Is content management dead? Contentstack’s Agent OS reimagines new life in the ‘Context Economy'

When I asked Neha Sampat, Contentstack’s fearless CEO, about her agentic strategy at ContentCon25 in June, she said:

“Stay tuned for that.”

Call it a carrot. 

Or maybe a cliffhanger?

Bottom line is that I was curious, given all the noise from other industry vendors. At that time, agents (with a sprinkling of MCP servers) were becoming the tech du jour of the 2025 summer menu. The topic was also percolating at “The Composable Conference” just a few months earlier – particularly within the DXP corridors. 

The idea of “context” was one of the big notes being played at this year’s ContentCon25, Contentstack’s annual customer conference. Neha and team had woven the term deeply into their messaging, even adopting the mantra that if content is king, “context is queen.” It all supported their positioning, focus, and differentiated value as an adaptive digital experience platform.

“We call ourselves an adaptive DXP because we think we should be the last DXP you should ever have to buy,” she told me. “We take on the burden to think about everything that’s coming, to react to, and ensure that we’re setting up our platform to support the brands using it. Adaptive is being able to change with the times, regardless of how fast that’s happening.”

Contentstack CEO Neha Sampat

At ContentCon, she provided more context regarding their agent roadmap – and in typical form, demonstrated the profound wisdom that continues to drive ContentStack’s success. As she noted, separating the hype from the hope is key as everyone focuses on the “A-word.” That means being thoughtful and intentional about its next steps.

“It’s not that we’re trying to avoid agents or that we won’t have an agent strategy,” she said. “But what we think is important is what do customers need and want now, and what’s our role in helping to enable that.”

Fast forward to today, and their agent strategy is no longer a pie in the sky. Announced this morning, Contentstack’s new Agent OS represents what the company calls a breakthrough in agentic AI, ushering in the age of “context management” – where brand interactions adapt instantly to each customer. 

While still in beta, Agent OS promises a convergence of data, content, and brand intelligence that delivers truly customer-driven experiences at scale, all powered from the Contentstack Edge platform. 

In simpler terms: Imagine marketers automating every facet of their workflows and engaging with a co-pilot that responds proactively to their needs. Or customers interacting with a website and automagically having their page personalized around specific preferences. 

As Neha said, we’re beyond the days when personalization was about earning preferential and permission-based data, allowing brands to harness enough from visitors to deliver a curated experience. Now, one-to-one interactions are being led by the customer, not through content management and rules-based personalization. 

So… is this the end of content management as we know it?

When adaptive experiences can respond fluidly and instantly to individual behavior, customer preferences, and real-time engagement, it could be. In that sense, it’s more like a new beginning – a reimagining of what’s possible in the agentic era.

Regardless of the marketing hook, Contentstack has some compelling examples of how Agent OS works and what it means as they roll it out ahead of ContentCon London later this week. Speakers from Air France-KLM, bol, Icelandair, and Mondelēz International will be there, sharing their success stories with Contentstack, and we're certain to hear more about these new features.

Goodbye content management, hello context management

In the last few weeks, we’ve heard similar (and often provocative) permutations of the demise of CMS and content management from luminaries within the industry. It was also a persistent theme at our last two Boye & Company CMS conferences in Germany and Montreal. 

CMS, without question, is changing. AI has been the chief catalyst, and agents are now exploding the frontier of possibilities.

This is precisely where the topic of context and data have entered the equation. AI needs context, and the transformation away from “one-size-fits-all” digital experiences is signaling the arrival of what Neha calls the “Context Economy,” where value is created not by what brands publish, but by how intelligently they adapt.

“Context is the most important currency in business,” she said. “For decades, marketers have relied on segments, rules, and best guesses to engage customers. Agent OS in the Contentstack Edge platform changes that forever.” 

As I mentioned earlier, Contentstack has been deliberately methodical – and a bit slower – in rolling out an agent strategy. But it has certain advantages that have worked in its favor. 

For starters, they’ve been building automation into their platform for quite some time, allowing it to leapfrog to agentic AI. This allowed for a more patient and holistic approach while studying the market’s trajectory.

“We've had a platform for agents for a couple of years, and this underpinning is why we don't believe others can catch up as fast as we did.”

