With the 2026 FIFA World Cup just around the corner, excitement for “The Beautiful Game” is reaching a fever pitch.

Regardless of the rankings (France is a favorite to win the 18-carat gold, malachite-plated trophy), anything can happen on this global field – and I’m down for a “dark horse” contender to shake things up. Even Microsoft Copilot thinks Spain has a better shot at glory.

We’ll see how the ball rolls. And we've got plenty of thrills ahead with the Women's World Cup next year.

There’s a similar vibe playing out in the CMS and DXP pantheon as agents take the front line. Every vendor is repositioning based on its capabilities and future vision for agent-to-agent interactions. At times, it feels like everything else is being sidelined.

Let’s talk tape. Demo reels often look dynamite, but real-world applications don’t always score. When you spend as much time around enterprise marketers, digital leaders, and content practitioners as I do, you start hearing the same thing over and over:

“It looks cool. But can this actually help my team win?”

That’s the question Kentico is trying to answer with its new AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite.

When I first covered the announcement earlier this year with Kentico’s VP of Product, Debbie Tucek, I saw raw promise in its potential. Now, the complete marketing suite is building momentum as it executes its downfield vision.

With AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite, Kentico isn’t pitching another glorified generative AI chatbot dressed in a marketing jersey. Instead, the company is introducing an agentic system with a coordinated squad of specialized agents that operate inside its Xperience by Kentico platform.

Kentico VP of Product Debbie Tucek. Source: LinkedIn

“The whole concept was really this single pane of glass,” Debbie told me, “and being able to facilitate this ability to orchestrate and optimize a multi-channel strategy that marketers are struggling with.”

AIRA, which was initially launched in 2025 as an assistive AI utility, has risen to the rank of captain, orchestrating a bench of "AI teammates,” each with defined roles, permissions, transparent audit trails, and more – all governed by humans with total control and confidence.

What does this team look like? Since we’re kicking around a football theme, there’s a Content Strategist protecting brand consistency like a disciplined center back, while a Customer Journey Optimization Specialist reads conversion breakdowns like a midfield tactician.

There’s also a Campaign Manager that orchestrates performance across channels like a veteran playmaker. And when it comes to traditional and AI-driven search, the talented SEO & GEO Specialist helps ensure that brands stay visible in the new field of AI discovery.

For Kentico, building this “AI Dream Team” was all about supporting marketers – not replacing them. And they need the help. Between the constant cycle of change, increased complexity, and fatigue from tool sprawl, they're struggling to keep pace. This is where Kentico’s AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite delivers, powering its embedded agents with the context and coordination to break down siloed roles and manual processes that stymie execution.

When that friction is eliminated, marketers can finally feel on top of things again. They can run their content operations, customer journeys, and experiments in real time and make sense of the results. Most importantly, they can focus on the essential (and often fun) parts of their job: ideating, strategizing, and just being creative.

As I discussed with Debbie in our last conversation, AI hype often outruns operational reality. It’s not just about parsing the ROI. Delivering real value for humans is the key, and this is where Kentico consistently shines as a champion.

Let’s meet this new team of agents – and explore why they could be the combination you need to win the cup.

What is the AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite?

Before we run down the roster in more detail, let’s do a quick refresher on the AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite as a whole, starting with how it’s structured.

First and foremost, this is not a bolt-on solution, but a collection of AI-powered marketing agents that live directly inside Xperience by Kentico. The inside part matters, as one of the biggest issues in enterprise marketing today isn’t necessarily a lack of AI tools – it’s fragmentation. Teams are toggling between disconnected copilots, analytics dashboards, SEO platforms, and more to launch and optimize campaigns.

Marketers don’t need another standalone AI interface. They need operational cohesion, and AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite is built to solve that problem with zero friction. No more burdensome tab-switching or playing musical chairs with third-party apps. You have full access to the platform’s specialized agents, allowing you to operate with governance, permissions, auditability, and human oversight built directly into the workflow.

One of the best things about AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite is its simplicity. The learning curve is incredibly light for even the most non-technical marketer. Using conversational prompts via AIRA Chat, you can start automating even the most complex tasks like campaign planning, content strategy, segmentation, and more – all in real time and based on real user behavior.

