Articles

Boye & Company Article

Matt & Matt, Episode 3: Broadway, Serendipity, Product Evangelism, and the New Rules of AI Visibility 

cms-critic-staff

Beyond the Gate: CMS Kickoff 26 Explored the AI Frontier While Focusing on Fundamentals

matt-garrepy

<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/critics/nabilorfali">Nabil Orfali</a> is the founder and CEO of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.techguilds.com/">TechGuilds</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/kajoo">Kajoo.ai</a> and a CMS Critic contributor.<hr /> I walked into <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">CMS Kickoff 2026</a> expecting to talk about the future. Instead, both roundtable sessions I led ended up being about the present—and why it feels so uncomfortable. We weren’t debating whether agentic AI works anymore. That question is mostly settled. What we were really circling around was something harder to admit: Agentic AI is already delivering real value in CMS work, and we’re still operating like it isn’t. Across two sessions, with people who actually ship things for a living, a pattern emerged. Not optimism. Not fear. Something more pragmatic. A quiet acknowledgment that the technology moved faster than our operating models—and now there’s a gap. This “gap” matches what the macro research is now showing. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai?utm_source=chatgpt.com">McKinsey’s 2025 global survey</a> reports 88% of respondents say their organizations use AI in at least one business function, up from 78% a year earlier—yet most organizations still report they haven’t fully scaled it across the enterprise. That “use vs. scale” delta is exactly what CMS delivery teams are feeling: experimentation is easy; operationalization is hard. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report?utm_source=chatgpt.com">Stanford’s AI Index </a>similarly describes business usage accelerating and investment continuing to rise, but with uneven ability to translate usage into a durable operating advantage.<h3 id="the-work-is-already-being-done-">The Work Is Already Being Done </h3>At some point during the first session, someone casually mentioned that their team was seeing over 70% acceleration on parts of CMS delivery. Another mentioned that entire categories of work—SEO metadata, image handling, accessibility checks, localization—were already largely automated. No one reacted. That’s when it hit me. If this were 2023, those statements would have stopped the room. In 2026, they barely registered. Not because they weren’t impressive—but because they were familiar. Agentic AI isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s doing the work. Quietly. Reliably. Often better than expected. And yet, no one in either session claimed they were running fully autonomous CMS delivery. Not because the agents failed—but because we don’t trust them enough to let go. Backing this up with measurable adoption and productivity signals: In real workplace data, generative AI has moved from novelty to routine. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.nber.org/digest/202412/workplace-adoption-generative-ai?utm_source=chatgpt.com">NBER reporting</a> on workplace adoption found 28% of employed respondents used generative AI at work, with 10.6% using it every workday (in the measured period).When AI is applied to repeatable knowledge-work tasks, controlled studies show consistent productivity lift. A widely-cited <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.nber.org/digest/20236/measuring-productivity-impact-generative-ai?utm_source=chatgpt.com">NBER field experiment</a> in customer support found a ~14% productivity increase overall, with much larger gains for less experienced workers.In software development specifically (relevant because CMS delivery is often engineering-heavy), <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-impact-of-ai-on-developer-productivity-evidence-from-github-copilot/?utm_source=chatgpt.com">Microsoft Research’s controlled experiment </a>found developers using GitHub Copilot completed a task 55.8% faster.Why this matters to CMS work: the roundtable outcomes were directionally consistent with these results: AI can compress the “execution time” of repeatable tasks dramatically, while the remaining bottleneck shifts to review, governance, and decision-making—the parts of delivery we historically underpriced or treated as overhead. <h3 id="autonomy-isn’t-the-goal.-confidence-is.-">Autonomy Isn’t the Goal. Confidence Is. </h3>One of the biggest misconceptions I still see is that “agentic” means autonomous in the absolute sense. Push a button. Walk away. Come back later to perfection. That fantasy didn’t survive contact with real CMS work. What did survive were more grounded patterns: <ul><li>Agents owning clearly defined tasks </li><li>Humans approving approaches, not outcomes </li><li>Sampling instead of exhaustive review </li><li>Reports instead of blind faith </li></ul>In other words, the same way we already manage junior team members. Someone made an offhand comment that stuck with me: “We already trust interns with production changes—we just pretend we don’t.” Exactly. Agentic AI doesn’t need blind trust. It needs earned trust, built through visibility, constraints, and feedback loops. That’s not a technology problem. It’s an organizational one. The numbers behind “trust” and why verification becomes the new work: A recent developer survey <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.techradar.com/pro/devs-dont-trust-ai-code-but-many-say-they-still-dont-check-it-anyways?utm_source=chatgpt.com">summarized by TechRadar</a> reported 96% of developers don’t fully trust AI-generated code, and only 48% say they always check it before committing. This is a textbook recipe for “it looked right” failures—exactly what CMS teams fear when AI is allowed to change production content, templates, personalization rules, or SEO fields at scale. In enterprise workflow terms, verification isn’t hypothetical overhead. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.itpro.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/workers-are-wasting-half-a-day-each-week-fixing-ai-workslop?utm_source=chatgpt.com">A Zapier survey</a> (reported by ITPro) found that employees spend ~4.5 hours per week correcting poor AI outputs, and 75% reported negative consequences from AI errors. Translation to CMS delivery:  This is why the roundtable consensus emphasized guardrails like prompt templates, change reports, phased rollouts, and level-based verification (especially for higher-risk content domains like healthcare and legal). What teams want is not autonomy—they want confidence at speed.  <h3 id="the-orchestration-shift-most-people-miss-">The Orchestration Shift Most People Miss </h3>The most technical, and most important, insight came up when we started talking about migrations at scale. Twenty thousand pages. Fifty thousand content items. If your instinct is to point a language model at that problem and let it churn through items one by one, you’re already in trouble. The smarter teams aren’t asking agents to do the work. They’re asking agents to design how the work gets done. Generate the migration scripts.  Define the mappings.  Set the rules.  Hand execution to observable systems.  Review structured output. That shift—from execution to orchestration—is subtle, but it’s where agentic AI stops being expensive and starts being scalable. And it’s where a lot of hype-driven implementations quietly fall apart. Why this is economically and operationally rational (with numbers): LLM usage at scale has two costs: compute/token cost and risk cost (errors propagated across thousands of assets). The roundtable conclusion—“agent writes the migration script; observable automation runs it”—is how you avoid both the token burn and the untraceable failure modes. This approach aligns with what we’re seeing in broader enterprise patterns: organizations are pushing AI “upstream” into planning, generation, and decision support rather than letting it “loop” through massive execution blindly. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.deloitte.com/az/en/issues/generative-ai/state-of-generative-ai-in-enterprise.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com">Deloitte’s enterprise GenAI research</a> similarly emphasizes that scaling requires process redesign and operating-model shifts—not just model access.How to make this real in CMS programs (the practical layer CMS Critic readers care about): This is where sampling and evaluation become the safety valve. The roundtable examples were concrete: validate a statistically meaningful sample (e.g., 500 checks out of 20,000 pages) and perform deeper validation for high-risk assets, then feed results back into the implementation agent. That pattern is how you get scale without pretending perfection. <h3 id="why-enterprises-still-hesitate-(and-why-they’re-not-wrong)-">Why Enterprises Still Hesitate (And Why They’re Not Wrong) </h3>Despite all the progress, enterprise hesitation isn’t irrational. In both sessions, the same concerns came up again and again: Where does our data go?  Who owns the outputs?  Can we run this inside our walls?  What happens when our knowledge trains someone else’s model? These aren’t edge cases. They’re core to regulated industries, global brands, and anyone whose CMS isn’t just a website—it’s institutional memory. Agentic AI adoption doesn’t fail because models aren’t good enough. It stalls because governance hasn’t caught up. And governance, unlike prompts, doesn’t improve overnight. Hard evidence that enterprise concerns are structural, not “fear”:  <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/doing_business/trust-center/docs/cisco-privacy-benchmark-study-2024.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com">Cisco’s Data Privacy Benchmark Study</a> (surveying 2,600 security and privacy professionals across 12 countries) found: <ul><li>92% view GenAI as fundamentally different, requiring new techniques to manage data and risk </li><li>69% cite concern that GenAI could hurt the organization’s legal and IP rights </li><li>68% worry information entered could be shared publicly or with competitors </li><li>68% worry results can be wrong</li></ul>Why that maps directly to CMS:  CMS programs are high-leverage because they touch brand, legal disclaimers, product claims, regulated content, personalization logic, and customer data. That makes “data governance + auditability” not a checkbox, but the adoption gate. Your roundtable’s emphasis on self-hosting options and specialized models for regulated use cases fits what security leadership is explicitly signaling. <h3 id="the-conversation-everyone-is-avoiding:-pricing-">The Conversation Everyone Is Avoiding: Pricing </h3>Eventually, the discussion always comes back to money. Because once delivery gets faster—much faster—the old math breaks. If something