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VOTING IS OPEN for the 14th Annual CMS Critic Awards!

CMS Critic Awards - 2025 Voting

<hr /> No doubt about it: 2025 was a BIG year of change for CMS. Agentic AI raged across the digital experience stack, and context was front and center. Platforms transformed before our eyes, but one thing remained the same: the passion and creativity of practitioners. Every day, marketers, editors, and developers rely on the tools they love to get the job done. And, as every year, we take the opportunity to celebrate the continued innovation and hard-fought loyalty of CMS and DX vendors in supporting their customers, partners, and communities. With that in mind… You nominated some amazing platforms for our 14th Annual CMS Critic Awards!Once again, your participation was off the charts. We had some big names make the grade, but a few challengers stirred things up. We had loads of individual suggestions across all of our categories – from CMS to DXP, e-Commerce to CDP – and now YOU get to pick the winners from the top five contenders! Now's your chance: You have until February 27th, 2026 to cast your vote! So get out there and share the news! Activate your communities and bring the rain. Most of all, have fun celebrating the incredible contributions coming from all corners of our industry. Keep reading for the nominee list, or start picking your winners at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/vote">www.cmscritic.com/vote </a> <figure class="media"><div data-oembed-url="https://youtu.be/e2tAX1XiSro"><div style="position:relative;padding-bottom:100%;height:0;padding-bottom:56.2493%"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/e2tAX1XiSro" style="position:absolute;width:100%;height:100%;top:0;left:0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe></div></div></figure> <h3 id="the-nominees">The Nominees</h3>Raise the curtains…. <h4 id="best-free-cms">Best Free CMS</h4><ul><li>Joomla </li><li>Statamic </li><li>TYPO3 </li><li>Umbraco </li><li>Wagtail </li></ul> <h4 id="best-enterprise-cms">Best Enterprise CMS</h4><ul><li>Joomla </li><li>Sitecore </li><li>Storyblok </li><li>TYPO3 </li><li>Umbraco </li></ul> <h4 id="best-headless-cms">Best Headless CMS</h4><ul><li>Contentstack </li><li>Sitecore </li><li>Statamic </li><li>Storyblok </li><li>Umbraco </li></ul> <h4 id="best-open-source-cms">Best Open Source CMS</h4><ul><li>Joomla </li><li>Statamic </li><li>TYPO3 </li><li>Umbraco </li><li>Wagtail </li></ul><h4 id="-"> </h4><h4 id="best-flat-file-cms">Best Flat File CMS</h4><ul><li>11ty </li><li>Grav </li><li>Hugo </li><li>Kirby </li><li>Statamic </li></ul> <h4 id="best-enterprise-content-management-(ecm)">Best Enterprise Content Management (ECM)</h4><ul><li>Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) </li><li>Alfresco </li><li>Box </li><li>Microsoft SharePoint </li><li>OpenText </li></ul> <h4 id="best-digital-experience-platform-(dxp)">Best Digital Experience Platform (DXP)</h4><ul><li>Contentstack </li><li>Kentico </li><li>Optimizely </li><li>Sitecore </li><li>Umbraco  </li></ul> <h4 id="best-website-builder">Best Website Builder</h4><ul><li>SP Page Builder </li><li>uSkinned </li><li>Webflow </li><li>Wix </li><li>YOOtheme </li></ul> <h4 id="best-content-marketing-platform-(cmp)">Best Content Marketing Platform (CMP)</h4><ul><li>Contentstack </li><li>HubSpot </li><li>Optimizely </li><li>Sitecore </li><li>Umbraco </li></ul> <h4 id="best-digital-asset-management-(dam)-system">Best Digital Asset Management (DAM) System</h4><ul><li>Cloudinary </li><li>Contentstack </li><li>Optimizely </li><li>Sitecore </li><li>Umbraco </li></ul> <h4 id="best-product-information-management-(pim)-system">Best Product Information Management (PIM) System</h4><ul><li>Akeneo </li><li>DynamicWeb </li><li>Optimizely </li><li>Pimcore </li><li>Struct </li></ul> <h4 id="best-customer-data-platform-(cdp)">Best Customer Data Platform (CDP)</h4><ul><li>Contentstack </li><li>Microsoft Dynamics 365</li><li>Optimizely </li><li>Segment </li><li>Sitecore </li></ul> <h4 id="best-e-commerce-solution">Best e-Commerce Solution</h4><ul><li>HikaShop </li><li>Shopify </li><li>Sitecore </li><li>Umbraco </li><li>VirtueMart </li></ul> <h4 id="best-development/hosting-platform">Best Development/Hosting Platform</h4><ul><li>Azure </li><li>e-Base </li><li>Laravel Forge </li><li>Netlify </li><li>Vercel </li></ul> <h4 id="best-ai-solution">Best AI Solution</h4><ul><li>Contentstack</li><li>Optimizely </li><li>Sitecore</li><li>Storyblok</li><li>Umbraco</li></ul><h3 id="ready-to-vote-your-heart-out?-">Ready to vote your heart out? </h3>It's you voice, your choice! Tell us which platforms you really love – and who should take home the prize. Remember, you have until February 27th to get your votes in!Do it today at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/vote">www.cmscritic.com/vote </a> <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <img style="width:34.15%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/logo_jday_hor.png" /><h4 id="joomladay-usa-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/">JoomlaDay USA 2026</a></h4>April 29 - May 2, 2026 – Delray Beach, FloridaBe part of the Joomla community in one of the most iconic cities in the world! JoomlaDay USA 2026 is coming to Delray Beach, and you can join us for a dynamic event packed with insights, workshops, and networking opportunities. Learn from top Joomla experts and developers offering valuable insights and real-world solutions. Participate in interactive workshops and sessions and enhance your skills in Joomla management, development, design, and more. And connect with fellow Joomla enthusiasts, developers, and professionals from across the world.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/"> Book your seats today.</a> <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:36.69%" 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>

Vote your heart out! Pick the winners for the 14th Annual CMS Critic Awards

The top nominees are in. Pick the winners before February 27th!

The Zero-Cost Content Paradox

AI is lowering the cost of content production. Can brands avoid drowning in their own content?

An Operating Model to Optimize Content Operations (and Lots of Other Stuff)

An Operating Model to Optimize Content Operations (and Probably Lots of Other Stuff)

