Matt & Matt Show Episode 6: CMS Summit Serendipity, AEO vs SEO, and the 'Agentic AI Squeeze'

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Achtung, baby!

In the latest episode of The Matt & Matt Show, we’ve landed safely after a whirlwind stretch that included Frankfurt, Atlanta, New York, and other lands far and wide. The mission: to spend quality time with the CMS and DX community – from vendors to agencies to customers – and gauge the pulse of what's happening across our industry.

After all that travel, we feel smarter. But we're still left asking: Where exactly are we going???

Maybe you feel the same. The industry is changing faster than anyone can keep up. AI is exploding across everything. Business models are being disrupted, and products are evolving in unpredictable directions. In the last week, Salesforce bought Contentful, Sitecore bought Scrunch, and it all feels like digital whiplash. 

As you ice down your neck, one thing is certain: AI is becoming the substrate. Not the product or the differentiation, but a core part of every system and offering. And it’s all moving us towards the “agentic enterprise,” which seems less abstract and more status quo. 

How fast and furious are agents growing? Cloudflare just told us that bots now represent almost 60% of all HTTP requests to HTML content. Humans are closer to 40%. This is the first time in internet history that the tables have turned towards the machines. 

At a time like this, having a real community of professionals and practitioners is a kind of blessing – and that’s exactly what the Matts experienced in Frankfurt during the Boye & Company CMS Summit 26. They discuss the event at length in this episode, as well as the debate over AEO vs SEO (thanks to Google), the coming AI governance crunch, the “build vs buy” conundrum, and how some platforms are embracing specialization in unique ways.

Watch the full episode below or keep scrolling for more!

Automated Hotels, Rhubarb Soda, and ‘Frankfurt Serendipity’

The episode opens, fittingly, with some travel friction – and an experience that’s analogous to what’s happening in our AI-saturated world. Matt Garrepy shares a harrowing tale of landing in Frankfurt at 6:30 a.m and being shuttled to an automated hotel that feels more cold sci‑fi than warm hospitality. 

No staff. No instructions. Just a dark patio, a looming entrance, and a few ambiguous buttons. After enough random pressing, the door opens. Inside: an empty lobby, a bathroom (that thankfully isn’t locked), and a long wait until humans finally appear.

Spoiler alert: the hotel ends up being fantastic. But the “adoption” served as a useful metaphor for the rest of the episode. Automation without thoughtful experience design doesn’t delight – it just moves the pain around. 

Sadly, we can expect more of this friction as human services become increasingly AI-driven. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2029, agentic AI – systems that can autonomously plan, reason, and execute multi-step workflows – will resolve 80% of common customer service issues. There will be pros and cons, but brands have to tune into customers if they hope to keep them.

None of this drama took away from the richness of CMS Summit 26, where the keynotes and workshops – and even the unexpectedly sublime rhubarb sodas – made the event one of a kind. As the Matts recall, there were countless moments of “serendipity,” from the curated halls of Frankfurt’s Museum for Communication to the evening’s social events (where Garrepy embraced his inner and outer Elvis Presley).

“The King of Content” has left the building…

That theme carried over to the travel woes, which brought a little more wonder and gratitude to the experience. Garrepy recounts bumping into his son’s childhood best friend at the Atlanta airport, while McQueeny shares a similar story at JFK Airport in New York, where a former colleague’s daughter recognized his name over the PA system before boarding the same flight to Frankfurt. 

When we show up in person, the universe tends to reward us with unexpected human connections – and that was a prevalent theme throughout this conference.

CMS Summit 26 Brings Metadata and Inclusion to the Surface

Speaking of CMS Summit 26, the two Matts spend a chunk of the episode hitting the highlights, and remarking on how unusually strong the post-event content was this year. LinkedIn was flooded with attendee stories, takeaways, and riffs on the sessions – what McQueeny calls the best crowdsourced recap he has seen from a Boye & Company event. It gave the summit a second life beyond the venue.

The Matts offered “bookend” keynotes, starting with an assessment of the agentic landscape from Matt G., and wrapping with an assessment of AEO from Matt M. They also delivered an impromptu installment of The Matt & Matt Show during the event, as well as a post-day-one wrap session on YouTube.

(Left) The Matt & Matt Show live, (top right) Tom Cranstoun, and (bottom right) a few attendees at CMS Summit 26.

Of course, there were several that stood out. Kate Kenyon of JPMorgan Chase offered a behind-the-scenes look at content operations that yielded the line everyone seemed to quote: “Metadata is AI’s love language.” It’s a tidy way to explain something the industry has felt for a long time: metadata has always underpinned SEO and structured content. But in an AI-first world, it also underpins answer quality, context, and governance. If AI is going to perform, it needs better inputs than vague blobs of HTML.

Kate Kenyon at CMS Summit 26.

Antonia Fedder also pushed the audience to think beyond accessibility and adopt a broader lens of inclusion. One of her key points, “A product designed for everyone is a product designed for no one,” landed hard in a room full of people building universal digital experiences. Garrepy connects this to a wider movement in the industry: recognizing that accessibility is not a box to check, but a strategic requirement if you care about the actual size and diversity of your audience.

Antonia Fedder at CMS Summit 26.

Other highlights: Florian Keitgen of B13 on the hidden risks of the human bottleneck, Tom Cranston exploring the agentic shift in his new book on Machine Experience (MX), and Liz Nelson of Sitecore exploring the “compressed internet” and harness engineering – a more realistic framing of prompt and behavior control with AI systems in production.

Google on AEO and GEO: ‘Isn’t it all SEO?’