takes five hours instead of fifty, but creates the same (or more) business value, what exactly are we charging for? This is where the room usually gets quiet. Hourly models don’t collapse because AI exists. They collapse because they stop making sense when execution is no longer scarce. The more honest agencies in the room admitted what many are thinking: delivery is becoming the cheapest part of the engagement. The value is moving upstream—strategy, discovery, integration decisions, governance, experimentation. AI didn’t take that value away. It exposed where it always lived. Evidence that pricing model pressure is real (and already underway): <ul><li>In professional services, pricing strategists are <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.simon-kucher.com/en/insights/generative-ai-and-price-model-revolution-professional-services-think-golf-not-tennis?utm_source=chatgpt.com">explicitly calling out</a> that GenAI will force changes to “decade-old pricing models” because automation erodes the link between effort and value. </li><li><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.tsia.com/research/slow-transition-value-based-offer-pricing?utm_source=chatgpt.com">TSIA’s research notes</a> the transition away from cost-plus remains slow but is actively moving toward consumption/value models, largely driven by customer expectations and new delivery economics.</li><li>Mainstream business outlets have also <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisoncoleman/2025/06/06/in-the-ai-era-why-businesses-are-rethinking-their-pricing-strategies/?utm_source=chatgpt.com">begun documenting companies</a> rethinking pricing strategies in the AI era as automation changes what customers perceive as worth paying for. </li></ul>How this shows up specifically in CMS:  If AI compresses build time, agencies either (a) race to the bottom on price, or (b) reposition around outcomes: conversion lift, SEO gains, speed-to-market, governance maturity, experimentation velocity, localization coverage, and operational cost reduction. Your roundtables called out exactly this migration of value: strategy, discovery, roadmaps, SEO, integrations, A/B testing, conversion optimization. <h3 id="what-2026-is-actually-asking-of-cms-leaders-">What 2026 Is Actually Asking of CMS Leaders </h3>After two sessions, dozens of perspectives, and a lot of nodding heads, I don’t think the takeaway is dramatic. It’s uncomfortable, but simple:Stop asking whether agentic AI is ready.  Start asking whether your organization is. Because the teams succeeding right now aren’t the ones chasing autonomy. They’re the ones redesigning trust. And that turns out to be the hardest part of all. A final data point that frames the urgency:  <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.bcg.com/publications/2025/are-you-generating-value-from-ai-the-widening-gap?utm_source=chatgpt.com">BCG has quantified</a> the “agentic” moment as a measurable category of value creation—estimating AI agents account for ~17% of total AI value in 2025, projected to reach 29% by 2028, and noting that more “future-built” companies are explicitly allocating budget to agents and deploying them earlier. That’s the competitive reality CMS leaders are walking into: not whether AI exists, but whether you can operationalize it faster than your peers—safely, observably, and with a commercial model that survives success.  <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <img style="width:30.06%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/cms-summit-26-logo.jpg" alt="" /><h4 id="cms-summit-26"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmssummit26">CMS Summit 26</a></h4>May 12-13, 2026 – Frankfurt, GermanyThe best conferences create space for honest, experience-based conversations. Not sales pitches. Not hype. Just thoughtful exchanges between people who spend their days designing, building, running, and evolving digital experiences. CMS Summit brings together people who share real stories from their work and platforms and who are interested in learning from each other on how to make things better. Over two days in Frankfurt, you can expect practitioner-led talks grounded in experience, conversations about trade-offs, constraints, and decisions, and time to compare notes with peers facing similar challenges. Space is limited for this exclusive event, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmssummit26/tickets">so book your seats 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> <img style="width:40.76%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/open-source-cms-26.jpg" /><h4 id="open-source-cms-26"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/opensourcecms26">Open Source CMS 26</a></h4>October 20–21, 2026 – Utrecht, NetherlandsJoin us for the first annual edition of our prestigious international conference dedicated to making open source CMS better. This event is already being called the “missing gathering place” for the open source CMS community – an international conference with confirmed participants from Europe and North America. Be part of a friendly mix of digital leaders from notable open source CMS projects, agencies, even a few industry analysts who get together to learn, network, and talk about what really matters when it comes to creating better open source CMS projects right now and for the foreseeable future. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/opensourcecms26/tickets">Book your tickets today.</a>