<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/critics/michael-spenceley">Michael Spenceley</a> is Leader, Learning &amp; Content Standards - Innovative Medicine at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jnj.com/">Johnson &amp; Johnson</a> and a CMS Critic Contributor. <hr /> Most organizations understand <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/content-operations">content operations</a>, even if there are differences in how it's executed. Generally speaking, it's the foundation of people, processes, and technology that enables a brand to manage its content at scale across a multitude of channels. But it's also a living, breathing activity that requires continuous maintenance and consideration. Regardless of how you navigate the ebb and flow of creating, reviewing, publishing, and managing your content, there are fundamentals that almost every model shares – and areas where things can be optimized and improved.In my years of managing content across large enterprises with distributed teams in highly regulated industries, I've formulated an operating model for optimizing content operations. Not only has it proven very successful in content applications, but it also has the potential to improve collaboration, support strategic goals, and enhance other facets of your business operations.<h3 id="why-is-this-important?">Why is this important?</h3>You may already intuitively think about your operation in this way. However, this structure provides a clear path for continuing to optimize your operation over a longer period. It also gives your team and your broader organization a clear language to articulate where and how work gets done today and a roadmap to get it to where it should be in the future. While I’ve framed this concept in the context of content operations, most of it likely applies to any service delivery operation across a wide range of processes and industries.  <h3 id="what-is-it?">What is it?</h3>This model provides a clear set of options for how work gets done, where it gets done, and who does it – with a focus on ensuring that the how, where, and who is fit for purpose based on the nature of the work. Here is an example of a tiered operating model: <ul><li>Tier 1 – Stays with the business<ul><li>Mostly strategic work that requires a high level of business or product subject matter expertise</li><li>Highest cost tier </li></ul></li><li>Tier 2 – Centralized content services<ul><li>Mix of tactical and strategic, requires moderate level of business or product subject matter expertise, significant content strategy expertise, and proximity to business stakeholders in tier 1</li><li>Lower cost tier</li></ul></li><li>Tier 3 – Outsource/Offshore<ul><li>Mostly transactional, requires low level of business or product subject matter expertise but still requires human intervention</li><li>Low-cost tier</li></ul></li><li>Tier 4 – Automate<ul><li>Transactional, repeatable and requires minimal human intervention</li><li>Lowest cost tier </li></ul></li></ul><h3 id="how-do-you-do-it?">How do you do it?</h3>It’s worth mentioning at this point that all the steps below shouldn’t be done in isolation; they should all be done in partnership with business stakeholders who currently own and interact with these processes. <ol><li>Start by defining the tiers in your model. Determine which tiers already exist and then consider tiers you need in the future that you may not have today.</li><li>Document processes, activities, and tasks that are done in each tier today. It’s up to you how granular you get. If your processes are complex, you’re going to need more granularity. If you plan to split certain activities across tiers, you’re going to need more granularity to understand which parts of the process should sit in different tiers. </li><li>Estimate your cost for each tier. This can be as simple as an average hourly rate by tier.</li><li>Based on cost and complexity of the work in each tier today, consider where you have opportunities to centralize, optimize and move work down the tiers. Work can move down the tiers over time, or it can skip tiers depending on the nature of the work. </li></ol><h3 id="how-might-this-help-you?-">How might this help you? </h3>It provides a roadmap to take in new work in a structured way, and it shows your business partners that you’re willing to collaborate in a way that acknowledges what they value, their pain points, and their appetite for change. In the beginning, you may be focused on work that’s perceived as tactical or tedious that you don’t want to do, but that gives you an opportunity to centralize, standardize and optimize it. This opens the door to begin a conversation about taking on more strategic and impactful work. This doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a journey.  <h3 id="watchouts">Watchouts</h3>Here are some common pitfalls to be aware of as you consider implementing your version of this model:<ul><li>Don’t create unnecessary handoffs. Be thoughtful about splitting up related activities across different tiers. Sometimes it makes sense to keep certain activities together.</li><li>As you implement, you’re moving work between teams, between vendors, and maybe between countries. This is a delicate process that requires a focus on managing and leading through the change.</li><li>While there will be challenges and a learning curve, once a process moves from one tier to another and is stabilized, it should be better than it was before. This isn’t just about cost; it’s about optimization of both the process and the experience of everyone who interacts with that process.</li><li>Make sure your lower-cost tiers (especially automation) actually cost less. If it costs you millions of dollars to build an AI to do a task that a human can do for a few thousand dollars per year, it may not be worth it – at least not yet. As AI becomes more advanced and cheaper, that time will come.</li><li>If you come across activities that just don’t make sense, always question it. Don’t try to optimize something that shouldn’t be done at all.    </li></ul> <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <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>

Michael Spenceley of Johnson & Johnson has a blueprint for improving performance on multiple levels.

<hr /> Most universities don't have one website. They have dozens – sometimes over a hundred. Engineering has its own site. So does Business. Admissions runs campaign landing pages while Alumni Relations maintains a separate portal. Each school, department, and initiative accumulates its own digital presence over time.Managing this ecosystem with legacy tools isn't just an operational headache. It's costing institutions students.<h3 id="the-hidden-cost-of-digital-fragmentation">The Hidden Cost of Digital Fragmentation</h3>The root cause is structural: universities are decentralized by design. Different schools control their own budgets and naturally select their own technology. Over the years, this has produced a patchwork of WordPress instances, aging Drupal installations, and department-specific tools that don't communicate with each other.For IT teams, this means maintaining multiple platforms, each with its own security requirements, update cycles, and vendor relationships. For marketing teams, it means duplicated effort, inconsistent messaging, and constant requests to IT for changes that should take minutes but take weeks <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.caylor-solutions.com/data-silos-stop-hoarding/">(Caylor Solutions).</a>But the real damage shows up in the student experience. Recent data from <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.educause.edu/">Educause</a> reveals the scale of the problem:<ul><li>57% of students report that their institution's digital experience causes them stress at least "sometimes"</li><li>47% have missed a critical deadline – a payment, registration, or assignment – because they couldn't find the information they needed across siloed systems</li><li>41% say this confusion negatively affects their ability to learn or succeed academically</li><li>60% spend more than five minutes trying to locate essential items</li></ul>These aren't minor inconveniences. Missed payment deadlines affect revenue. Missed registration deadlines affect retention. And when nearly half of students struggle to navigate the institution's digital presence, that's a brand problem with enrollment implications.<h3 id="why-traditional-multisite-approaches-fall-short">Why Traditional Multisite Approaches Fall Short</h3>The conventional response to this fragmentation has been multisite architectures – spinning up WordPress or Drupal instances from a shared codebase. This gives institutions limited scale and no governance.You can deploy 50 sites from a central installation. But ensuring brand consistency across all of them? That still requires manual oversight, style guide enforcement, and expensive agency rework when departments inevitably drift. The underlying content remains siloed. The user experience remains fractured.Meanwhile, according to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.cbord.com/">CBORD</a>, 44% of higher education leaders cite implementation complexity as their biggest technology challenge when modernizing. Generic CMS platforms weren't designed for the specific governance requirements of higher education, where you need centralized control over brand and data while preserving departmental autonomy over content.<h3 id="a-different-architectural-approach">A Different Architectural Approach</h3>Solving this problem requires rethinking the relationship between governance and autonomy. The goal isn't to centralize everything — that would create bottlenecks and kill the agility that departments need. The goal is to centralize what must be consistent (brand, data, security) while decentralizing what should be autonomous (content creation, campaign execution).This is the approach we took when building <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://griddo.io/en/">Griddo</a>. The platform emerged from <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.secuoyas.com/en/">Secuoyas</a>, an agency with 18 years of experience working with institutions like IE University. That experience revealed a consistent pattern: universities needed a "connective tissue" that could wrap around their existing systems while providing governance at the ecosystem level.Two architectural decisions proved essential: Embedded Design Systems: Brand Consistency Without BottlenecksThe most visible symptom of fragmentation is inconsistent brand appearance. Even when institutions have comprehensive brand guidelines, enforcement across dozens of sites maintained by different teams is nearly impossible with traditional tools.Griddo addresses this by incorporating a fully brand-tailored Design System directly into the platform core. This isn't a style guide that teams reference – it's a structural constraint that makes brand drift architecturally impossible. Departments get full autonomy over their content while working within components that guarantee visual consistency.The result: marketing teams stop policing brand compliance and start focusing on strategy. Centralized Multi-Site Governance: One Dashboard, Full VisibilityFor institutions managing large ecosystems – some of our clients operate 45+ websites – administrative overhead compounds quickly. Updates that should be instantaneous require coordination across multiple platforms and teams.Griddo's architecture provides a single administrative layer across the entire ecosystem. Marketing campaigns, news, events, faculty profiles, and institutional data can be managed from one location and deployed instantly across every relevant site. This centralization works because of an API-first architecture (MACH: Microservices, API, Cloud, Headless) that integrates with existing university systems – Student Information Systems, CRMs, ERPs – rather than replacing them.<h3 id="measured-results">Measured Results</h3>This isn't theoretical. IE University, operating a complex multi-site ecosystem across multiple languages and programs, has documented concrete outcomes:<ul><li>40% reduction in site management overhead – time previously spent on coordination and maintenance is now redirected to marketing activation</li><li>70% reduction in infrastructure costs – consolidating from multiple platforms to a unified architecture eliminated redundant licensing, hosting, and maintenance expenses</li></ul>These metrics matter because they translate directly to capacity. A 40% reduction in management overhead means the existing team can execute more campaigns, respond faster to market opportunities, and focus on strategic work rather than platform maintenance.<h3 id="the-strategic-imperative">The Strategic Imperative</h3>Digital fragmentation in higher education isn't a technical inconvenience – it's a strategic liability. When students can't find information, they miss deadlines. When they miss deadlines, institutions lose revenue, and retention suffers. When brand presence is inconsistent across dozens of sites, institutional reputation erodes.The solution isn't more platforms or more manual oversight. It's an architecture designed specifically for the governance requirements of higher education: centralized control where it matters, decentralized autonomy where it counts. <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:68.13%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/02/griddo-daniel-serrano-article-featured.jpg" alt="A person holding a tablet PC with Griddo software on it. In the background, there's a university campus." /></figure><h3 id="see-centralized-governance-in-action">See Centralized Governance in Action</h3>If your institution is managing multiple websites with inconsistent technology, fragmented data, and brand drift across departments, the complexity won't resolve itself.To see how a purpose-built DXP handles multi-site governance across a real university ecosystem, request a demo at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://griddo.io/">griddo.io</a>  <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <img style="width:34.15%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/logo_jday_hor.png" /><h4 id="joomladay-usa-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/">JoomlaDay USA 2026</a></h4>April 29 - May 2, 2026 – Delray Beach, FloridaBe part of the Joomla community in one of the most iconic cities in the world! JoomlaDay USA 2026 is coming to Delray Beach, and you can join us for a dynamic event packed with insights, workshops, and networking opportunities. Learn from top Joomla experts and developers offering valuable insights and real-world solutions. Participate in interactive workshops and sessions and enhance your skills in Joomla management, development, design, and more. And connect with fellow Joomla enthusiasts, developers, and professionals from across the world.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/"> Book your seats today.</a> <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:36.69%" 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>