So what does an actual use case look like? Let’s consider a hypothetical campaign for a new product that’s missing the mark on performance. Using natural language, a marketer can ask AIRA to optimize the journey based on its low-scoring conversions. The system automatically taps the right agent to take the field (in this case, the Customer Journey Optimization Specialist).

Once in play, the agent analyzes and identifies drop-offs or abandonments, provides enhancements like copy tweaks or step flow reordering, and the marketer approves and launches any changes – maintaining the human in the loop. And all of this is done in a few hours with a single, seamless interface.

While generative systems typically focus on outputs (write this email, summarize this document, generate this image), agentic systems focus on tangible outcomes. They coordinate work, execute processes, collaborate across functions, and continuously improve performance. This is where Kentico is focusing its AI front line – and scoring with value.

Meet the Agents: Kentico’s AI Marketing Lineup

The AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite is a team, not a toolbox. And this is where the football analogy really kicks in.

Every successful team needs specialization. You don’t ask your striker to organize defensive fielding, or your goalkeeper to dictate midfield tempo. Great teams work because players understand their roles and coordinate around shared goals.

Kentico’s AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite operates much the same way, with each agent meeting a clearly defined purpose inside the broader marketing strategy. Most importantly, they all function under AIRA’s orchestration leadership, where it coordinates this agentic team to victory.

Let’s get to know each of the agents and what position they play on the field.

Content Strategist: Protecting Brand Consistency at Scale

If there’s one thing AI can destroy faster than it creates, it’s brand consistency. As organizations scale content production, tone drift becomes almost inevitable. Different contributors, multiple channels, and variable campaign pressures can fracture a harmonized brand. Add in the wrong kind of AI tooling, and you can multiply the negative impacts.

Kentico’s Content Strategist agent is designed to prevent that, acting as an AI-powered governance player that reviews content against your organization’s defined strategy to protect voice, tone, terminology, grammar patterns, and messaging consistency.

What really stands out for me is the emphasis on operational clarity. The Content Strategist goes beyond vague recommendations to provide structured feedback – quoting exact content sections, referencing applicable rules, and prioritizing issues based on severity. This is key because enterprise marketers need firm, actionable guidance that can be scaled confidently across multi-team organizations with global content operations.

The Content Strategist is an ideal agent for driving a range of high-value tasks, from rebranding initiatives to product launches to multi-channel publishing. And because the system operates directly inside Xperience by Kentico, teams avoid the “copy-paste-review-repeat” workflow nightmare that often accompanies standalone AI governance tools. The result is less editorial overhead and faster publishing without sacrificing consistency.

In football terms, think of the Content Strategist as part of your disciplined defense, keeping the team structurally sound so you can be more aggressive with your marketing programs.

Customer Journey Optimization Specialist: The Conversion Midfielder

Every marketer inevitably hits the same wall: Campaigns are running. Traffic is flowing. But somewhere inside the customer journey, conversions are inexplicably collapsing. Isolating the problem means pulling reports, digging through analytics, analyzing content, reviewing UX patterns, and manually diagnosing what went wrong. It’s a huge haul.

Kentico’s Customer Journey Optimization Specialist aims to dramatically compress that entire process. The agent continuously analyzes customer journey performance data, identifies drop-off points, examines related pages or emails, and prioritizes optimization recommendations.

What I find particularly interesting is the agent’s use of screenshot-based analysis. By combining visual context with behavioral and performance data, it can deliver more detailed and relevant recommendations that go way beyond generic CRO advice – telling teams exactly what to change and why.

Source: Kentico

With AIRA Chat, a marketer can put the Customer Journey Optimization Specialist in play with a few basic prompts. In minutes, it will identify the weakest journey stage, analyze the related content, and serve up a prioritized list of enhancements for the marketer’s approval. It’s like having a dedicated conversion optimization specialist sitting by your side.

For smaller teams especially, this could be transformative. Not every company can hire dedicated CRO experts, journey analysts, or optimization consultants. Kentico is effectively operationalizing those capabilities by putting a powerful agent on the team.

Campaign Manager: Turning ‘Marketing Memory’ into Competitive Advantage

One of the biggest challenges in modern marketing is sometimes referred to as organizational or corporate amnesia – the systematic loss of institutional knowledge, context, and operational memory.

