Articles

Agentic AI Article

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

matt-garrepy

<hr /> <ul><li>Storyblok surveyed 200 senior IT and procurement professionals regarding their AI strategies</li><li>90% of businesses plan to increase their AI investment in 2026</li><li>61% cited data privacy and regulatory concerns as the biggest challenges to successful AI adoption</li><li>91% indicated that AI will improve content management within their organization</li><li>Only 23% have fully integrated GEO-related strategies</li></ul> It’s true: bad news sells. And when it comes to AI, the negative vibes can be particularly potent. Look no further than the often-referenced MIT report that cites a whopping <a href="But%20the%20lesson%20isn’t%20that%20GenAI%20is%20broken.%20It’s%20that%20companies%20are%20trying%20to%20erase%20the%20very%20drag%20that%20creates%20value.">95% of GenAI pilots at companies are failing.</a>Of course, it’s all about context. And if you read more deeply into the research, the MIT study suggests that it’s not AI that’s broken – it’s that businesses and stakeholders are trying to avoid the essential “drag” that creates value. They’re relying on generic, brittle tools that aren’t designed with memory or learning loops.There’s also been <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/is-ai-actually-a-bubble">talk of an “AI bubble”</a> that continues to permeate the zeitgeist. Based on past tech cycles, it’s not out of step to forecast an epic “burst” given the billions poured into the sector since 2022. We’re subjected to a regular dose of fear-mongering around this topic, but there's evidence that some of the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://fortune.com/2025/09/03/what-previous-ai-winters-can-tell-investors-and-executives-about-what-might-be-coming-next-for-ai/">M&amp;A moats could be drying up.</a>Before you start chanting about the coming AI winter – buoyed by the notion that just 5% of GenAI pilots are yielding tangible results – many businesses still seem bullish about AI. That’s the sentiment reflected in new research from <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.storyblok.com/">Storyblok</a>, which analyzed the field through the lens of content management. Recently, the CMS vendor surveyed 200 professionals at large-scale enterprises, targeting IT and procurement roles responsible for AI decision-making. The research focused on their 2026 planning, the hurdles faced in successfully adopting these technologies, their views on the major benefits of AI, and how it’s affecting their content management strategies. <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:28.6%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/12/dominik-angerer.jpg" alt="Dominik Angerer headshot" /></figure>Storyblok CEO and Co-founder, Dominik Angerer Storyblok uncovered several notable nuggets from the survey, chiefly surrounding budgets and spending. According to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominikangerer/">Dominik Angerer,</a> CEO and Co-Founder of Storyblok, companies seem poised to dedicate more funding to their AI initiatives despite any prognostications about an AI bubble bursting. “Our research paints an overwhelmingly positive business view of AI adoption as we look ahead to 2026,” he said. “Budgets look set to continue to grow robustly, and we have seen a significant increase in the number of businesses that say their adoption of AI is mature or fully integrated. There is also growing confidence that AI can and will deliver great ROI."I certainly noted this abundance of enthusiasm at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/joy-to-the-content-world-storyblok-brings-ai-innovation-and-human-connection-to-joyconf-2025">Storyblok's JoyConf event</a> back in October, and the company is building momentum as it introduces more AI features and capabilities in this burgeoning field of AI-enhanced content management. Here are some highlights from the report that are putting wind in its sails. <h3 id="content-management-leads-the-pack-for-genai-impact">Content management leads the pack for GenAI impact</h3>Bullish is the word, and businesses seem prepared to put their money where their mouths are, with the majority leaning into more activity than the previous year.When asked about their AI investment plans for 2026, 57% said they expected it to “significantly increase,” 33% cited a “slight increase,” and 9% believed budgets would remain flat. Only 2% said they expected a reduction in their AI budget. But that’s predicting what’s ahead. For many, the optimistic forecast is built on previously successful outcomes or positive signals coming from existing pilots. For example, respondents said they have seen significant benefits from implementing AI technology, with 54% noting “operational efficiency gains” as the biggest ROI. This was followed by 48% citing a “faster time to value,” 43% noting “enhanced employee productivity,” and 41% stating “streamlined decision making” was the big benefit.Within the pantheon of targeted business applications, content management was cited as one of the top functions that generative AI would impact, with 91% saying it would improve this function within their organization. This makes sense given the strong adoption of AI across CMS tooling and workflows, presenting businesses with proven product features and solutions that already utilize AI to power workflows, drive personalization, orchestrate agents, and other AI-enabled capabilities that are fast becoming requirements of modern content management strategies. “Content management is one of the areas where there seems to be near-complete consensus on the transformational impact of AI,” Dominik said. <h3 id="geo-adoption-is-still-lagging">GEO adoption is still lagging</h3>As consumers shift their search behavior towards answer engines like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://chatgpt.com/">ChatGPT</a> or <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://search.google/ways-to-search/ai-mode/">Google’s AI Mode,</a> the harsh realities of decaying website traffic and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://searchengineland.com/zero-click-searches-up-organic-clicks-down-456660">“zero-click searches”</a> are settling in. How bad is it? <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://searchengineland.com/search-engine-traffic-2026-prediction-437650">Gartner predicts</a> that by next year, traditional search engine volume will drop by a breathtaking 25%, with search marketing losing its share to AI chatbots and other virtual agents.To