Why Universities With 50 Websites Are Losing Students – And What to Do About It

dserrano

Putting the Human Touch on Hosting: Kinsta’s Matt Reid on Powering the Future of WordPress

matt-garrepy

cms-critic-staff

Agentic AI for Agencies in 2026

bmckeiver

<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/critics/chad-gilbert">Chad Frederick Gilbert</a> is Vice President of Content Marketing at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://npdigital.com/">NP Digital </a>and a CMS Critic contributor.<hr />People are changing the way they search for information online. Previously, they would launch their browser and enter a phrase or keyword into a search engine, then review the list of search results, looking for the most relevant source that met their needs. Sometimes, this process required a substantial amount of time.With the advent of AI, all that has changed. People now explain what they need to large language models (LLMs) and ask them to search, comb through the results, and produce executive summaries. This enables users to locate information simply by having a conversation. As a result, the new science of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://neilpatel.com/blog/generative-engine-optimization-geo/">Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)</a> has emerged, in which marketers craft content to appeal to LLMs. Showing up in those conversations can create new leads, drive traffic to the website, and ultimately lead to increased revenue.Here’s how these changes are affecting content teams, their content management systems (CMSs), digital experience platforms (DXPs), and the types of tools businesses should consider incorporating to improve their GEO results.<h3 id="what-today’s-llms-want">What today’s LLMs want</h3>Marketers now have a new goal: not only attracting AI models to their website but also having AIs cite it in responses to user queries. Publishing content that achieves this requires a different approach.First and foremost, today’s <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.19421">AIs prioritize content that is accessible</a> and offers clear value to the audience. They evaluate pages for the accuracy, reliability, and trustworthiness of their content through fact-checking. They also consider the site’s cybersecurity, transparency, and honesty. Any deceptive tactics or misinformation count against websites.Another element that current AIs are looking for is substance. Today’s <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14436">AI models still like SEO keywords</a> and phrases, but only when they are used in a natural way. Attractive content also demonstrates the depth and richness of true mastery. It not only covers the fundamentals clearly and concisely but also answers common follow-up questions.In addition, authority arguably matters more now. Today’s <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://neilpatel.com/blog/llm-seeding/">AI models consider the source</a>. Authors who have official credentials or qualifications to back up their position, or some kind of lived experience with the topic, have an advantage. The same is true for sources who have been quoted in top-tier publications. If a site has no clear authorship, LLMs recognize this as a bad sign, which has ramifications for the kinds of content that businesses need to produce today.<h3 id="how-to-attract-today’s-ai-models">How to attract today’s AI models</h3>AI models pull from sites that offer authoritative content presented in a clear, structured way that addresses users’ needs. For this reason, content teams now <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcontentmanagement/tip/How-to-integrate-GEO-with-an-SEO-strategy">organize information differently</a> so AI can interpret it more easily. For instance, it’s advisable to use more headings and subheadings, as well as lists marked off with bullet points. It’s also a good idea to use a question-and-answer format or include a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section.To meet the criteria for thoroughness, the text should be thorough, detailed, and concrete. Include definitions of key terms, as well as real-world or hypothetical examples. Backing claims up with supporting evidence is also important, as it reinforces trust. LLMs also appreciate content that explains its own reasoning.To establish authority, use your content to showcase your business leaders, their credentials, and any relevant lived experience. Pursue a PR strategy of earning media coverage in reputable publications to build visibility and credibility. Embed external URLs only from high-quality, disinterested sources like academic studies or industry research in your content.<h3 id="how-ai-makes-marketing-easier">How AI makes marketing easier</h3>While the demands of producing such high-level content might seem daunting, today’s AI technologies also alleviate some of the burden from human staff. Content teams that have implemented AI assistance can work faster and more effectively than ever. AI resources can conduct research, generate ideas, perform quality checks, and even provide preliminary drafts of potential content.The good news is that it’s often not necessary to invest in a whole new CMS or DXP to stay abreast of these changes. Supporting tools that help businesses improve their digital presence are readily available on the market.<h3 id="what-tools-improve-geo">What tools improve GEO</h3>Most businesses don’t need the most advanced CMS or DXP to succeed. They just need a tech stack that supports the production of high-quality content, provides telling insights about the audience, and can measure real-world performance.Here are the tools that most business leaders should incorporate into their workflows:<ul><li>AI-driven content tools: These AIs help produce content, from conducting the underlying research to generating possible outlines and even coming up with potential copy. They can scale your existing content quickly while ensuring consistency and a positive consumer experience.</li><li>GEO optimization tools: These resources optimize your content for today’s LLMs. They find good URLs — both external and internal — to embed in your copy and suggest appropriate metadata and tags. They also analyze the structure of your content and propose improvements, ensuring the page is easy for both humans and AIs to understand. This not only improves the customer experience but also boosts the business’s online visibility.</li><li>Audience insights and analytics platforms: These help you understand your audience. They track how users engage — or fail to engage — with your website. They also sense the patterns that underlie the conversions your business makes. Moreover, they can tell you what your ideal customers search for, steering you toward the right messages.</li><li>Quality-control tools: AI models’ ability to process large amounts of information quickly enables them to spot problems with your content’s quality or consistency. For instance, they can identify broken links and other issues on your website and suggest practical solutions.</li></ul>Having a suite of such tools would help future-proof your enterprise, even as the next AI iteration promises further changes.<h3 id="position-your-business-for-the-future">Position your business for the future</h3>While GEO requires content teams to rethink their approach, having the right resources enables them to create compelling content for humans and AIs alike at scale. By delivering clarity, substance, authority, and trust, marketers can position their organizations to dominate the future. <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <img style="width:34.15%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/logo_jday_hor.png" /><h4 id="joomladay-usa-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/">JoomlaDay USA 2026</a></h4>April 29 - May 2, 2026 – Delray Beach, FloridaBe part of the Joomla community in one of the most iconic cities in the world! JoomlaDay USA 2026 is coming to Delray Beach, and you can join us for a dynamic event packed with insights, workshops, and networking opportunities. Learn from top Joomla experts and developers offering valuable insights and real-world solutions. Participate in interactive workshops and sessions and enhance your skills in Joomla management, development, design, and more. And connect with fellow Joomla enthusiasts, developers, and professionals from across the world.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/"> Book your seats today.</a> <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:36.69%" 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>

How Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and AI are Transforming Content and Human Strategies

chad-gilbert

<hr /> <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassafras">Sassafras</a> is a genus of aromatic, deciduous trees in the Laurel family – Lauraceae, for you nature nerds – which is native to eastern North America and parts of Asia. Known for its distinct, fragrant smell, Sassafras trees have these uniquely variable leaves that can be unlobed, two-lobed (kind of mitten-shaped), or even three-lobed. Funky, but beautiful.Living in the Southeastern U.S., I’ve experienced Sassafras in real life, often a fixture along dense forest trails. They produce a lovely yellow pistillate, and the leaves, twigs, and bark have an almost citrusy or spicy note to them. It’s delightful. Alluring, even. <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:62.04%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/02/sassafras_leaves_june_nbg_261691941.jpg" /></figure>Sassafras Leaves. Source: June Nbg, Wikipedia/Creative Commons Once upon a time, the bark of the Sassafras tree was the primary ingredient in root beer. It’s hence been recreated using artificial flavorings, partly because the oil derived from it – <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.healthline.com/health/sassafras-drug">called Safrole</a> – has hallucinogenic properties as a mild empathogen. Translation: you feel closeness and affection as it coerces your brain to release serotonin and dopamine.Right now, people could use a dose of Sassafras as they melt down over the “SaaSafras” – a more-than-mild tech selloff seemingly induced by <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.anthropic.com/">Anthropic’s</a> new plugins for its <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.anthropic.com/webinars/future-of-ai-at-work-introducing-cowork">Claude Cowork</a> agent, which were launched last Friday. In simplest terms, Claude Cowork is an agentic AI workspace that goes beyond answering questions. It can perform CRUD functions (create, read, update, delete) on files and folders on your computer, helping you execute tasks and not just engage in Q&amp;A conversations. Less like a chatbot, more like a digital coworker that can get stuff done.The real buzz is around those plugins, which are designed to automate specialized tasks across departments like marketing, legal, and customer support. Imagine drafting an email in your brand voice, then having a legal agent review it for risk.That sounds cool. But as we’ve seen, it’s hammering stocks as investors weigh the potential for organizations to just rely on these agents over traditional software. Enterprise giants like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/salesforce">Salesforce</a> are feeling a major pinch. Professional services and advertising firms like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.publicisgroupe.com/en/splash-en">Publicis</a> are taking a hit as faster automation and shrinking demand for traditional IT services become a shadowy specter along the growth highway.<h3 id="more-fear-in-the-ai-forest-">More fear in the AI forest </h3>Like we haven't had enough anxiety from the likes of AI. Fact is, we've been talking about a “SaaS implosion” as a byproduct of the agentic evolution for quite some time.The impact is being felt broadly. This includes the categories of CMS, digital experience, and martech vendors, all rolling in a hyperbolic field of “SaaSafras,” anxious that their software might be rendered obsolete by Claude – which, ironically, has been a common companion in the evolution of their own tools.As expected, software business leaders have pushed back, hoping to quell the fear – but offering sage points. As <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/cognizant-ceo-reacts-after-anthropic-claude-cowork-crashes-saas-stocks-says-ai-is-not-magic-2863547-2026-02-05">Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar</a> said today, AI isn’t magic. It’s not a “plug-and-play switch” that delivers results overnight. If that were the case, we would have seen more economic gains over the last three years. Instead, we’ve been served consistent data that tells a different story: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/">95% of AI projects fail</a> before reaching production. 5% of active agentic systems are <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/agentic-panic-new-study-finds-ai-agents-in-production-face-infrastructure-and-reliability-challenges">being refactored every 30 days.</a> And a recent survey from PwC indicates that 56% of CEOs are getting “nothing” from their AI adoption efforts. Investments have been costly, and boards are beginning to focus hard on ROI.By all accounts, AI isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. At least not yet. But we’re still spooked by Claude. Why? Because we thrive on hype. So let’s take a step back to see the forest through the trees. Enterprises don’t just buy software – they buy trust. They buy assurances around HIPAA compliance and FedRAMP. They buy accountability and a single throat to choke. They buy performance, security, and scalability for critical workflows. They don’t just buy products. They buy outcomes.I’m sure Claude’s plugins will make an impact on productivity. It might be enough to rock some of the overall boat away from big, multi-year software licenses. But they can’t replace a system of authority that provides control, governance, and confidence. With AI, code might become a commodity, but context is the real goldmine. Legacy players like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/adobe-experience-manager">Adobe</a> have customer data that provides an irreplicable scaffolding for their own LLM ambitions. Meanwhile, hyperscalers like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/aws">AWS</a> are adding services that will enable SaaS players to accelerate their agentic AI strategies. That could level the playing field and create opportunities.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://pitchbook.com/news/reports/q1-2026-pitchbook-analyst-note-clash-of-the-titans">As Pitchbook said,</a> this is like the era of laying fiber before the internet boom, and there are durable moats. We just need to know where to dig them.<h3 id="is-this-the-end-of-saas?">Is this the end of SaaS?</h3>It's a loaded question. Clearly, we're seeing challenges and pressures to the prevailing models. But will this erase the companies behind them, or just force an evolution of how they monetize their services? And what happens to the people behind the products in this great reckoning?I agree with <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/jensen-huang-demanding-roi-from-ai-strategy-testing/">Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang,</a> who dismissed the idea that AI will make software obsolete. He called it illogical, doubling down on how SaaS tools will use and be used by AI, not replaced by it. He even said that “demanding ROI from AI is like forcing a child to make a business plan for a hobby.”He went on to say that AI tools have freed up employee time and hasn’t wiped out roles. In fact, from his vantage point, it’s enabling teams to focus on more forward-thinking initiatives and improving core strengths. Despite Amazon’s recent <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/2026/aws-layoffs-hit-u-s-and-canada-employees-as-amazon-sheds-16-000-jobs">gutting of 16,000 mid-level workers,</a> large-scale displacement didn’t happen as it was predicted (at least not yet). I wrote about this in my <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/backoff-on-the-ai-layoffs-domos-chris-willis-on-the-future-of-work-in-2026">interview with Domo’s Chris Willis,</a> where companies that have downsized with AI have quietly hired back skilled workers.But labor is, indeed, shifting on all sides. The old model of paying for SaaS software is dying on the Sassafras vine as single-seat software paradigms are replaced by AI agents performing high-value tasks. This is where software companies could move up the ladder as a replacement mechanism – and with that growth, create more of the jobs and opportunities of the future. I say might, because it’s anyone’s guess.Is there reason for concern? Absolutely. CMS is changing in profound ways as content transforms. Licensing models are being disrupted. Composable patterns have made it easier to move from one technology to another. And yes, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cursor.com/">Cursor</a> can vibe code its way to a working website using markdown and sidestep its need for a market-leading headless CMS.But even if an app can be replaced with a vibe-coded tool or a Claude Cowork plugin, is that the best decision for your business? In some cases, it could be. The cost savings and efficiencies will be there. In others, having a solid, proven system of record is the only way to go. <h3 id="smell-the-‘saasafras’?">Smell the ‘SaaSafras’?</h3>There’s a lot of choice emerging in all of this, but it’s been building. Incrementally. We didn’t just arrive here yesterday. And it’s true: some vendors won’t survive what’s ahead. But hasn't that always been the case? Do we really need <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://chiefmartec.com/2025/05/2025-marketing-technology-landscape-supergraphic-100x-growth-since-2011-but-now-with-ai/">15,384 tools</a> on the Martec Supergraphic? <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:78.12%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/02/screenshot-2026-02-05-at-3.png" /></figure>The 2025 Martec Supergraphic. Source: Chiefmartec.com So how do we move forward? Here are some things to focus on:<ul><li>Innovate on the agentic edge but concentrate on productive, workflow-critical solutions where AI can act as a control plane for real work and deliver tangible impact.</li><li>Make governance your moat. Enterprises will always experiment, but in 2026, they’re trading AI novelty for security, scalability, compliance – and, of course, board-worthy results.</li><li>Turn proprietary context into leverage, not just training data. Use the hard-earned structural fundamentals that surround your valuable data – things like schemas and history. They're one of the most important pillars of your IP.</li><li>Kill seat-based pricing before agents kill it for you, and move to outcome- and value-based models.</li><li>Win on orchestration, not generation, because the future belongs to platforms that can manage chaos – not just create more stuff. This is one of the keys to enduring business value.</li></ul><h3 id="the-strongest-roots-will-survive">The strongest roots will survive</h3>That smell in the air today is panic. An emotional sweat that’s a little disorienting and easy to mistake for something more pungent than it actually is. But this “SaaSafras” moment we’re in isn’t a signal to flee the forest. It’s a reminder to pay attention to what’s growing beneath the canopy. AI agents are absolutely reshaping how software is built, bought, and used. But they won’t replace the need for trust, context, and systems of real accountability.The vendors that survive this moment won’t be the ones clinging to the old models. They’ll be the ones cultivating deep roots or growing new lobes of innovation. When the hype fades, durable platforms will adapt in the wild – and remain standing. <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <img style="width:34.15%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/logo_jday_hor.png" /><h4 id="joomladay-usa-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/">JoomlaDay USA 2026</a></h4>April 29 - May 2, 2026 – Delray Beach, FloridaBe part of the Joomla community in one of the most iconic cities in the world! JoomlaDay USA 2026 is coming to Delray Beach, and you can join us for a dynamic event packed with insights, workshops, and networking opportunities. Learn from top Joomla experts and developers offering valuable insights and real-world solutions. Participate in interactive workshops and sessions and enhance your skills in Joomla management, development, design, and more. And connect with fellow Joomla enthusiasts, developers, and professionals from across the world.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/"> Book your seats today.</a> <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:36.69%" 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>