Agentic AI Didn’t Fail CMS Teams. Our Expectations Did.

nabilorfali

A Gathering of Content Champions: Here’s Why CMS Connect 25 was ‘Super’ in Every Way

Sorry, Eurovision. The real music was at CMS Summit 25. Here’s what made it a hit

<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/critics/tom-cranstoun">Tom Cranstoun</a>, “The AEM Guy,” is the principal consultant at Digital Domain Technologies Limited and a CMS Critic contributor. <hr /> The Frankfurt skyline, the only city in Germany with skyscrapers, provided a fitting backdrop for two days of intense conversation about content management systems at the CMS Summit 2025, organized by <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmssummit25/program">Boye &amp; Co. </a>This first European installment brought together a diverse mix of CMS practitioners, vendors, agencies, and analysts from across Europe and North America. My experience at the summit changed how I view the intersection of AI, CMS, and web technologies—areas that directly connect to my professional focus.<h3 id="the-state-of-content-management-in-2025">The State of Content Management in 2025</h3>What struck me most was not the technical specifications of various platforms, but the rich dialogue about how organizations actually use these systems. A common challenge emerged across multiple sessions: the search for a perfect "all-in-one" solution often leads to disappointment.Several presentations addressed this directly, noting that good technology alone doesn't guarantee success. Speakers described how quickly new requirements can reveal limitations in even the most promising systems. This observation was reinforced by cautions against purchasing tools before clearly defining the problems they should solve. The recommendation to view technology "not as a solution but as an enabler" resonated with many attendees, myself included.<h3 id="ai-integration:-substance-over-spectacle">AI Integration: Substance Over Spectacle</h3>The discussion around AI and content management stood out for its practicality. Rather than focusing on theoretical applications, presenters addressed real implementation challenges.Sessions on AI integration cut through typical enthusiasm with a focus on creating genuine value. Speakers emphasized that successful AI implementation depends less on impressive features and more on building user trust and achieving measurable outcomes.Several talks provided valuable insights on how AI systems interact with CMS-powered content, highlighting current limitations and offering concrete approaches to help AI better understand structured content—a critical consideration as these technologies become more deeply integrated. In full transparency, I was one of the speakers and I moderated one of the workshops, “Trust in AI”.<h3>"How Did I Not Know This?"</h3>The most profound insight came during the "Trust in AI" and "Building Products with AI" workshops, where a startling realization emerged that changed my understanding of AI in multilingual content management: Non-English speakers experience AI differently. And those of us in the English-speaking tech world rarely understand this. <hr /><h4 style="text-align:center" id="-"> </h4><h4 style="text-align:center" id="“non-english-speakers-experience-ai-differently.-and-those-of-us-in-the-english-speaking-tech-world-rarely-understand-this.”">“Non-English speakers experience AI differently. And those of us in the English-speaking tech world rarely understand this.”</h4> <hr /> As someone familiar with AI bias discussions, I thought I understood the landscape. Yes, AI has a Western tilt. Yes, models reflect dominant ideologies. But what I hadn't fully grasped until this summit was the structural exclusion of non-English perspectives from the foundation upwards.In the European context, where linguistic diversity is lived rather than theoretical, this observation gained immediate traction. As we discussed AI implementation in content management systems, participants from various countries shared starkly different experiences with the same AI tools—experiences shaped primarily by language.The technical explanation proved equally eye-opening. Most large language models powering today's AI features in CMS platforms are trained on Common Crawl, a public dataset that scrapes vast portions of the web. Approximately 44% of this content is in English, with no other language exceeding 6%. German, Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese are present, but minimally so. The remaining global languages are virtually absent.A couple of anecdotes from the side chatter further underscore this challenge in both artificial intelligence and machine translation, particularly when dealing with nuanced languages like German.  <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/trieloff/">Lars Trieloff's</a> remark, "His English is Better than AI's German," while perhaps humorous, highlights the limitations of AI in achieving natural and idiomatic language proficiency. This suggests that even with advancements in AI, human expertise remains essential for tasks requiring linguistic finesse.  <figure class="image image_resized" style="width:86.85%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/05/image-1747664039114.png" alt="A person speaking into a microphone