You know what I’m talking about, especially if you’re on the marketing side of the business. Teams launch campaigns, collect data, generate reports, and then promptly move on to the next initiative without doing a deep dive into what they learned. It’s an epidemic.

How can we learn more decisively – and make the next campaign better than the last? That’s the question the Campaign Manager is designed to answer, and it does it by stitching together fragmented data into actionable insights and forward-looking strategies. It unifies campaign briefs, assets, forms, automations, pages, and journeys into a single operational view within AIRA Chat. And there’s no manual reporting required.

Source: Kentico

One of the features that really stands out with the Campaign Manager is its longitudinal learning. It’s a powerhouse agent with a long memory, enabling marketers to conduct cross-campaign comparisons over time by analyzing campaign briefs, customer journey performance data, email statistics, engagement metrics, and goal completion data in one place.

And by leveraging proven success, marketers can glean and adopt useful patterns instead of starting from scratch with each new campaign brief.

Marketing teams have loads of data. In fact, most teams are drowning in it. But few have activated the essential learning that unlocks its power at scale. This is where the Campaign Manager agent is creating persistent intelligence inside Kentico – helping enterprise organizations move from experimenting with AI to fully harnessing it.

SEO & GEO Specialist: Elevating Visibility in the AI Discovery Era

We’ve been talking a lot about GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) on CMS Critic, and how it’s all built on the structured tenets and long-standing practices of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

I know. We love our TLAs (Three-Lettered Acronyms). But these are important ones. As we discussed at the recent CMS Summit in Frankfurt, AI discovery is becoming the new portal for search. Consumers are shifting to answer engines like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews, and the drop in organic traffic has elevated GEO from the marketing trenches to the boardroom.

Traditional SEO still matters, of course. But GEO has the potential to augment brand visibility within the broader scope of generative responses – whether through citations, summaries, or recommendations. And it's working: a recent study suggests that 97% of leaders believe it delivered positive impacts in 2025.

Managing the scope of these competencies is hard enough for any marketing team, let alone a single person – which is often the case. This is where the SEO & GEO Specialist agent comes in. It evaluates pages not only against traditional SEO best practices, but also against AI readability and discoverability standards.

The SEO & GEO Specialist audits and enhances facets of search engine marketing that most practitioners will recognize – things like keyword placement, metadata, heading structure, internal linking, and more. I’m particularly keen on the agent’s ability to store targeted keywords based on page and language variants, so repeat users can easily validate or update relevant terms and seamlessly anchor them to the right search intent.

Source: Kentico

On the AI readability front, it takes automation to the next level, scoring against ten dimensions of AI parsability. This includes semantic clarity, factual precision, and topical relevance. The agent also generates visibility reports and groups recommendations by impact level, helping marketers prioritize optimization work. It’s all trackable as well, so marketers can measure and improve performance over time.

For enterprises, executing a coordinated AEO, GEO, and SEO strategy has become an imperative. Up until now, marketers have relied on disconnected third-party tools like Semrush and ahrefs to handle the heavy lifting. If you’ve used any of these, you know how granular they are – but also how locked up each set of project data is.

In the future, answer engines may become the primary search and discovery layer. Right now, optimizing for AI comprehension – as well as for humans – is the best way to close the gap and prepare for what's ahead. The SEO & GEO Specialist makes that journey remarkably easier, and might position it as one of the most strategically important agents on the field.

Humans + AI: How Marketing Teams Are Being Reimagined

There’s more to the AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite than just technology. This moment is a transformative sea change – and what Kentico is really launching here is a new operational model for marketing teams.

Industry-wide, AI has become the substrate. Look no further than the 2026 Gartner AI Hype Cycle, which indicates a rapid commoditization of generative AI and a clear strategic shift towards agentic operations.

For years, digital marketing organizations have been trapped between rising expectations and constrained resources. Channels have expanded, campaigns have exploded, and the urgency for delivering personalized experiences at breakneck speed has become paramount. Meanwhile, headcounts rarely increase to meet the growing demands – and that tension is where agentic systems become seismic shifters for multiplying marketer capacity.