Smell the 'SaaSafras'? Anthropic’s new AI tools are a reminder that change is in the air, but panic stinks

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Orchestrate and Create: Umbraco Compose Streamlines Integration of New Technologies and Agentic AI

MVPs Assemble: Sitecore Recognizes 213 Digital Innovators as ‘Most Valuable Professionals’ for 2026

<hr /> When I first saw <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominik-xperience-pinter/">Dominik Pinter</a> at the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">Boye &amp; Company CMS Kickoff 26</a> in St. Petersburg two weeks ago, he was running on the pier under cool but balmy skies.This wasn't at all out of character. We've covered some miles together at previous conferences. He’s a man on the move, constantly looking ahead and chasing what’s on the horizon. Endurance is an asset in tech. Just try keeping up with him.That said, you can’t get very far as a distance runner if you’re not grounded in the present. And in many ways, that’s what defines his leadership at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.kentico.com/">Kentico</a>: a clear focus on the future grounded in world-class support for customers and partners in the here and now.That’s a good formula for winning a race – even if you’re facing serious headwinds. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/kentico-achieves-big-milestones-in-2025-citing-ai-innovation-and-xperience-by-kentico-as-key-drivers">In a recent article,</a> the Kentico CEO echoed the challenges that many CMS and DXP vendors faced in 2025, but quickly noted that it was a “transformative year” that saw over <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.kentico.com/CMSModules/Newsletters/CMSPages/Redirect.ashx?linkguid=0192112e-93c7-4bd7-b015-f29c33f4fadd&amp;email=matt%40cmscritic.com&amp;hash=be0d1d8f19e0858f5111492f222eca952b1f9d98aaaeebe1c4c04b9dec830ced">100 new digital projects</a> launched on its stellar <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.kentico.com/platform">Xperience by Kentico</a> platform. The evolution to its new multichannel content management, marketing, and digital commerce solution has been a long one, but it’s paying off in new opportunities and growth. <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:36.54%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/12/image-1765977570953.png" /></figure>Kentico CEO Dominik Pinter. Source: Kentico website Along with its investment in the AI horizon – crystallized by <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.kentico.com/platform/aira">AIRA</a>, Kentico’s native AI agent that streamlines the creation, optimization, and time to deploy for digital experiences – Dominik and his company are embarking on the next chapter in its 20-plus-year history. One that focuses on empowering brands, builders, and marketers in entirely new ways.That excitement level was amplified today as the company announced a major leap forward in its AI ambitions: the launch of its <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.kentico.com/platform/agentic-marketing-suite">AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite.</a> As the name implies, it’s powered by specialized agents built to execute defined marketing and content tasks, reinforcing Kentico’s vision that AI should be operational, transparent, and embedded directly into how teams work. “Marketers have no shortage of ideas,” Dominik said. “What they need is the bandwidth to bring them to life. With the Agentic Marketing Suite, we’re giving teams a way to scale their expertise, cut through complexity, and deliver results faster.”Kentico’s AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite is a reflection of the evolution that marketers are experiencing: higher velocity. More noise. Too many tools. It gives marketing teams more space, allowing them to move from planning to live experiences without the very real drag of delays or cumbersome tools. And because it’s built directly into Xperience by Kentico, it has the essential AI-powered workflows to support a full lifecycle of activities – from planning, content creation, testing, and optimization – all in one place.The goal: turn marketing ideas into measurable results faster. <h3 id="leveraging-aira-as-the-foundation-of-an-ai-powered-marketing-suite">Leveraging AIRA as the foundation of an AI-powered marketing suite</h3>As mentioned, AIRA (Artificial Intelligence Recommendations &amp; Assistance) is at the heart of Kentico’s AI strategy, providing marketers with easily accessible tools that cut down on repetitive work and simplify daily tasks. At its core, Kentico’s Agentic Marketing Suite is an evolution of AIRA, transforming it from the role of a digital assistant and into an orchestrated system of specialized AI agents that support the full marketing lifecycle, from strategy and content creation to optimization and campaign execution. What really shines with AIRA is that it’s easy to use and always within arm’s reach. As a digital companion, it works across your Kentico DXP, automating content on the go and providing task-specific guidance through an in-product conversational chat interface and intuitive in-context icons.  <figure class="media"><div data-oembed-url="https://youtu.be/qxKEIGpJh2c"><div style="position:relative;padding-bottom:100%;height:0;padding-bottom:56.2493%"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qxKEIGpJh2c" style="position:absolute;width:100%;height:100%;top:0;left:0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe></div></div></figure> ARIA offers <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.kentico.com/discover/blog/new-in-aira">a wide range of features,</a> from automatic translation and content tagging to campaign ideation, customer journey insights, instant product guidance, and more. It’s everything you expect from an AI copilot in your platform, and it’s secure and scalable on <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/microsoft-azure">Microsoft Azure.</a> All of these capabilities have enriched AIRA as the foundation for Kentico’s Agentic Marketing Suite, serving as an automation engine for marketers. <h3 id="what’s-in-the-agentic-marketing-suite?">What’s in the Agentic Marketing Suite?</h3>Kentico is framing its new platform as marketing’s “virtual team,” enabling users to create, test, and optimize without switching tools. It helps you turn your ideas into action, simply by telling it what you want to do with natural language.In the Agentic Marketing Suite, AI “teammates” support your strategy, content creation, and optimization tasks. These agents function as dedicated virtual collaborators, designed to assist with specific tasks. You can add teammates as your needs evolve, from content applications to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_engine_optimization">Generative Engine Optimization (GEO),</a> sidestepping the need to hire specialists for every specialized role. And you get real outputs you can take to the bank – not just partial snippets that require additional heavy lifting.  <figure class="media"><div data-oembed-url="https://youtu.be/HIUKAIFv_08"><div style="position:relative;padding-bottom:100%;height:0;padding-bottom:56.2493%"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HIUKAIFv_08" style="position:absolute;width:100%;height:100%;top:0;left:0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe></div></div></figure> Among the first available in the Suite is the Content Strategist, which helps shape and refine content strategies through intelligent analysis and recommendations. Additional agents will be introduced as part of Kentico’s ongoing release, expanding support into areas such as campaign management, market analysis, and workflow optimization. Each addition will focus on improving speed, precision, and impact for marketing teams. The central benefit is clear: marketers can now accelerate their path from idea to execution. With automation as part of the technical DNA, the Suite can help mitigate the arduous back-and-forth between various marketing functions like SEO and UX. It’s also designed to work seamlessly with your content and business context – something Kentico’s VP of Product <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/debbie-tucek/">Debbie Tucek</a> has emphasized as a key tenet for making AI work for organizations. Embedded in Xperience by Kentico, the Agentic Marketing Suite is also imbued with many of the foundational competencies you would expect from a hardened system of authority – things like clear roles and permissions, and built-in safeguards that maintain reliable and performant automations ar scale. <h3 id="why-it-matters">Why it matters</h3>More than ever, marketers are in a high-pressure vice grip to perform. Plagued by tool fatigue, cognitive overload, and a growing anxiety around the pace of change with AI, they need reliable solutions to help them feel more in control while achieving measurable outcomes. Translation: they need real solutions, not hype.Kentico continues to prove itself as a go-to technology and dedicated partner for building, supporting, and managing enterprise workloads across a bevy of use cases. The platform has endeared itself to a growing number of partners, proving to be incredibly extensible – and committed to an ambitious innovation arc with its transition to Xperience by Kentico.Now, with its AI evolution in full thrust and its AIRA assistant driving positive user feedback, the introduction of an Agentic Marketing Suite holds real promise. I like the clear focus on agents personified as “teammates” that can accomplish high-utility tasks, and having a system of authority that helps facilitate the complete marketing lifecycle is key. With brands and teams struggling to keep up with change, having a strong, natively-integrated solution is becoming a more attractive play.Kentico has also been nurturing a strong global partnership channel, so agencies could provide another dimension of community resource and validation when it comes to harnessing these capabilities as part of a more holistic implementation. We'll be connecting with some of them as well. My recommendation: This is a fresh announcement, and we'll be doing a deeper dive into the features, capabilities, and licensing options. Stay tuned. But as a marketing suite, it looks sweet – and it's certainly a promising track for Kentico as it looks to expand its value in a tight market where the ROI surrounding AI and software investments is under the microscope. With a proven track record and a vetted entity in AIRA, they have all the right pieces to make this a solid offering and provide a stronger market alternative to upstream competitors. Marketers should bring a scrutinizing eye to any demo, but concentrate on the use cases for agent tasks and how they align with your specific needs. My guess is that Kentico’s elegant approach to UX could make adoption even easier.  <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <img style="width:34.15%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/logo_jday_hor.png" /><h4 id="joomladay-usa-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/">JoomlaDay USA 2026</a></h4>April 29 - May 2, 2026 – Delray Beach, FloridaBe part of the Joomla community in one of the most iconic cities in the world! JoomlaDay USA 2026 is coming to Delray Beach, and you can join us for a dynamic event packed with insights, workshops, and networking opportunities. Learn from top Joomla experts and developers offering valuable insights and real-world solutions. Participate in interactive workshops and sessions and enhance your skills in Joomla management, development, design, and more. And connect with fellow Joomla enthusiasts, developers, and professionals from across the world.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/"> Book your seats today.</a> <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:36.69%" 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>