AI-generated content may be incorrect." /></figure><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/trieloff/">Lars Trieloff</a>, principal at Adobe. Photo Source: Marta Cukierman <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelika-gust-5a4192205/">Angelika Gust's</a> experience further emphasizes this point. Her workflow, involving an "Experiment in AI," necessitated the active participation of native German speakers. Their role was crucial in rectifying the "stilted German" generated by the AI, indicating that while AI can be a useful tool in translation, it often falls short of producing text that is both grammatically correct and stylistically natural.  <figure class="image image_resized" style="width:85.83%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/05/image-1747664039107.png" alt="A person in a dress with her hands up

AI-generated content may be incorrect." /></figure><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelika-gust-5a4192205/">Angelika Gust</a>, Senior Product Manager, Digital Channels at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.bahn.de/">DB Regio</a>. Photo Source: Marta Cukierman These real-world examples serve as a potent reminder that achieving truly human-quality language generation and translation remains a hurdle for artificial intelligence. The need for human oversight and correction is not just a matter of preference but a practical necessity for ensuring accuracy and quality. <figure class="image image_resized" style="width:84.04%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/05/image-1747664038840.png" /></figure> This imbalance creates models that "think" in English—not just linguistically, but culturally and contextually. For CMS implementations serving multilingual audiences, this poses significant challenges. Content created or augmented by AI in non-English languages often exhibits lower quality, cultural misalignments, and reduced effectiveness.Don’t forget that the system prompt is also written in English, the UI and front end often sneak in tricks by looking for text like ‘think deeply” in the prompt and then adjust the model's output.Wow. Perhaps everyone should prompt in English! I hope not.Common Crawl's architecture compounds the problem by prioritizing highly-linked domains, which overwhelmingly come from the English-speaking West. Already-dominant voices are further elevated, while content from smaller, less networked communities is ignored. This is particularly problematic for CMS implementations serving diverse global audiences.The contrast with established institutional approaches was striking. The United Nations publishes all official documents in six languages. The European Union recognizes 24 official languages and mandates linguistic equity across communications. Yet our content management systems, increasingly powered by AI, lag significantly behind this standard despite serving the same diverse populations.Another layer of systemic imbalance arises in how AI systems are fine-tuned. Reinforcement <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_learning_from_human_feedback">Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)</a>, the technique used to refine language models, is overwhelmingly English-centric. This creates:<ul><li>Perspective Narrowing: Models reflect Anglophone values and social assumptions</li><li>Language Exclusion: Many global languages receive no feedback at all</li><li>Digital Colonialism: While the Global South provides labour and data, the benefits and governance remain concentrated in the Global North</li><li>Outdated non-native English: The global south was decolonised in the 1950s, their English language was often a second language, used as a link language; it has not kept up with modern English.</li></ul>What made this revelation particularly impactful was its obviousness in retrospect. As someone who has worked extensively with content management systems, I found myself wondering:  “How did I not know this?”<h3 id="digital-sustainability-emerges-as-a-core-concern">Digital Sustainability Emerges as a Core Concern</h3>The conference marked a shift toward acknowledging the environmental impact of digital solutions. Presentations offered compelling data on the growing carbon footprint of websites, applications, and AI systems.Speakers noted that building more climate-friendly digital experiences benefits both the planet and business outcomes. Several vendors and agencies have begun incorporating sustainability metrics into their development practices, signaling a potential industry-wide shift in priorities. <figure class="image image_resized" style="width:86.08%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/05/image-1747664039089.png" alt="A person giving a presentation to a group of people