“We've had a platform for agents for a couple of years, and this underpinning is why we don't believe others can catch up as fast as we did,” Neha said. She was referencing Contentstack Automate as the backbone of this rapid evolution, which has provided task and workflow automation to help modernize how digital teams get work done. 

“If you take that and add in the power of our Brand Kit, which is then keeping you on brand, following your guidelines, your visual identity, and then generating content or experiences based on all of those things coming together and tied to the integrations you've permitted, you've then got this transition to a context platform or Context Economy. Which is, hence, the end of content management.”

As Neha said, it’s the singularity of these elements coalescing and building on top of the modern headless CMS that is, in her words, reimaging what’s next. Agent OS and its context-driven capabilities will help brands and marketers to think about adaptive, real-time experiences that change based on learning from a customer’s behavior, effectively mitigating the need for traditional content management.

While AI and automation address many of the discrete challenges that brands face, they don’t always have the benefit of full brand and customer context. This is where Agent OS is providing a unified foundation for AI agents and automations, removing the need to toggle between tools, set up manual workflows, and configure repetitive, low-value AI prompts.

From a functional perspective, Agent OS will have access to a brand’s content, voice, audience profiling, and real-time insights, providing a more complete understanding of your brand ecosystem. It also has access to broader Contentstack tools designed that support predictable tasks and ensure on-brand outputs in the right places. 

As I mentioned, Agent OS is in its early alpha/beta days, but they’ve test-driven several facets with customers behind the scenes. Neha indicated that we should see things in the real world within weeks, not months.

Polaris: Your interactive ‘North Star’ co-pilot

Along with the core benefits of Agent OS, Polaris – Contentstack’s interactive assistant – will provide a constant connection throughout Contentstack Edge, allowing marketing teams to enhance their productivity with access to quick answers. 

As Neha said, Polaris is an “always on” co-pilot that's available across the platform. “When you're doing things within Contentstack, you'll have this co-pilot that can provide recommendations, help you generate content, and support you in the moment.”

As she described to me, Polaris might identify that an Edge user is trying to perform a specific task and provide assistance to help figure it out. As you can imagine, there are tons of potential applications, from improving workflow performance to adding more automation, but it’s all underscored by Polaris’s ability to learn, identify, and ultimately think ahead.

One of the big advantages is making the lift around analytics even easier. As Neha told me, if we go back to the acquisition of Lytics, marketers now have an automation platform, personalization, and data and analytics in Contentstack. But being able to analyze and correlate everything in real time was the goal – and Polaris is helping to make that accessible.

“With Polaris, we’re delivering a tool that says, ‘Hey, it sounds like this customer is trying to do this, and it's happening like this,’” she described. “It's not like a report that you get a week later that you then have to go back and retarget. It's happening in real time.”

As Neha predicts, there’s a future where marketers will trust Polaris to perform these functions on its own, giving users even more freedom to focus on other facets of their marketing programs.

“In my opinion, it’s only a matter of time before you start to trust the automation to do it without your interference or interjection,” she said, likening it to the growth of autonomous vehicles like Waymo. “It's a similar sort of curve adoption curve, which I believe will happen very fast. You see it happen two or three times, and you start to build trust in the system. From a marketer's point of view, it's like a Swiss Army knife for doing all these things that you've wanted to do and dreamt about doing.”

Where can this kind of interaction lead with agentic co-pilot capabilities? With Contentstack’s Digital Concierge, users can provide real-time experiences for customers, driven by all the content and Brand Kit components that Neha mentioned. 

In one example provided by Contentstack, a customer-facing agent for a mock brand of athletic attire showcases how a website visitor can prompt their way to personalization on an e-Commerce website using a customized Digital Concierge. 

A mock interaction with Contentstack’s Digital Concierge, featuring insights. Source: Contentstack

In the agent chat session, a customer provides details about what workouts they prefer, their favorite apparel colors, even their budget range. In seconds, the store is personalized around their preferences. Meanwhile, marketers receive real-time insights on the audience and behaviors, helping teams to optimize their overall strategy. 

It's what we've always wanted personalization to be: easy. 

Supercharging the agentic future with a new brand identity

This is a pivotal moment for Contentstack, which has already made waves in recent analyst reports and continues to build visibility with customers, partners, and the broader market. 