Introducing the Agentic Marketing Suite: Kentico Extends its AI Strategy to Power Marketing Teams

Bot Brilliance: ai12z Launches Vibe Coding for Digital Assistants, Personalization, and Adaptive Web Pages

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

<hr /> Security will always be a critical pillar for modern software, particularly as more threats permeate the perimeter. But security is more than just a technology consideration, and requires the fortification of best practices and policies to complete the picture. As an open source content management system with multiple products in its ecosystem, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/umbraco">Umbraco</a> continues to invest in bolstering its own security posture – and just announced that it has achieved the globally recognized <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.iso.org/standard/27001">ISO/IEC 27001:2022</a> certification.According to Umbraco CEO <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/the-right-person-to-lead-umbraco-appoints-mats-persson-as-ceo-reflecting-growth-ahead">Mats Persson</a>, this certification reflects the CMS’s growth and adoption by larger, multinational enterprises and organizations operating in highly regulated industries. It also enhances an already strong foundation of security-focused benchmarks that the company has attained.  <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:36.25%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/image-1769732833624.png" /></figure>Umbraco CEO Mats Persson “We already implement robust information security processes to comply with the NIS2 Directive and EU Cyber Resilience Act,” Persson said. “ISO 27001 certification provides our global partners and customers with the reassurance that Umbraco follows international best practices governing the way that our products process, store, and protect sensitive data.”<h3 id="setting-a-higher-bar-for-security">Setting a higher bar for security</h3>ISO – the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.iso.org/standard/27001">International Organization for Standardization</a> – maintains a rigorous process for achieving ISO/IEC 27001 accreditation. It’s well-regarded as the world's best-known standard for information security management systems (ISMS), and defines the core requirements it must meet.The ISO/IEC 27001 standard provides companies of any size – from all sectors of activity – with guidance for establishing, implementing, maintaining, and continually improving an information security management system.ISO 27001 provides a proven framework for several key requirements, starting with identifying and managing security risks and ensuring consistent and documented security practices are in place. Recipients of the certification must also support accountability and transparency across their teams, and continuously review and update their security systems and practices as their products and organizations evolve.Meeting ISO/IEC 27001 means Umbraco has instituted a system to manage risks related to the security of data that is owned or handled by the company, and that its system respects all the best practices and principles outlined in this standard.<h3 id="enhancing-security-to-support-the-partner-ecosystem">Enhancing security to support the partner ecosystem</h3>The ISO/IEC 27001 certification applies specifically to Umbraco’s product organization and follows an extensive audit of its people, processes, and technologies by an independent security specialist. It validates the company's fierce commitment to maintaining the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive data within its products.While the accreditation is a technical achievement, the investment in the process was also part of Umbraco’s ongoing support for its digital agency partners, which are increasingly winning deals with global enterprises – particularly brands and organizations with large workloads handling sensitive data. This includes complex websites and e-commerce sites.“Gaining the ISO 27001 certification shows that independent auditors have scrutinized the processes used to develop, operate, and maintain Umbraco products, and confirmed that the company reviews and manages security risks on an ongoing basis,” Persson added. “This is a milestone on a continuous security journey.”<h3 id="why-it-matters">Why it matters</h3>Umbraco is already demonstrating its ambitions for global growth, and this ISO certification is further evidence of its drive towards the enterprise layer. Having already complied with the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.google.com/search?q=NIS2+Directive&amp;rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS763US764&amp;oq=NIS2+direct&amp;gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqDAgAEAAYQxiABBiKBTIMCAAQABhDGIAEGIoFMgYIARBFGDkyBwgCEAAYgAQyBwgDEAAYgAQyBwgEEAAYgAQyBwgFEAAYgAQyBwgGEAAYgAQyBwgHEAAYgAQyDAgIEAAYQxiABBiKBTIHCAkQABiABNIBCDMyMTFqMGo3qAIAsAIA&amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;ved=2ahUKEwiYhOmJg7KSAxV-1fACHXraPBYQgK4QegYIAQgAEAM">NIS2 Directive</a> (the comprehensive, EU-wide cybersecurity legislation that strengthens security for critical infrastructure and digital services) as well as the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/cyber-resilience-act">EU Cyber Resilience Act,</a> Umbraco is well-positioned to sell into regulated industries with the most important product of all: trust. <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <img style="width:34.15%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/logo_jday_hor.png" /><h4 id="joomladay-usa-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/">JoomlaDay USA 2026</a></h4>April 29 - May 2, 2026 – Delray Beach, FloridaBe part of the Joomla community in one of the most iconic cities in the world! JoomlaDay USA 2026 is coming to Delray Beach, and you can join us for a dynamic event packed with insights, workshops, and networking opportunities. Learn from top Joomla experts and developers offering valuable insights and real-world solutions. Participate in interactive workshops and sessions and enhance your skills in Joomla management, development, design, and more. And connect with fellow Joomla enthusiasts, developers, and professionals from across the world.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/"> Book your seats today.</a> <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:36.69%" 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>

