Umbraco Accelerates AI Transformation by Appointing Senior Software Engineer to Focus on MCP

When I spoke to Filip Bech-Larsen before Umbraco’s 2025 Codegarden event, he was ecstatic about a lot of things. And rightly so. 

The open source content management system – which has long been dubbed "The Friendly CMS” – was on a roll. Along with a years-long stretch of remarkable growth and an expanding ecosystem of offerings, Umbraco was plotting an ambitious course in the evolving landscape of AI.

Of course, as an open source vendor in a landscape of proprietary solutions, Filip reminded me why Umbraco’s approach to AI was markedly different from other commercial solutions.  

“Our strategy is a little bit different to most of our competitors, and it basically comes down to Umbraco being a platform that you build on top of, instead of being the tool that does everything for you,” he explained. “Like the Lego bricks metaphor, we give you the base plate, and all the blocks, and then you build whatever you want on top of that. And since we're open source, we can't really take a commercial dependency and just integrate directly with ChatGPT because that's not how open source licensing works. So we have a few different tracks around this.”

And the primary vehicle for accessing these tracks is the Umbraco Marketplace, which features a wide range of artificial intelligence plugins, from translators to TinyMCE’s premium package that includes a super handy accessibility checker. He went deeper into the details, which you can read about here. 

Along with these advancements, Filip also shared the first glimpse of Umbraco’s new MCP server, crystallizing the company’s bold steps into the realm of agentic AI. In fact, since Codegarden, MCP has exploded in adoption, with thousands of options now available across a multitude of servers. 

Now, with MCP reaching a fever pitch and becoming a central part of the agentic horizon, Umbraco is doing what it has done over the past twenty years: looking to its open source community. There have already been sparks of AI innovation from across Umbraco’s 250,000 contributors and its international network of digital agency partners. Now, the company’s core team has brought dedicated talent to its inner circle to accelerate the MCP frontier. 

Effective today, Phil Whittaker has been appointed Senior Software Engineer at Umbraco, where he will be focused on the continued development of its MCP server and the maturing of its overall AI strategy. 

Phil Whittaker. Source: LinkedIn

With over 25 years of experience, Phil brings a deep resume to the role, having held positions as a software developer, digital agency founder, CTO, and lead engineer. He’s also worked extensively with Umbraco, uCommerce, and other platforms to build complex, highly integrated websites and digital experiences. 

Phil is also a prominent fixture within Umbraco’s open source software ecosystem, sharing his knowledge with fellow developers and organizing Umbraco user meetups. His commitment to the community has earned him an Umbraco MVP five times. 

“Being part of the Umbraco open-source community over the past fourteen years has made a huge difference to me professionally and personally,” he said. “I’m delighted to join a team of people whose work I have admired for many years.”

“Phil Whittaker is a major contributor within our open-source community and is at the very heart of Umbraco MCP Server development,” said Filip Bech-Larsen. “We’re excited to be able to work alongside him at Umbraco HQ to support organizations as they learn how to harness the power of agentic AI, while retaining full control and transparency over its operation.”

Focused on MCP

A quick reminder if you’re new to MCP: Model Context Protocol is an open standard that enables large language models to connect and communicate with external tools, data sources, and other services. Think of it as a USB-C port for AI, providing a vehicle for LLMs to access and share information. 

This, in turn, enables the development of rich AI agents that can be enlisted to perform complex, real-world actions – and that runs the gamut from ecommerce transactions to wildly imaginative tasks.

Despite all the fervor, the phenomenon of MCP is still pretty fresh. In fact, the standard was launched by Anthropic in November of 2024 and made available as an open source framework. But it caught on quickly, and by spring of this year, the buzz around agentic commerce was palpable – and MCP was seen as a gateway for expanding the agent-to-agent vision.

As Phil explained, he was already developing AI apps and harnessing AI for content generation and coding before ChatGPT was launched. This gave him more of a solid foundation as MCP came on the scene. 

“I started experimenting with Model Context Protocol at the start of this year and was hugely impressed by its potential when combined with a CMS,” he said. “This led me to the development of an MCP Server for Umbraco. It’s incredibly powerful, while providing strong control. We’ve built the right tool in the right way at exactly the right time. As a developer, you don’t come across anything this momentous more than once or twice in your career.”

In September, Phil wrote about the beta release of the Developer MCP Server for Umbraco CMS, which provides a pathway to AI-powered content management capabilities directly in the Umbraco CMS workflow. This was a milestone moment in the continued development of Umbraco’s MCP strategy, signaling his future role in shaping the continued trajectory. 

Why it matters

MCP is a clear game-changer as we move full throttle into the era of agentic AI. For CMS and DXP vendors, having an MCP server has become a strategic imperative, and Umbraco is taking a sage course by elevating an experienced AI pioneer from its own community to shape the next steps of its MCP evolution.

Umbraco continues to enjoy a unique position within the CMS category as the most widely-used open source content management system built on .NET. The platform is trusted by well-established global enterprises like Rubbermaid, but is also a go-to for public sector organizations – reflecting its secure, scalable, and future-proof posture. 

Umbraco’s commitment to accessibility and sustainability is also a testament to its culture, and further reinforces the loyalty of its highly-engaged community of users and developers – clearly one of its strongest attributes. It has also made some smart moves with the rollout of its Umbraco Cloud strategy, which features enterprise-grade scalability and regional hosting. 

While Umbraco is cementing its position as a CMS with MCP capabilities, it’s important to understand your own agentic goals as you evaluate solutions. What I like about the elevation of Phil to the UmbracoHQ team is his proven track record of documenting the value of these tools through a legacy of proven Umbraco experience – and that should translate into greater confidence.

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