combat this phenomenon, brands are building beyond their current SEO strategies and embracing <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_engine_optimization">Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO</a> – the practice of adapting digital content and online presence management to improve visibility in results produced by <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence">generative artificial intelligence</a>. While GEO strategies present a real opportunity for addressing these realities, businesses are still behind. Acccording to Storyblok’s research, 41% had either not started or were in the early stages of adopting GEO, with only 23% saying they had a full strategy implemented. “With less than a quarter of businesses saying they have adapted to these changes,” Dominik codified, “it’s clear there’s a lot of work to be done to ensure businesses can regain confidence in their content.”Without a robust GEO strategy, businesses will struggle to fully optimize their content strategy in an AI-first world of consumer search habits. Clearly, organizations are lagging in this category, but there’s a growing awareness – and a compelling rationale – for getting on board quickly. <h3 id="security-and-data-privacy-are-top-concerns">Security and data privacy are top concerns</h3>AI might be the shining city on the hill, but it’s vulnerable – and that truth is being proven out on a regular basis. Along with performance-based risks relative to guardrails and policy issues, bad actors are exploiting flaws in frameworks and leveraging prompt injections to break walled gardens and elicit brand-damaging behavior. This can range from minor headaches to major security breaches.We’ve also reached a major inflection point in cybersecurity, where AI models have become powerful tools for safeguarding data privacy, but also for conducting state-sponsored attacks. In September, agentic capabilities were <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.anthropic.com/news/disrupting-AI-espionage">used to manipulate Claude Code</a> and infiltrate global targets that included tech companies and financial firms.As such, it’s not surprising to learn that safety was the central concern for respondents in Storyblok’s survey. On a granular level, 61% cited data privacy and regulatory concerns as the biggest challenge in adopting or scaling AI solutions. This was followed by security risks at 58%, and legacy system restrictions at 43%.These hurdles were also reflected in how IT and procurement professionals felt AI adoption could become more successful. 62% said data governance and quality assurance needed to be improved. Meanwhile, 54% wanted better integration with existing systems, and 42% cited increased “vendor transparency.”Notably, only 12% of respondents mentioned “cost-effective pricing” as an area for improvement. This might further underscore that businesses aren’t yet concerned about the cost of AI – or letting the overall price tag stymie their progress.Security is a moving target. As Dominik also noted, despite positive traction, concerns regarding governance and regulatory compliance are likely to grow – and may inhibit AI adoption over the short and medium term. “However,” he said, “it is good news that the professionals in charge of AI procurement have these concerns top of mind.”<h3 id="why-it-matters">Why it matters</h3>As we roll into 2026, Storyblok’s survey provides a glimpse of AI sentiment – and, perhaps, a hopeful one. There are no crystal balls (or at least no reliable ones), and AI’s path has been difficult to gauge on both the foundational and emotional scale. Given the astounding growth and tumultuous rollercoaster of economic and legislative policy headwinds, the last year has proven just how unpredictable things can be.What’s encouraging is to see where the opportunities are for content management, and how stakeholders view it as an area for continued impact. With its intrinsic connection to search, this should light a fire under vendors and agencies to further augment their value and practices regarding GEO, which, based on the data, is not a fully-adopted strategy.Security should be foremost on everyone’s mind. As we rush to drive new AI-powered products and experiences to market, we could potentially expand the surface area for vulnerabilities. Like APIs, this also applies to the fabric of third-party solutions used to compose solutions. The latest example of this came just a few weeks ago, when a <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://openai.com/index/mixpanel-incident/">security incident</a> occurred with <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://openai.com/">OpenAI</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://mixpanel.com/home/">Mixpanel</a>, a data analytics provider. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.globaldata.com/store/report/agentic-ai-market-analysis/">According to GlobalData,</a> we've now entered the hyper-growth stage of agentic AI. That means everything is accelerating, and that includes the propensity for problems. As the earlier MIT report indicated, friction is a necessary component for assuring the performance of AI – and the same holds true for data privacy and governance. This is not a time to rely on generic, unproven tools; we need performant, well-maintained solutions from trusted sources. This is where vendors like Storyblok are positioning themselves not just as AI-powered platforms – but AI partners in success. <hr /><h4 style="text-align:center" id="looking-for-more-guidance-on-storyblok?-talk-to-an-expert.">Looking for more guidance on Storyblok? <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: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> <img style="width:30.13%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/12/image-1765546475634.png" /><h4 id="umbraco-codegarden-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://codegarden.umbraco.com/">Umbraco Codegarden 2026</a></h4>June 10–11, 2026 – Copenhagen, DKJoin us in Copenhagen (or online) for the biggest Umbraco conference in the world – two full days of learning, genuine conversations, and the kind of inspiration that brings business leaders, developers, and digital creators together. Codegarden 2026 is packed with both business and tech content, from deep-dive workshops and advanced sessions to real-world case studies and strategy talks. You’ll leave with ideas, strategies, and knowledge you can put into practice immediately. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://codegarden.umbraco.com/">Book your tickets today.</a>