As the company fully embraces its position as an adaptive platform built for the Context Economy, it’s using the energy of this “tipping point” to elevate its brand voice with a new visual identity – one that reflects a bold perspective for the agentic era. 

Contentstack’s CMO, Gurdeep Dhillon, reinforced Agent OS's transformative impact and how the company’s brand language is helping to convey its power and potential.

“There will be before the Context Economy, and after. There’s no going back,” he said. “Our rebrand reflects this sea change and positions us to lead our customers into this new era. Brands that win context will gain a lasting advantage, and Agent OS gives them the intelligence and agility to do it consistently and at scale.”

(Left to right) The Contentstack logo, before and after

The new brand system was introduced on the website yesterday. Visually, it’s a sharp departure from the previous template. In addition to a lively and animated new corporate logo – which features clean lines and a simplified graphic that evokes “stacking” components – the overall experience feels incredibly streamlined, with an emphasis on clarity and legibility. This applies to everything, including the structure, taxonomy, and navigation.

From a design standpoint, it’s worth noting that the use of Tercia as a primary font face is a refreshing departure from the typical tech gestalt. It creates an elemental juxtaposition of bleeding-edge innovation while subtly channeling Frank Lloyd Wright's classic geometries – a perfect template for architectural foundations and disruptive thinking. 

It’s unexpected, elegant, and inspired. 

The new Contentstack website, featuring the rebranded logo and design template

As most business leaders know, rebranding can be a slippery slope (just ask Cracker Barrel). But logo loyalty aside, Contentstack’s new skin feels markedly different in an evolutionary way, like it’s ushering in a new world where change is constant and navigating the oceans of data and context is more intuitive. One element that did make the leap: the tagline Reimagine Possible, which is a fitting testament to the brand’s promise.  

I asked Neha about the rebrand, and why it made sense now. As she said, it was an opportunity to crystallize how Contentstack focuses on its customers, acting as the “caretakers” through this new journey – and walking into the dark together. 

“It required us to think differently, to not be such a corporate, traditional brand, but really think outside the box and show a bolder view of how things will look,” she said, referencing the new brand’s overall modernization and the use of bright, bold colors. 

She also talked about how the new brand will translate across Contentstack’s properties, framing how visitors should always feel like there’s innovation happening.

“Being able to show things like Polaris, and how real time experiences can be created for you, it’s all part of the vision,” Neha said. “We’re bringing that to life, not just as a content management player, but really as an adaptive digital experience platform.”

Leveraging change management as a key activator

In nearly every conversation I’ve had with Neha over the last few years, she has referenced the critical topic of change management. As a CEO who has battled with the best to reach the top, she’s seen her share of evolutionary moments, big swings, and radical pivots. She has deep reverence for change management as a practice, and with AI's expanding impacts, she sees a greater urgency to embrace it. 

“We’re all on this journey,” she said. “All this stuff is being thrown at us, and it's happening super-fast, and we're trying to figure out, ‘What does this mean for me? What does it mean for my job? Is my job secure? Am I still useful?’ It's not just our customers and prospects going through it. It's us, too, from leaders down to every engineer and admin in your org. Change management has never been this important. What is the human side of adapting ourselves in an artificially intelligent world?”

Partners are also playing a key role as ambassadors of change, particularly with AI. As she explained, some are embracing it, some are cautious, and some are downright energetic. Activating trust is where Contentstack is really gaining ground, and something I heard resoundingly from partners at ContentCon.  

“In terms of the actual technology and Agent OS and the platform, we're seeing partners really excited and leaning in,” she said. “They're starting to see how we're remarkably different from the other players, and that's what's important in building our relationships with them and bringing them into the deals that we're working on.”

On the customer side, Contentstack continues to create strong differentiation and lead the change. At ContentCon in June, I spoke at length with Bill Mitchell, Senior Director of Marketing Strategy & Operations at MongoDB – a leading database platform for developers. 

As a B2B brand with enterprise software buyers, Bill is playing in a unique space and always working at the edge with Contentstack’s capabilities. It started with rapid unification under a single CMS and support for multiple languages. Starting this week, that’s turning into the next wave of personalized features on Mongo’s website.