Umbraco Lands ISO 27001 Certification, Bolstering Its Security Posture

<hr /> To borrow from poker: In 2026, AI is already becoming table stakes in the enterprise software game. And while many of the high-utility agentic capabilities I'm seeing are aimed at value, many features are converging – and in some cases, looking the same.One area that’s still nascent is the flourishing new class of app builders (think <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://base44.com/">Base44</a> or <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://replit.com/">Replit</a>). In the realm of vibe coding, they provide a great resource for prototyping by lowering the barrier for development. Now, almost anyone can build a software or business application with just an idea and a prompt, and that's becoming a popular marketing mantra.The problem? Many of these conjured experiments fall off the tracks before they ever reach production – stymied by underperforming code, poor maintainability, and a lack of alignment with enterprise data and security standards.During my recent keynote at the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">Boye &amp; Company CMS Kickoff 26</a> in St. Petersburg, I talked about the final frontier of adaptable UX in enterprise software – specifically in <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/what-is-a-content-management-system-cms">content management</a> and digital experience platforms. We’re beginning to see this take shape as some platforms are giving users more control and customization over things like visualization. In certain tools, there's even the presence of handy app studios for building curated dashboards and experiences. At the same time, they’re leveraging a performant, scalable, and secure foundation of an authoritative platform – ensuring compliance and accountability where it matters. This is where <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.domo.com/app-catalyst">Domo’s new App Catalyst</a> is making waves. Most of today’s AI app builders are optimized for speed, but miss the mark when it comes to managing data, logic, and governance across multiple systems. App Catalyst is designed for what happens after – when applications must be maintained, trusted, and scaled across an enterprise.As Domo’s Chief Technology Officer and EVP of Product <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/darenthayne/">Daren Thayne</a> said, vibe coding showed us how fast ideas can turn into software. But speed alone doesn’t create the durable value that enterprises need. <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:38%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/image-1769704595338.png" /></figure>Domo’s Chief Technology Officer and EVP of Product Daren Thayne “The next evolution is moving from raw code generation to composing applications that are governed by design and grounded in trusted data,” he said. “App Catalyst is an important step in that direction. It gives teams a production-ready foundation they can extend confidently, instead of starting from code that was never meant to scale.”App Catalyst is a reflection of Domo’s broader vision for the future of the intelligent enterprise, where AI does more than accelerate experimentation. It helps people and organizations compose scalable, governed applications that connect data, workflows, and people in a single, trusted platform. But AI is nothing if it can’t support the people using it. In my recent conversation with <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/backoff-on-the-ai-layoffs-domos-chris-willis-on-the-future-of-work-in-2026">Domo’s Chief Design Officer, Chris Willis</a>, we discussed the importance of human judgment when using AI tools and technologies. “The hard part is judgment, and that's an essential human skill," he told me. "I don't see models as possessing that.”At least not yet. But until then, Domo is powering its users with AI tools that are designed to give them more domain than ever before while easing the journey.Here’s a bit more on how App Catalyst works.<h3 id="rapid-app-building-for-the-enterprise">Rapid app building for the enterprise</h3>Unlike tools that focus solely on raw code generation, App Catalyst is really designed for enterprise applications. It helps you compose production-ready app frameworks that integrate with your existing data, governance, and security standards – ensuring that your apps are scalable, compliant, and ready to grow with your business. It also avoids the trap of accruing copious amounts of tech debt or tapping additional engineering resources.To be clear, App Catalyst is Domo-centric, leveraging its performant backbone. Users can describe the kind of app they want to build using natural language and instantly generate a functional framework that runs directly on their existing data in Domo. The resulting app foundation seamlessly integrates with Domo datasets and is deployed through Domo’s <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.domo.com/automation/low-code-app-development">App Studio</a> – which is designed for building analytics apps with low-code, drag-and-drop tools. It automatically inherits Domo’s governance and security model, including per-user data access permissions. If real data isn’t available yet, App Catalyst generates placeholder data so teams can start building immediately.At 50,000 feet, App Catalyst is telegraphing a shift in how organizations are building with AI in 2026 and beyond. Early vibe coding approaches might have focused on generating raw code quickly, but real enterprise impact requires a move toward composition over generation. App Catalyst is a foundation for that future, one where AI helps teams assemble governed, production-ready app frameworks that align with data access, security, and operational standards from the start. This evolution moves organizations away from fragile experiments and toward scalable app building that can actually grow with your business.<h3 id="from-prompt-to-production">From prompt to production</h3>Rather than attempting to deliver a finished application in one step, App Catalyst provides a strong, production-ready starting point. Teams can iterate quickly with live code generation, preview changes instantly, and publish apps with a single click, then continue refining and customizing the application to meet evolving requirements.As you might guess, App Catalyst brings real AI efficiency to its building experience. It’s frictionless prototyping, allowing you to rapidly ideate and iterate using natural language prompts – and move an idea to a functional app framework in minutes.The entire experience is self-service, so you can build a pro-code app foundation without extensive upfront engineering to get there. That means almost anyone, even users with no technical skills, can bring an app to life.Most importantly, App Catalyst provides fierce governance. This is a big one, as most enterprises have to ensure that their apps meet their internal compliance requirements. With App Catalyst, whatever you create automatically respects user-level data access and security policies.<figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:86.2%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/image-1769703695369.png" alt="A screenshot of a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect." /></figure>Source: Domo website Getting started is super easy. Like other AI interfaces, you use a basic prompt to describe the app you’re looking to build. You’re then moved to a split-screen view as it renders before your eyes.On the left side, you get a breakdown of what App Catalyst generated. On the right, you can see what it created. And it's not just a dashboard or a view, but a true application – complete with models, text fields, and check boxes. Brass tacks: It usually takes two to five minutes to generate an app using App Catalyst, although times may vary. On <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.domo.com/app-catalyst">Domo’s website,</a> there’s a great demo video that walks you through the step-by-step process, but jumps over the rendering lag. So keep that in mind when you're test-driving the experience.  <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:78.12%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/image-1769703695361.png" alt="A screenshot of a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect." /></figure>Source: Domo website You can also expand and build complete Domo App Studio apps, which can fit in with any other Studio components. If you’re more technical and you’re looking to customize your app further, you can make edits using Pro Code, which gives you direct access to the underlying HTML. <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:76.86%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/image-1769703695406.png" alt="A screenshot of a computer screen

AI-generated content may be incorrect." /></figure>Source: Domo website The finished product (in this case, a marketing intelligence command center) reflects the speed and efficacy of the App Catalyst framework. By removing the need for complex setups – or starting from scratch – you can focus on delivering value and avoid the morass of complex logistics. And you can keep on optimizing and refining your layouts and visualizations using the same natural language prompts. <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:82.27%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/image-1769703695336.png" alt="A screenshot of a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect." /></figure>Source: Domo website As I already mentioned, you can connect to live datasets in Domo or play with dummy data to experiment with the capabilities. App Catalyst ensures your apps are functional and compliant, and automatically respects enterprise-grade governance and security controls. This includes per-user data access permissions, row-level permissions, and column-level masking, ensuring your apps are compliant and secure from the start.App Catalyst might initially appeal to product managers, developers, and savvy practitioners – enabling them to visualize requirements, demonstrate concepts to stakeholders, and prototype digital products quickly. But over time, Domo plans to expand these capabilities to empower business users to validate ideas, test market hypotheses, and explore what is possible with data-driven applications, all while reducing dependency on IT teams.<h3 id="the-verdict">The verdict</h3>Domo has always understood the value of data and how we, as individuals and teams, use and experience it. Making it actionable is the key – and with App Catalyst, they’re moving beyond the barriers of studio-grade customization tools and into the realm of true AI app creation. You can describe your app vision in plain language, and the AI handles all the heavy lifting.My recommendation: While App Catalyst will likely appeal to more technical users (particularly those who are already customizing aspects of their Domo experience), its natural language interface will make it accessible to ambitious low-code/no-code users. That said, enterprise teams should build testing and experimentation paradigms to ensure performant outcomes – and develop general policies and best practices around app generation within their organization’s environment. The big upside: as Domo expands these capabilities, App Catalyst will likely become even more reliant and user-friendly for business users who want to build apps without burdening IT. Definitely worth a test-drive.  <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>