AI-generated content may be incorrect." /></figure><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/speakers/thorsten-jonas">Thorsten Jonas</a> presenting “The Time is Now for Web Sustainability.” Photo Source: Marta Cukierman This focus on sustainability connects directly to questions about resource allocation and efficiency—particularly relevant as content management systems grow more complex and data-intensive.<h3 id="collaborative-problem-solving-">Collaborative Problem-Solving </h3>The second day shifted from presentations to working groups addressing pressing industry questions. Topics included building products in the age of AI, future-proofing content across multiple platforms, and establishing accuracy and trust with AI systems. <figure class="image image_resized" style="width:87.11%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/05/image-1747664277914.png" /></figure><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/julianmills/">Julian Mills</a> facilitating one of the day two workshop sessions. Photo Source: Janus BoyeThis format created space for substantive cross-organizational dialogue, allowing participants to share challenges and strategies from different perspectives. Many attendees noted this collaborative approach as particularly valuable compared to the experience of traditional conferences.<h3 id="reflections-and-forward-movement">Reflections and Forward Movement</h3>Looking back on the summit, what remains most valuable are the connections formed with other practitioners facing similar challenges. The conversations during breaks and social events often yielded insights as valuable as the formal sessions.For those working at the intersection of content management and emerging technologies, the path forward requires both technical expertise and strategic vision. We're navigating an industry-wide transformation driven by technological changes that pressure vendors, agencies, and clients alike.The multilingual AI revelation particularly calls for a shift in how we approach AI integration in content management. If we truly want AI-enhanced CMS to serve global audiences, then we need:<ul><li>Training data that's representative, multilingual, and culturally nuanced</li><li>Evaluation processes that account for linguistic diversity</li><li>Governance structures that include voices from all markets served</li><li>More inclusive, ethically curated datasets</li><li>Feedback systems reflecting a genuinely global range of human values</li><li>Movement beyond tokenism into structural equity</li></ul>The next European CMS Summit is scheduled for May 12-13, 2026, again in Frankfurt. Based on the quality of this year's event, it promises to provide another opportunity for meaningful exchange across the global CMS community. If you're based in North America, you can also join <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmsconnect25">CMS Connect in August</a> or <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff25">CMS Kickoff in January.</a> And finally, the conversation continues in the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/groups/cms-experts/">CMS Expert Groups,</a> where <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/critics/matt-garrepy">Chief Critic Matt Garrepy</a> is also an active community leader. This post represents my personal takeaways rather than a comprehensive report. I extend my gratitude to all speakers, demonstrators, and fellow attendees for two days of inspiring dialogue and discovery. <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <img style="width:33.07%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/05/contentcon25-logo-1747412490394.png" /><h4 id="contentstack-contentcon-25"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.contentstack.com/contentcon">Contentstack ContentCon 25</a></h4>June 3-5, 2025 – Chicago, USAThe future of digital is waiting for you! Contentstack presents ContentCon, the premier event for digital teams and industry leaders who are reimagining the future of digital experiences. Join us for two days of transformative presentations and workshops designed to help you put personalization and AI strategies into action. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://contentcon2025.site.zuddl.com/">Register today! </a> <img style="width:31.83%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/01/cms-connect-2025-logo.png" alt="" /><h4 id="cms-connect-25"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmsconnect25">CMS Connect 25</a></h4>August 5-6, 2025 – Montreal, CanadaWe are delighted to present the second annual summer edition of our signature global conference dedicated to the content management community! CMS Connect will be held again in beautiful Montreal, Canada, and feature a unique blend of masterclasses, insightful talks, interactive discussions, impactful learning sessions, and authentic networking opportunities. Join vendors, agencies, and customers from across our industry as we engage and collaborate around the future of content management – and hear from the top thought leaders at the only vendor-neutral, in-person conference exclusively focused on CMS. Space is limited for this event, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmsconnect25">so book your seats today.</a>

'How did I not know this?’ CMS Summit 25 changed my understanding of AI

tom-cranstoun

Shopify - The global commerce platform

Build your business with Shopify to sell online, offline, and everywhere in between.

The global commerce platform

#ffffff

Reflections on CMS Kickoff 25 from ‘The AEM Guy’

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

News