Are businesses bullish on AI in 2026? New research says yes, but security is a top concern

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

<hr /> When <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/umbraco">Umbraco’s</a> community talks, its HQ listens – and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/bolette-kern-2436ab57/">Bolette Kern</a> helps turn those transactions into action. As Senior Product Manager for the legendary open source vendor, Bolette is at the front line with users, embodying what makes Umbraco “The Friendly CMS.” In fact, when news broke that <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/blog/umbraco-17-lts-release/">Umbraco 17</a> was being released last week, she joined me for a call from a partner summit. She’s busy. And rightly so. Umbraco has been blazing trails recently, going back to this year’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">CodeGarden event</a> – where everything from a <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/blog/unveiling-umbraco-mcp-server/">new MCP server</a> to orchestration features via <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/products/umbraco-compose/">Umbraco Compose</a> were unveiled.But one of the jewels in the crown has been the hotly anticipated, long-term supported (LTS) version 17 of Umbraco, which Bolette calls a “major and milestone release.” As she noted, it follows the predictable six-month cadence for releases. But it’s also the realization of a two-year journey that began with its new backoffice architecture in Umbraco 14. Now, all of the pieces have aligned in this latest LTS, including a mature backoffice experience, a modernized content platform, and a concurrent ecosystem – from extension APIs to package compatibility. As Bolette said, this LTS version is an ideal fit for agencies and organizations craving stability, longevity, and growth. Making the move will give developers a host of new capabilities and essential updates, which is what makes this leap so critical.“It's really important that we have people moving forward with us on this new LTS, because we’ve introduced quite a lot of necessary changes in 14,” she said. “Going from 13 up to 17, we have a job of making sure that people are joining us on this journey into a more modern platform that also supports what Umbraco is best at, which is being the most extendable and ‘Friendly CMS’ that's out there.”While Umbraco sees this LTS as evolutionary, it still reflects the core pillars of freedom and flexibility, allowing developers to work with their preferred technologies and frameworks to build and customize their digital experiences. It’s the embodiment of a truly composable posture, allowing its community to build in almost any direction.One of the big benefits of this LTS is the glide path to upgrade, and how Umbraco has reduced the friction associated with the move. “Organizations that have built projects on Umbraco 13, our previous LTS version, will have a direct upgrade path to Umbraco 17,” Bolette said. Customers upgrading to Umbraco 17 LTS will also benefit from its new backoffice architecture, extensibility, security, headless capabilities, scalability, and performance enhancements brought into the core CMS over the past two years.Part of the impetus for upgrading is having a future-proofed foundation. As Bolette pointed out, the underlying <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/whats-new/dotnet-10/overview">.NET 10</a> is also an LTS version of Microsoft’s software. As such, customers will be on the latest .NET version – ensuring that any optimizations and improvements at the Microsoft layer are also reflected in Umbraco 17. “Both are LTS versions, which means that your Umbraco 17 projects will be future-proofed for at least three years,” she stated.One really great attribute worth elevating: Umbraco has been focused on delivering an accessible backoffice throughout 2025, engaging with an accessibility consultant to review and improve its editor-facing workflows against <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.w3.org/WAI/">WCAG standards.</a> According to Bolette, most issues flagged in the audit have been remediated in 17, or are targeted for 17.1.<h3 id="what’s-new-in-umbraco-17">What’s new in Umbraco 17</h3>Overall, there’s a lot. And if you’re up for a deeper technical review of repository caching or system date migration, I suggest reviewing this <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/blog/release-candidate-umbraco-17/">Release Candidate blog post</a>. It’s a fantastic granular accounting of everything, from small upgrades to big features. Here's a video segment that unpacks the biggest improvements in Umbraco 17, featuring <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/lottepitcher/">Lotte Pitcher,</a> Head of Developer Relations, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/niels-lyngs%C3%B8-01b159272/">Niels Lyngsø,</a> Technical Product Manager, and Senior Developers on the CMS team – <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-neto/">Laura Neto</a> and Nikolaj E. Lauridsen: <figure class="media"><div data-oembed-url="https://youtu.be/EfC9jWUaIXk"><div style="position:relative;padding-bottom:100%;height:0;padding-bottom:56.2493%"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EfC9jWUaIXk" style="position:absolute;width:100%;height:100%;top:0;left:0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe></div></div></figure> What really stands out in Umbraco 17 is the introduction of comprehensive backoffice load balancing and enhanced search functionality. While both features will appeal to a range of use cases, they further reflect Umbraco’s tacit focus on growing its enterprise portfolio, especially in the addressable North American market. As Bolette explained, many of the new features in Umbraco 17 are tailored to enterprises, offering advanced capabilities that are fit for large-scale organizations and global teams.