The Death of the One-Size-Fits-All Web
Content management won’t cut it today. Context management is the only strategy that will reach and move audiences to action. Is your digital experience technology equipped to handle it?
Nishant Patel is the co-founder and CTO at Contentstack and a CMS Critic contributor.
When the internet first went mainstream, it was innovative just to have a website. Later, it was a blog. Then a mobile version. Each step felt like a leap forward in how brands showed up online.
But we’ve entered a different era. With the rise of AI, simply “having a presence” doesn’t stand out to customers anymore. What does stand out is how adaptive that presence can be.
By emphasizing personalization, Land O’Lakes’ animal nutrition brand Purina increased conversions to an average of 30% and improved its ability to keep visitors on the website for longer. That’s the power of experiences designed for individuals, not audiences.
So what does the future look like? Two words: context management.
Content vs. Context Management
For years, brands doubled down on producing and managing content. But with the technology available and the siloed way data was collected, they were mostly guessing what a segment of people wanted.
A brand can crank out endless content, but if that content isn’t in response to an individual’s real-time signals, what good will it do?
Content management won’t cut it today. Context management is the only strategy that will reach and move audiences to action. (This, coming from someone who created the first headless CMS.)
Unlike content management, context management seeks to piece together the full story of the problem or desire that the customer wants to solve, based on signals they send. For example, a Gen Z customer might see a product they like on social media. From there, they might quickly search that product—via a search engine or LLM—and land on your website. Imagine they click “shop” and see the exact product they’ve been searching for in front of them, without any deep dives. That’s a brand experience just for that individual, adapted instantly after a quick scan of their browser history.
In the Context Economy, the value of a brand no longer comes from the volume of content published, but from how intelligently a brand’s experience adapts to the customer’s signals.
Is your digital experience technology equipped to handle it?
Where Context Meets Agentic AI
Brands have been moving towards context management for a long time. According to the 2025 State of Martech report, the center of the Martech stack has shifted over the last two years to data warehouses and customer data platforms. I like that because you can’t be smart without data. But I also think it's a curious choice, because data can never act alone.
Brands need to pair data systems with a CMS to turn data into insights, activate those insights, and connect with customers. What happens if you supercharge that with automation and agentic AI? Here’s what a true agentic AI ecosystem might function like:
A flash sale is about to go live. Instead of scrambling across teams—marketing, legal, supply chain, development, brand—AI agents handle the campaigns.
One agent writes the copy. Another ensures it’s on-brand. An anti-hoax agent flags suspicious assets, while a supply chain agent checks inventory. Once the plan is greenlit by humans, a promotion agent takes over to launch the campaign, update the homepage, and email the right audience. As performance data rolls in, yet another agent optimizes the campaign in real time, ensuring it reaches the right people in the right moments.
Again, keep in mind this shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all experience. Individual A receives one version, while Individual B receives a completely different version, based on the context they provide. Both move the customer to form a deeper connection with the brand in different ways.
This is not a distant future. Contentstack enables that reality today.
Embrace Agentic with Contentstack’s Agent OS
Contentstack’s Agent OS is a breakthrough in agentic AI that allows AI and automation to operate with full brand and customer context to drive one-to-one interactions.
Agents tap into a brand’s content, voice, audience insights, and existing Contentstack tools to handle predictable tasks and enforce on-brand outputs where it matters. Automations remove the need to switch between tools, set up manual workflows, and configure repetitive, low-value AI prompts.
This is context management: combining data, content, and brand intelligence in real time to enable customer-driven experiences at scale.
How to Get Your Context in Order
So how do you prepare for an agentic future, today?
- Know your customer. Make sure customer data is being captured with the right systems, and that you’re pulling in real-time signals you can actually act on. That might require getting marketing and IT together in one room until that’s figured out. Even better, use data systems already embedded in your CMS, so you don’t have to configure complicated integrations and fixes to connect data and content.
- Know your brand. This isn't just about logos and tone and voice. Understand how your brand is most relevant to your customer and adds value to their life. Do they want to be educated? Entertained? Make sure you’re fulfilling that need.
- Commit to the moment. Once you understand the intersection between customer and brand, use AI and LLMs to personalize content for customers in the right channel, at the right time.
The “one-size-fits-all” web has been dying for a long time. Now, with modern digital experience platforms like Contentstack Edge that combine content, data, and agentic AI in real-time, there’s a better customer experience waiting. We can finally move on to the era of context management.