The Matts also review some of CMS Summit’s group workshops, which surfaced pointed debates – especially those around the value of AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization).

For many SEO veterans, particularly on the agency side, there’s been a struggle to embrace AEO and GEO as new labels for existing practices and patterns. Matt McQueeny facilitated groups on the this topic, and offered a pragmatic counterpoint: Whether or not the underlying tactics overlap, AEO and GEO are working as wedge offers, getting enterprise stakeholders in the room. 

Garrepy then adds a timely wrinkle, citing a recent update to Google’s developer documentation. The company’s public stance? AEO and GEO are not separate disciplines, just part of a holistic SEO ecosystem. 

This lack of alignment is creating friction. And as the Matts have previously noted, there are still people who don’t know what AEO and GEO are – or how they function. 

Google has a clear incentive to simplify everything under a category it has owned for decades. But practitioners, agencies, and vendors also have incentives to adopt new ideas and philosophies about AI-mediated search that resonate with buyers. Whether you consider AEO “real” or not, it’s already shaping how services are pitched and sold.

AI Agents, Budgets, and the Coming Governance ‘Squeeze’

Like his keynote, Garrepy’s workshop at CMS Summit 26 gravitated toward agentic AI. The industry, he argues, has effectively moved from co-pilots to a phase where agents will drive the bulk of the ROI conversation – often before organizations are ready to manage them. That shift is replete with risk, and he covers some of that exposure.

Several threads come together here. First, enterprises are experimenting aggressively with agents while simultaneously grappling with the cost of large-scale AI adoption. We’re also shifting from “tokenmaxxing” to “tokenmisering,” and Garrepy points to Uber’s recent admission that it burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just a few months, with leadership openly questioning whether this spend has yet translated into clear customer-facing value.

At the same time, headlines project a near future in which large organizations might run tens or even hundreds of thousands of agents in production. The Wall Street Journal says the average enterprise could have as many as 150,000 agents in production. That scale makes questions of observability, governance, and risk management impossible to ignore. 

Without question, agents have become the focal point of enterprise strategy. Foundational AI models themselves are already dipping into commoditization, and the real battleground is shifting to agentic operations – and how we control and measure what we’re actually deploying to automate our tasks. All of this is creating a squeeze on strategy and resources as the market tries to find a stable path forward. 

‘Build vs Buy’ and the Case for Specialization

The episode’s final arc brushes on several topics that are taking up the air in the room: the “build vs buy” conundrum, vibe coding, and specialization.

McQueeny first lands on Perficient’s partnership with Lovable as a sign that vibe coding tools are moving into the orbit of serious enterprise work – and seeing a digital consultancy align with a major platform reflects a growing focus on AI-native innovation and enterprise transformation. 

Garrepy connects this to his recent MACH Alliance webinars with Jasmin Guthmann, where they explored the “build vs buy” dilemma that’s impacting the world of AI-accelerated development. As they discussed in these sessions, enterprise teams and agencies can now assemble credible alternatives using AI-enhanced tools. As such, platform vendors must make a stronger, clearer case for why buying is safer, faster, and more sustainable. That case will hinge less on features and more on security, compliance, scale, support, and ecosystem depth.

At the same time, the Matts see a parallel movement toward niche and vertical specialization as a rational response to AI-driven commoditization. Garrepy cites examples like RebelMouse (platform plus agency, tightly integrated) and Crew CMS for commercial real estate, higher-ed-specific offerings. McQueeny notes that these plays can become powerful moats if they’re continuously updated and wrapped in real domain expertise, rather than frozen accelerators from a pre-AI era.

AI may automate or equalize much of the implementation grind, but it also amplifies the value of strategy, creativity, and long-term relationships. Specialization – if it’s done well – can turn those into durable advantages.

Forget the Buzzwords...

The entire software world is in a liminal moment, and CMS is no exception. AI is becoming the substrate. Search is fragmenting as the answer engines take root. Agents are climbing the hype cycle just as budgets and governance concerns kick in. In response, vendors are scrambling to tell a coherent story.

And amid all of this noise, the things that keep surfacing at events like CMS Summit 26 are disarmingly human: communication, inclusive design, smart positioning, and the serendipity of actually being in the room with people who are facing the same challenges.

Sure, we’re juggling big concepts like AEO, MCP, and the “agentic enterprise.” But beneath the buzzwords, it’s people who make this business what it is. To that end, CMS Summit 26 wasn’t just another conference – it was a snapshot of an industry caught between old labels and new realities, and struggling to find its footing. We won’t figure this out alone, and that’s why human connections matter more than ever.

Auf Wiedersehen, Frankfurt! We can't wait to come back next year. And we'll see everyone for another episode in two weeks. Oh… and remember to subscribe on YouTube.

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Matt & Matt meetups

The Matts are on the road! Check out where they’re at – and drop us a line if you’re able to join some of our Boye & Company meetings for CMS Experts and Digital Leaders. 

• June 10 – 12 – Copenhagen
  Umbraco Codegarden 2026
• June 23 – Orlando
  CMS Experts/Digital Leaders meetup
• August 4-5 – Montréal
  CMS Connect 26 Conference

Enjoying the Matt & Matt Show? Stay connected!

• Subscribe today on YouTube: @MattMattShow
• Follow Matt McQueeny on LinkedIn
• Follow Matt Garrepy on LinkedIn

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We love our audience, and we want your input. Send us your ideas for future episodes! And if you’re willing, maybe we’ll have you on to talk CMS, DXP, AI, and more! Contact us.

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