“There’s wind in the sails for moving upmarket right now,” she said. “So everything we do, including some of the features that we’re introducing in Umbraco 17, is catering to the more enterprise-scale projects. For example, load balancing in the backoffice really caters to projects that have 100-plus editors.” <h4 id="backoffice-load-balancing">Backoffice Load Balancing</h4>Without question, the ability to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://docs.umbraco.com/umbraco-cms/fundamentals/setup/server-setup/load-balancing">load balance the backoffice</a> in Umbraco is a major step forward – and a big win for enterprise workloads. Previously, only a public-facing website could run across multiple servers, while the backoffice was restricted to a single machine. This killed performance for larger teams that swarmed one server for all content creation and media management, severely impacting scalability and resilience.Now, with Umbraco 17, you have one unified application that can scale horizontally to meet your needs. Effectively, your entire backoffice can run across multiple servers – just like a front-end website. This gives content teams greater confidence over performance, improved resilience by eliminating a single point of failure, and a simpler infrastructure to worry about.Load balancing provides the elasticity that enterprises rely on for performance, particularly in high-volume editorial workflows. The benefit to large, distributed teams and organizations is clear, hence why <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/critics/filip-larsen">Umbraco CTO Filip Bech Larsen</a> called it a “game-changer for enterprises” that have multiple content editors working on their website at the same time. <h4 id="enhanced-search">Enhanced Search</h4>Semantic search is driving a large share of the customer engagement across digital experiences. By some accounts, as much as <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.coveo.com/blog/what-is-site-search/">43% of website visitors opt for the site search</a>, with a clear preference for natural language.Umbraco’s enhanced search is helping to meet this demand. The feature arose from digital agency partners who were tasked with adding semantic search to customer sites. Obviously, there are numerous tools across the market that provide site search, and with Umbraco 17, you can plug in abstractions that deliver those capabilities via your preferred search provider. <h4 id="mcp,-cloud,-and-more">MCP, Cloud, and more</h4>I already alluded to the additional granular features of the updated backoffice, specifically as it relates to the new load balancing capability. On top of that, the Umbraco 17 LTS also benefits from a <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/performance/caching/hybrid?view=aspnetcore-10.0">HybridCache feature</a> that optimizes content loading and multi-site support features introduced in Umbraco 15. Further reflecting the enterprise focus, there are Block Level Variations that enable global organizations to make local language content changes while maintaining their core brand standards with consistency. There’s also role-based permissioning that’s accessible via the Client Credentials feature.Another big change worth noting is the replacement of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/tinymce">TinyMCE</a> with a new open-source rich text editor, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://tiptap.dev/product/editor">TipTap</a>. The transition is designed to improve not only the content editing experience, but also handle license compliance out of the box. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/tinymce-releases-2025-state-of-rich-text-editors-report-and-cms-use-cases-are-fading-why-it-matters">I recently wrote</a> about how CMS use cases for RTEs are diminishing, and open source options like this do offer clear advantages.I mentioned MCP earlier, but it’s a vital part of the growing agentic strategy for Umbraco. The final version of the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/blog/umbraco-cms-developer-mcp-for-umbraco-16/">Developer MCP is live,</a> which delivers full API parity with Umbraco’s Management API and a host of refinements. While the Developer MCP is largely designed for technical folks, forthcoming capabilities will be focused on weaving AI across everyday editorial workflows. This includes enhancements like Tools Collections, an Editor MCP, and more.With the rebrand of uMarketing Suite complete, 17 now aligns its backoffice experience with <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/blog/introducing-umbraco-engage/">Umbraco Engage,</a> which introduces Deploy support – making it easier to transfer configs like segments, personas, and more while maintaining analytics data in each environment. Umbraco 17 is also available on <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/products/umbraco-cloud/">Umbraco Cloud</a> immediately and provides some key enhancements for enterprises. This includes a Custom Identity Provider support for the Cloud Portal that centralizes authentication and daily bandwidth insights to improve operational visibility and capacity planning.<h3 id="maintaining-openness">Maintaining openness</h3>Umbraco 17 might be a technical evolution, but the company hasn’t changed its fierce commitment to community. Maintaining engagement and supporting open source contributions remain at the heart of Umbraco’s strategy, which firmly roots the trust that users and enterprises rely on. I asked Bolette how the changes in this latest version – or any version for that matter – are telegraphed with the community to build consensus and adoption. “I think it really comes down to being very honest and transparent about what it is that we see as the key benefits,” she said. “When we say we’re the most friendly and most extensible CMS, that’s really true to the bone. Being very transparent about what we do is helping us along the way to get this message out.”The last few years have seen solid growth and expansion for Umbraco. As it looks ahead, partnerships will be a critical ingredient in the recipe for success. As such, the company is focused on reinforcing its relationships to fuel innovation and opportunities.“It’s really been such a great experience seeing how this started in the community,” Bolette said. “Now, we’re sitting in conversations with partners that are building things on top of MCP, and they’re just so proud of showing off what they have built. Having that super close connection to what our ecosystem and what our partners and the community are doing is key.”Like all software, CMS platforms are in a constant state of improvement. What makes Umbraco different is its open source community and the ideation and innovation it brings to the evolutionary track. The resulting DNA offers stronger bonds, passing down the best traits of human thinking, connection, and inspiration – even as technology continues to change. With Umbraco, you're not just leveraging a product or an LTS. You're investing in the people behind it. And that core of community is one of its greatest assets. You can get more details on <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/blog/umbraco-17-lts-release/">Umbraco 17 here.</a>  <hr /><h4 style="text-align:center" id="looking-for-more-guidance-on-umbraco?-talk-to-an-expert.">Looking for more guidance on Umbraco? <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: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 17 Energizes Digital Experiences with Enterprise Load Balancing, Enhanced Search, and More