That promise sounds inspiring. But it’s also being met with skepticism, particularly in the conversations I’ve been having with marketing professionals and teams across industries. While many agencies and enterprises are adapting to AI, there’s still palpable anxiety around the long-term impacts – and where humans fit in the calculus.

Kentico CEO Dominik Pintér. Source: LinkedIn

Kentico CEO Dominik Pintér tackled this head-on in a recent thought piece entitled, The 10% Rule: When AI Becomes a Cost, Not a Multiplier. His argument is refreshingly pragmatic: AI only matters when it fundamentally changes leverage. He points to specific metrics for weighing the value.

“If it is a 2x, move fast. Invest. Lock it in,” he writes. “If it is a 10 percent, stop. It is not an efficiency. It is an expense waiting for the subsidy to end.”

That mindset has clearly guided Kentico’s approach to designing the AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite. Dominik’s central thesis holds true: a marketer shouldn’t spend their day buried in repetitive execution, disconnected reporting, endless reviews, or manual optimization tasks. Agentic AI is a salve, but it has to deliver 2x value as a true, collaborative partner – and not a liability.

“We didn't build the Agentic Marketing Suite so marketers could do less,” he said. “We built it so they could finally do the work that made them want to become marketers in the first place.”

That line might be the defining philosophy behind this entire launch.

What’s ahead for the AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite?

Building any team starts with a strong foundation, and that’s been the long game with Kentico's AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite. Expanding the roster is the stated goal, and the company is planning more specialized agents to roll out through the rest of 2026 and into 2027. Here are a few of the near-term objectives on the roadmap:

Enhanced agent ecosystem visibility: Since last year, I’ve been advocating for more native agentic ops solutions. Without reliable observability in place, “agent sprawl” could present real challenges. Marketers need greater control and transparency, and Kentico is taking this beyond per-agent metrics to develop instrumentation that surfaces analytics on usage, impact, overlap, and gaps. They’re describing it as an “org chart for your AI teammates,” and it’s exactly what we need more of.
Pricing transparency: Cost is becoming a paramount consideration for all AI operations. AIRA works on a credit-based system, which is openly tracked using the AIRA Usage Overview. Kentico’s intention has been to avoid seat-based pricing for its agents, which would be antithetical to its team-based model.
Agent-to-agent orchestration: Right now, in the Agentic Marketing Suite, humans are engaging directly with AIRA’s specialists. But imagine a system where your agents can collaborate directly with each other, eliminating the need for marketers to hand off any context while still maintaining human control and governance. This agent-to-agent interaction is a powerful vision, and one that could take Kentico to the next level. Plan to hear more on this in the coming months.

The Verdict? Winning the Cup Will Require Better Teams

“The Beautiful Game” is an exhilarating human experience, one we share globally during the World Cup. Competitive rivalries aside, what makes it exciting is the raw athletic talent and the glorious goals we’ll be talking about around the watercooler.

As marketers face their own challenges on the field of competitive play, AI has become a strategic advantage. The winners will be the organizations that figure out how humans and AI work together operationally – and that’s where agents are scoring.

Kentico’s AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite is taking a team approach to delivering the promise and potential of AI. Its bench of specialized agents brings focused expertise and accelerated execution to every workflow, giving both large enterprise and small, tightly resourced teams the power they need to realize greater creativity and strategic focus in a noisy, fragmented world.

The game has changed, and marketers are balancing the real challenges of maintaining brand reputation, customer trust, legal exposure, compliance requirements, and business outcomes. You need the best team to tackle it all, and that’s what Kentico is assembling.

My Recommendation: If you’re evaluating DXPs through an AI lens, AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite has a winning strategy. It offers a strong vision with the critical layers of governance that agentic systems will rely on in real-world production. Because it’s built into Xperience by Kentico, there’s no added fuss or complexity with integrations or extra tools. More importantly, it's delivered on a platform with a proven legacy of performance. It's currently available with Kentico's Standard and Advanced tiers, and there's full documentation available. Keep in mind that the SEO & GEO Specialist is currently in preview mode. Expect additional agents this year, as well as enhancements to memory and context across existing agents. Definitely worth a demo, which you can schedule here.

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Meet the Agents: Kentico Fields an ‘AI Dream Team’ to Win the New Game of Marketing