentstack.com/blog/tech-talk/how-ai-powered-personalization-enhances-customer-experience?utm_campaign=fy26_glb_os_thought-leadership&amp;utm_medium=press-link&amp;utm_source=cmscritic&amp;utm_content=nishant-cmscritic-october">personalize content</a> for customers in the right channel, at the right time.</li></ol>The “one-size-fits-all” web has been dying for a long time. Now, with modern digital experience platforms like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.contentstack.com/platform?utm_campaign=fy26_glb_os_thought-leadership&amp;utm_medium=press-link&amp;utm_source=cmscritic&amp;utm_content=nishant-cmscritic-october">Contentstack Edge</a> that combine content, data, and agentic AI in real-time, there’s a better customer experience waiting. We can finally move on to the era of context management.

The Death of the One-Size-Fits-All Web

nishant-patel

Explore a wide range of informative articles on Agentic AI, insights, and industry updates. Stay informed and ahead of the curve with our diverse collection of news and posts covering the latest trends and developments in the industry. 