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

<hr /> There’s a SCORM brewing, and a hard rain a-fallin’. While we do cover Learning Management Systems (LMS), we don’t talk as much about the content types or operations, which can be anything across the courseware category. Think of training modules that an enterprise might produce for its products, or videos for its “Day One” employee onboarding. Teams still need to create, edit, and publish this content with centralized control.But those modules often need to be shared across systems and platforms – and that’s where <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://scorm.com/scorm-explained/one-minute-scorm-overview/">SCORM</a> comes in. And if you’re like most folks outside the confines of the learning and training fields, it’s a bit of an enigma.The acronym stands for Shareable Content Object Reference Model, and it’s effectively a set of technical standards that allows online or website learning content – as well as LMSes – to communicate with each other. It helps govern things like tracking a learner's progress, completion status, and scores.Before SCORM, content created for one LMS or website module might not work on another. It’s like the USB standard for hardware, ensuring that eLearning courses are portable, trackable, and compatible across different platforms, allowing you to create a course once and use it on any SCORM-compliant system. They’re typically packaged up as a ZIP file that can be uploaded to and tracked, which is essential for modern online training. But what about translating this content? Localizing for different markets? To put it lightly, it’s been a complex and manual process. Learning and development teams have to balance spreadsheets, vendors, and separate workflows for each asset. This approach slows the delivery of essential training, stymying go-to-market readiness. Now, you can find shelter from the SCORM, courtesy of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.smartcat.com/ai-agents/elearning-software/">Smartcat</a> – a leading AI platform for global content creation, localization, and automation that serves hundreds of global companies, including a quarter of the Fortune 1000. The company recently unveiled its new Learning Content Agent, which unifies all translation tools and workflows into a single platform, handling all assets with one workflow and zero manual effort. With the Learning Content Agent, L&amp;D teams can translate every asset within a course – including text, images, videos, and documents – in a single, automated process. This allows global enterprises to deliver high-quality, multilingual training faster and at a greater scale than ever before. The agent handles every course asset, from text and images to video and audio, in over 280 languages, with quality assurance available from Smartcat's marketplace of 500,000 professional linguists. <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:69.36%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/11/smartcat-screenshot.jpg" /></figure>Source: Smartcat website Smartcat’s new agent is the first solution on the market to automate every step involved in SCORM translation. The game-changer is its ability to translate and rebuild courses without the original project, unlocking years of legacy content that was previously impossible to update. <h3 id="complementing-lms-with-cms-and-dxp-translations">Complementing LMS with CMS and DXP translations</h3>Along with its learning content solutions, Smartcat offers a broader agentic platform, which features specialized AI agents that automate complex enterprise workflows across learning, marketing, and content operations. They also sport solutions for document, image, software, PDF, website, and media translation. According to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/claireafoster/">Claire Foster</a>, Director of Content and Product Marketing at Smartcat, the Learning Content Agent now expands their capabilities, bringing powerful new functionality to Smartcat’s enterprise AI platform.“SCORM packages are notoriously complex, combining multiple file types like images, documents, and text that have traditionally required individual localization,” she said. “The Learning Content Agent now automates this process end-to-end in one simple flow, producing fully translated, LMS-ready packages.”Clair also shared how this is complemented by Smartcat’s <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.smartcat.com/website-translator/">Website Translation Agent</a> by integrating with CMS and DXP environments to translate and update website content as part of a holistic learning strategy. Within many organizations, content teams that need to localize websites containing text, documents, and media face similar issues as learning teams managing SCORM files. They can leverage a similar workflow through Smartcat’s broader platform, which connects its agents across learning, marketing, and content operations. “Smartcat’s Website Translation Agent integrates with CMS and DXP environments to translate and update website content in multiple languages while preserving formatting and brand consistency,” she explained. “Together, they allow teams to maintain consistent terminology, style, and brand elements across training materials, websites, and other digital experiences. This integrated workflow makes it easier for organizations to manage multilingual content at scale while keeping learning and marketing content aligned.”