“Ultimately, this has all been a journey towards speed and efficiency,” he said. “At ContentCon, there was a lot about personalization, and we've gotten really deep into that. Our homepage will start to take on personalized characteristics, and next week, we're starting a limited experiment to bifurcate audiences. We're about to unleash a much more deliberate approach, and as the results come in, it'll certainly give us the energy and enthusiasm to do more.”

I asked Bill how the horizon of agentic AI is starting to shape his strategy as a marketer, and where he see more of the potential. 

“I think co-pilots will start to provide a jumping off point,” he said. “We might say, Let's build that, but build it through a co-pilot kind of approach, so we don't have to build it again. It's going to learn from what we're doing, and it can start to scale much faster. It’s going to be massive for many things. An efficiency driver, time saver, door opener, process builder. I mean, we're just looking at all sorts of ways to bring it into our environment.”

Bill also shed some light on Contentstack’s commitment to support their relationships via their Care Without Compromise program, particularly with getting the most complex parts of personalization off the ground. For him, the benefits are two-fold.

“One part is that they keep pushing themselves to innovate,” he said. “The other part is that they've been very helpful in getting us moving with the technology. They don’t say, ‘Here it is, here’s some documentation, you’re off on your own.’ They ensure that you're able to get momentum going, because they know it's important for us as a business to not just know the capabilities exist, but to put them into action.”

Check out more of my interview with Bill from ContentCon:

Why it matters

Is content management really dead?

Contentstack says it is. And this headline is sure to conjure debate. Some will disagree, others will echo the sentiment. But the evolutionary pressures of AI on content management are undeniable, and change is happening. 

But that’s Neha for you. As a leader, she continues to establish herself and her company as forward-leaning disruptors. In our conversation, she described this moment as a sort of “doorway decision,” the kind where you walk through – and don’t come back the other way.

“By saying ‘content management is dead’ and moving towards the Context Economy, we're saying you're going to leapfrog the way you've been creating experiences and move into a completely new way of thinking,” she explained. “It's bold because it requires humans to believe. To start trusting autonomy and artificial intelligence.”

Given where we’re at, that's still a big leap of faith. But this is where Contentstack might have an advantage with its culture, commitment to support, and growing emphasis on change management as a core competency. 

“It will all require a shift in mindset, and some even some handholding,” she said. “And we're good at those things.”

This has been a milestone year for Contentstack, kicking things off in January with its purchase of Lytics, the CDP that’s providing the crucial context layer for its adaptive wave of capabilities – all of which were on display at the company’s largest-ever ContentCon in Chicago. They clearly have wind in their sails, and if Agent OS can deliver as promised, they are well-positioned to challenge the competitive field. The maturing of Polaris as a holistic co-pilot also gives Edge a parity boost against other leading DXPs.

A rebranding is a throat-clearing moment, and Contentstack’s choice to evolve its visual identity is marking a pivotal moment in its evolution. My drive-by assessment thus far is positive, and some of the key choices feel aligned with their disruptive spirit. While it's still being rolled out, I’m particularly drawn to some of the styling; it feels unique in the pantheon of vendor websites, which often struggle to establish differentiation.

I will say this: As we meander further into the uncharted waters of agentic AI and let it wash over our existing tools, the persistence of categories is becoming opaque. As platforms redefine and reposition themselves as “agentic CMSes” or “adaptive DXPs,” it will be crucial for vendors to focus on the customers’ holistic needs. 

Despite the news of its impending death, content management will continue to be a gateway for many buyers. Seeing how an agentic ecosystem fits into their strategy will require the right amount of detail throughout the evaluation process, and the critical considerations to ensure interoperability will continue. Given Contentstack’s strong focus on customer intimacy – and heritage as a composable platform player – I think they are well-equipped to meet these needs. 

I asked Neha how all of this shapes the future of CMS. Is the advent of agentic AI killing it, or transforming it into something new?

“I don't really call this a reinvention or resurgence of the space,” she said. “It's really a reimagining, because it's complete. We're doing it so differently, and we have to be able to manage that change in our brains – the change that tells us that we can't do it. We have to reimagine that it’s now essentially possible.”

Sounds more like new life than death. We’ll hear more from ContentCon London this week, which takes place on September 11th. 

Learn more here.

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