<h3 id="powering-content-ops-for-learning-and-development-teams">Powering content ops for learning and development teams</h3>Smartcat’s Learning Content Agent delivers a comprehensive suite of features designed for global enterprise L&amp;D needs. This includes full SCORM automation, where you can extract, translate, review, and rebuild all assets within a SCORM package for direct publishing into any LMS.To simplify course management, L&amp;D practitioners no longer need to juggle multiple files for each language. The agent achieves this by exporting a single, multilingual SCORM package that contains all languages, ready for direct upload to any Learning Management System (LMS). Ongoing updates are also simplified; a single change in the source language is automatically synced across all translated versions.As previously stated, you can revive legacy content, allowing you to localize SCORM files without having to locate the original source files or access the source authoring tool. This enables in-context review and repackaging without being harangued by the legacy source.Smartcat also provides AI‑Powered quality and human expertise to help ensure consistent, compliant translations across all languages using glossaries, translation memory, and domain‑tuned AI, all enhanced by in‑context review and access to professional linguists. This is a key advantage when it comes to delivering trusted translations.Finally, Smartcat makes it easy with its multilingual packages and seamless updates. You can export a single multilingual file for all languages and automatically sync updates across all versions, making the whole process effortless. "Global enterprises can no longer afford to have employee expertise siloed by language. Our Learning Content Agent addresses this directly by transforming SCORM localization from a complex operational cost into a driver of business growth,” said <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/fgottlob/">Falk Gottlob</a>, Chief Product Officer at Smartcat. “By automating the entire workflow, Smartcat enables global teams to accelerate time-to-competency, ensuring every member can perform at their best, from day one." <h3 id="pricing">Pricing</h3>Smartcat offers plans for organizations and agencies with different features. Both provide Basic and Enterprise tiers, with prices starting at $1,200/year for individual users and small teams. Jump up to Enterprise for global teams – where you start with six agents – and you’ll need to call for custom pricing. There are some nice granular benefits on the agency side of the ledger for multi-lingual content generation, AI human workflows, procurement capabilities, and API access. Definitely worth a tour as part of a demo to see how these features might suit your agency model for services across areas like marketing, e-commerce, and more. <h3 id="the-verdict">The verdict</h3>Smartcat is a great platform for turning content in any format into any language, from docs to video to complex websites and software. This makes it super extensible – and given its core agentic capabilities, it’s providing a solid platform for simplifying what used to be incredibly complicated processes for corporate teams that crave control, accuracy, and governance.To that end, Smartcat’s new Learning Content Agent is further evidence of its mission to streamline the complex topology of managing SCORM translations. Combined with its Website Translation Agent, L&amp;D teams can facilitate the translation of their learning content across all facets of their operations, from LMSes to website pages – all through one agentic resource.  According to Smartcat, its Learning Content Agent is already delivering solid results relative to speed and cost. Companies like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.smith-nephew.com/en/">Smith+Nephew</a> are using it to achieve 4X faster translation turnaround time for their highly regulated medical content, shrinking the SLA-mandated localization workflow from ten days to just two. Pretty impressive.Reliable translation is essential for global brands, and in a multi-channel world, Smartcat is making it easier and more predictable to deliver with precision while maintaining control and governance. You can check out Smartcat’s Learning Content Agent by requesting a demo, or you can <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.smartcat.com/l/scorm-translation/">learn more here.</a> <hr /><h4 style="text-align:center" id="looking-for-more-guidance-on-smartcat?-talk-to-an-expert.">Looking for more guidance on Smartcat? <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>

Cat got your tongue? Not with Smartcat’s AI Agent for SCORM multilingual course translation

<hr /> Well, it happened. I’ve been predicting a move like this for a while, although I thought it might be an up-and-comer like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.conductor.com/">Conductor</a> or even a niche startup like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://otterly.ai/">Otterly.ai</a> elsewhere in the stack.  But then again, it’s <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/adobe-experience-manager">Adobe</a>. And when they go, they go big.And that’s what they’re doing with the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://news.adobe.com/news/2025/11/adobe-to-acquire-semrush">acquisition of Semrush,</a> a stalwart of modern martech and one of the “must-have” tools for search engine optimization over the last decade. Adobe just announced that it will purchase Semrush for the tidy sum of $1.9 billion in an all-cash transaction for $12 per share.The deal is said to close in the first half of 2026, pending regulatory and shareholder approvals. It should be “smoother” sailing, despite the pothole in the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/whats-under-the-fig-leaf-the-naked-truth-about-the-figma-ipo-and-the-markets-appetite-for-tech">rearview that is Figma</a>. Semrush is, comparatively, a tame acquisition that’s almost 20 times less breathtaking than that debacle. No doubt, Adobe is posturing to expand its leadership in the realm of marketing intelligence and the concentration on Generative Search Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). As competitors like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/optimizely">Optimizely</a> position themselves as <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/welcome-to-the-geo-ready-cms-optimizely-adds-new-features-to-enhance-ai-powered-search">“GEO-ready” platforms</a>, the race is on to give brands more comprehensive tools that address the shift towards AI search discovery.Despite this focus on marketing-centric tools that address the pressures of AI, Adobe lives beyond a single category like DXP or CMP, evolving its value to that of customer experience orchestration in the agentic AI era – and pointing its collective powers at the complete content supply chain, customer engagement, and brand visibility.It's doing all of this with its suite of industry-leading products like the ubiquitous <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/adobe-experience-manager">Adobe Experience Manager (AEM),</a> its unified <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://business.adobe.com/products/adobe-analytics.html">Adobe Analytics</a> suite, and the recently launched <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://business.adobe.com/products/brand-concierge.html">Adobe Brand Concierge</a> for creating interactive, AI-powered conversational journeys.Adding Semrush to this puzzle brings the picture into sharp relief, giving marketers a holistic view of how their brands appear across the new frontier of LLMs, as well as owned channels, legacy search, and the broader web. It also gives them more control over managing their visibility across the entire ecosystem. “Brand visibility is being reshaped by generative AI, and brands that don’t embrace this new opportunity risk losing relevance and revenue,” said <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/achakravarthy/">Anil Chakravarthy,</a> president of Adobe’s Digital Experience Business. “With Semrush, we’re unlocking GEO for marketers as a new growth channel alongside their SEO, driving more visibility, customer engagement and conversions across the ecosystem.”<h3 id="cmos-need-better-tools-to-master-ai-search">CMOs need better tools to master AI search</h3>The Chief Marketing Officer’s job has always been a little cursed. Often a revolving door of talent that lives and dies by the numbers, it has recently grown a bigger backbone when it comes to strategic performance. What's at stake? Pretty much everything. Enterprises are relying on marketing to deliver the goods at a breakneck pace. Meanwhile, CMOs are expected to make sense out of metric tons of data from a wide range of sources and tools – and make actionable decisions that drive growth. It's a tough racket, and forget the fact that a CMO's marketing team is also being challenged by cognitive overload. While brand equity and visibility are key, CMOs face a reckoning with results. According to a report from NIQ, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251118947080/en/CMOs-Face-a-Reputation-and-Results-Reckoning-According-to-NIQs-2026-Outlook">84% of CMOs now prioritize ROI</a> as their primary metric for budget allocation, signaling pressure to drive short-term conversion over long-term brand growth.And driving those conversions is search. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/google-cloud-platform">Google</a> still crushes AI answer engines like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://chatgpt.com/">ChatGPT</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.perplexity.ai/">Perplexity</a>, maintaining roughly 90% of the global search market share. Google’s traffic has continued to increase into 2025 due in part to its new <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://gemini.google/overview/">Gemini-powered AI Overviews</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://search.google/ways-to-search/ai-mode/">AI Mode</a> features.But the landscape is starting to shift. ChatGPT’s adoption has been downright mindboggling, reaching 100 million users within two months of launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer app ever. By late 2024, it was reportedly logging around 1 billion interactions per day. By one account, it could <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://ttms.com/llm-powered-search-vs-traditional-search-2025-2030-forecast/">surpass Google by 2028,</a> and new data from <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://business.adobe.com/blog/adi-october-2025-holiday-shopping-actuals">Adobe Analytics</a> showed that traffic from generative AI sources to U.S. retail sites increased by 1,200% year-over-year in October.As consumers increasingly turn to answer engines for information, recommendations, and purchase decisions, CMOs need tools that address generative AI platforms so they can enhance their visibility across these new customer interfaces and drive conversions. Organizations that invest in GEO – alongside their SEO capabilities – are poised to keep their brands well-represented, more easily discovered, and trusted across owned and earned channels.<h3 id="a-legacy-of-seo-innovation-with-a-new-focus-on-geo">A legacy of SEO innovation with a new focus on GEO</h3>Semrush is the gold standard in SEO. It provides a deep cache of rich information, from competitive insights to keyword research to campaign planning. It’s also incredibly intuitive and accessible, with many third-party platforms surfacing Semrush data in their analytics dashboards. For more than ten years, Semrush has armed marketers with “traditional” search engine optimization capabilities. But its recent gains in the development of GEO capabilities – specifically with its <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.semrush.com/ai-seo/">AI Visibility Toolkit</a> – are helping brands enhance visibility, expand audience reach, and remain discoverable in AI search. The good news for marketers is that the core principles of SEO also apply to GEO. Translation: They work together, and you don’t need to abandon your SEO strategy to build your presence across the AI engines. AI assistants provide helpful and (hopefully) accurate information to users, and they pull that information from the same internet your SEO-focused content lives on. Generally speaking, the more your brand is associated with the topics you want to focus on, the more likely it is to be referenced in an AI-generated answer.The combination of Adobe and Semrush could be a catalyst for even greater insight across both the SEO and GEO channels. Marketers need both, and Adobe's consolidation will likely benefit both competencies. “Adobe is an industry leader in helping marketers create personalized customer experiences at scale. With the advent of LLMs and AI-driven search, brands need to understand where and how their customers are engaging in these new channels,” said <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamrwagner/">Bill Wagner,</a> chief executive officer of Semrush. “This combination provides marketers more insights and capabilities to increase their discoverability across today’s evolving digital landscape.”From a performance standpoint, Semrush has been bringing the rain. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://increv.co/academy/semrush-users/">As of last year,</a> it boasted nearly 1.2 million users with annual revenue of over $300 million. In its most recent quarter, it drove 33% year-over-year ARR growth in its enterprise customer segment, earning the trust of industry leaders like Amazon, JPMorganChase, and TikTok.It’s worth noting that Semrush does have a large cohort of free-tier users (by one estimate, it represents as much as 90% of its base). This speaks to the company’s commitment to deliver value while building a strong SaaS pipeline to future paid users. Will Adobe maintain that? Only time will tell, but it’s a great example of a “Big Give” that works.<h3 id="the-verdict">The verdict</h3>GEO is becoming a crucial objective for brands and their marketing teams. This is a non-negotiable requirement of their modern tooling, and will inform the decision-making as they assess technologies to light these dark alleyways in their marketing intelligence.  Semrush and its peers might be innovating on the edge, but we’re still in catch-up mode. Every day could be another <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://greylock.com/greymatter/the-deepseek-moment/">DeepSeek moment</a> of change, threatening to send practitioners back into a well of shadows when it comes to LLM behaviors. As such, having the scale and skunkworks that Adobe provides could inject more value into the GEO roadmap, giving enterprises greater confidence around the futureproofing.This isn't “guesttimation” for me. I’ve personally relied on Semrush for years to analyze competitors, test longtail keywords, identify and root out toxic backlinks, and more. It’s a fantastic tool, and that’s why I think this is a smart move. Semrush is a solid, long-standing brand that’s built deep trust with its community, and that brand loyalty could benefit the transition to Adobe – a shift that hasn’t always been easy on cultures or communities.Is it worth the bucks? As far as the tendered deal is concerned, the math around multiples appears sound and reflects what we’re seeing elsewhere (early to say if it’s a steal or a deal). While the numbers aren’t as mammoth, 2025 has been a solid year for M&amp;A, tracking a <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.reuters.com/business/global-ma-activity-up-10-first-nine-months-2025-study-shows-2025-10-28/">10% increase in overall activity</a> in the first nine months of the year. A lot of that has been led by tech and specifically AI-related acquisitions, but the martech realm has been active, starting with the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/contentstack-just-acquired-lytics-a-real-time-customer-data-platform-heres-why-it-matters">purchase of the Lytics CDP</a> by <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/contentstack">Contentstack</a> in January of this year.Competitive pressure is a clear driver. As players like Optimizely and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/sitecore">Sitecore</a> expand their agentic AI features and evolve what a complete martech stack looks like, GEO capabilities are becoming front and center. And as the research indicates, conversions are going to be the key metric for ROI – and AI search is becoming a bigger piece of the integrated pie. What’s next? A lot. With the introduction of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://openai.com/index/buy-it-in-chatgpt/">ChatGPT’s Agentic Commerce Protocol,</a> we’re now seeing the potential for more retail transactions shifting to LLMs – creating even greater urgency for brands to elevate their presence across these channels. As we look ahead to the agent-to-agent frontier powered by <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro">MCP,</a> it’s fair to predict that these buying motions will be faster and increasingly automated.Look, there’s more here than just broadening the scope of Adobe’s marketing intelligence. It’s a signal that the race is on to shape the customer experience within the generative AI horizon – and giving marketers the best tools to meet the moment.Enterprises want composable solutions that offer adjacent integrations but include purpose-built features to help them address the immediate challenges of the AI era. And they can’t wait for tomorrow – they have to act today. That’s what Adobe is delivering: the promise of speed and scale for an agentic world.Can you feel the rush? <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>

Feel the GEO Rush: Adobe to Acquire Semrush for $1.9B to Enhance AI Search

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The Headless Holodeck: Joel Varty of Agility CMS on Warp-Speed Demos, AI, and the Next Generation of CMS

Conquer ‘Cold Starts’ with Hot Launches: Uniform AI Helps Teams Ship Digital Experiences Faster

<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

‘Seasons of Love’: Sitecore Symposium 2025 Sings, Putting AI and Marketers in the Spotlight

<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?

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Welcome to the ‘Collaborative CMS’: Directus Breaks the Bottlenecks with its Native MCP

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