From AI idea to production-ready app in minutes? Meet Domo’s new App Catalyst

Delivering hyper-personalized B2B content with a modern CMS

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Hard? Hardly. Drupal CMS 2.0 evolves open source content management with AI, visual building – and simplicity

<hr /> When I spoke to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/coremedia">CoreMedia</a> CEO <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/soerenstamer/">Sören Stamer</a> back in December, we were waxing philosophically about the year ahead. He went deep into topics like data and digital sovereignty, a persistent theme at our recent <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">Boye &amp; Company CMS Kickoff</a> conference in St. Petersburg, Florida. Along with the anticipated (and explosive) growth of AI – where Sören sees big potential for agentic commerce and AI-powered interfaces – he also talked about the next wave of personalization and its impact on experiences.“Personalization isn’t new,” he told me. “What’s new is its velocity. Hyper-personalization means connecting intent, data, and content in real time, and anticipating needs before they’re expressed.” Personalization has certainly been one of the more elusive features for digital experience tools. Or, at least, doing it right – both sustainably and at scale. As Sören said, we’ve been talking about platform-centric and third-party personalization tools for the last two decades, but AI and new experience models are finally raising the bar. To realize the promise, CoreMedia has been busy innovating – and today, it launched a major evolution of its CMS that embeds personalization and real-time experimentation directly into the content workflow. This comes at a time when enterprises are swimming in oceans of customer data but struggling to transform it into relevant experiences for consumers. Simultaneously, users are opting for personalized experiences that are clear, transparent, and capable of solving real problems. It’s at this intersection that CoreMedia powers the potential of personalization by reducing or even eliminating the friction between insight and action.With its new native features, CoreMedia will give teams the ability to create, test, and optimize personalized content variants inside its industry-leading CMS. Armed with this added flexibility and insight, brands can now respond to customer intent in the moments that matter most – and turn relevance into measurable growth.“Enterprises don’t have a data problem – they have an action problem,” Sören explained. “Customer intent shows up in real time and needs to be acted upon instantly. When marketing teams are forced to work with disconnected tools and manual processes, they often miss the chance. By making personalization and experimentation native to the CMS, CoreMedia enables teams to respond in the moment intent appears. That’s where experiences are won or lost, and where relevance turns into revenue.”CoreMedia has been actively innovating at the edge of AI for quite some time. Case in point: its <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.coremedia.com/coremedia-kio">CoreMedia KIO</a> assistant brings expansive tooling for content and journey experience orchestration. As part of its integrated ecosystem, it adds a bleeding-edge dimension of functionality to help craft CX in new ways – including a conversational interface that transforms user engagement.Along with its strides to make progressive, GEO-ready capabilities part of its elemental playbook, CoreMedia continues to offer foundational CMS features that rank strongly with global retailers that are hyper-focused on delivering world-class experiences. This includes the likes of The North Face, Vans, and Timberland from VF Corporation – as well as B2B stalwarts like Emerson and Sonepar.As Sören told me, one of the big bets CoreMedia is making is that the customer experience of the future will be unified. Clearly, personalization and experimentation will be vital to delivering on that holistic vision.Here’s a bit more detail on how CoreMedia’s evolutionary new capabilities work. <h3 id="bringing-native-personalization-to-the-content-workflow">Bringing native personalization to the content workflow</h3>Often, personalization has been a mixed domain of technologies, cobbled together to deliver a complete solution. But with CoreMedia’s native approach, personalization is no longer a downstream task handled in external tools. Now, content teams can create, manage, and optimize personalized variants directly inside CoreMedia’s CMS, harnessing the same familiar workspace they utilize for content production. CoreMedia already offers an elegant UX, and users will find the addition of audience insights, targeting rules, and variant controls all within arm’s reach. This promises to help teams move seamlessly – and in real time – from creation to activation. <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:68.62%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/image-1769540029544.png" alt="Image" /></figure> Personalized content variants are created, tested, and optimized in real time directly within the CMS. Source: CoreMedia One of the biggest benefits is the speed and efficacy. Using the CMS, teams can produce tailored versions of any text block, banner, promotion, or other content asset. In seconds, they can deliver focused messages to the right audience at the right moment – all without duplicating content or managing different versions.There’s also a composable and extensible framework supporting the engine. Segments can be created directly in CoreMedia or synced from CRM, CDP, and other systems, ensuring teams work with the most complete customer profiles. CoreMedia’s targeting also supports real-time signals, including lifecycle stage, browsing behavior, or location. Personalization and performance data can be exported to stay consistent across business intelligence tools, data platforms, and the wider enterprise tech stack of tools and services. <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:83.14%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/image-1769540029597.png" alt="Image" /></figure>Segmentation and personalization are integrated directly into the content workflow. Source: CoreMedia For users and teams, having everything in one intuitive platform can ease the personalization challenges while accelerating time to market. Your content variants and targeting rules are all managed in a single, uniform workplace. This eliminates the potential for fragmentation across tools and simplifies the creation, launch, and optimization of personalized experiences at a global scale.<h3 id="a/b-testing-and-real-time-experimentation-–-right-where-content-decisioning-lives">A/B testing and real-time experimentation – right where content decisioning lives</h3>Without question, A/B testing has become a critical asset for marketers. There's a bevy of third-party tools for facilitating test paradigms, but having a solution close to your content workflows is a key advantage. That’s why CoreMedia has embedded A/B testing directly into its CMS, allowing teams to validate ideas and optimize experiences as part of their standard cadence of content production. Instead of exporting content to external testing utilities and waiting for reports, editors can compare variants, monitor performance, and act on results in real time – without ever having to leave the CMS. <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:82.21%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/image-1769540029604.png" alt="Image" /></figure>Test ideas, measure impact, and decide faster with CoreMedia’s A/B testing. Source: CoreMedia One of the clear advantages of CoreMedia’s A/B testing is having side-by-side comparisons of variant performance. With quick go-to insights, you can determine which content resonates with customers and make quick, evidence-backed decisions.Live experiment data also shows you how users interact with each variant, enabling fast adjustments when a challenger outperforms the original. There’s also continuous optimization in context, so editors can refine content directly inside the CMS. This leads to a smoother production flow and consistent momentum in experience optimization.<h3 id="semantic-search-delivers-control-and-scalability-to-content-operations-">Semantic Search delivers control and scalability to content operations </h3>We’ve already mentioned CoreMedia’s investment in AI edge innovation, and search has been a key area of focus. And rightly so: as AI accelerates content creation and personalization, enterprises are grappling with the relevance, reuse, and governance associated with rapidly expanding content libraries. Personalization is promising. But without precision, control, and clarity, it can quickly devolve into a slow and inconsistent morass. That’s where CoreMedia’s Semantic Search comes in. Leveraging a natural language interface, it helps teams find, assess, and reuse content efficiently – even as volume and complexity increase.<figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:80.56%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/image-1769540029638.png" alt="Image" /></figure>Natural-language search enables teams to quickly find, assess, and reuse content directly in the CMS. Source: CoreMedia For users, this is a godsend. Imagine conducting searches using everyday phrases like “winter campaign images” – all without relying on just exact keywords. This makes discovery faster, more intuitive, and more contextual than traditional search.CoreMedia’s Semantic Search also brings a layer of calm to handle your content chaos. When prompted, it automatically surfaces similar or redundant assets, reducing clutter and reinforcing brand consistency. There’s also fierce governance surrounding discoverability, enabling teams to reuse assets, avoid duplication, and maintain structured libraries as content volumes expand.<h3 id="the-verdict">The verdict</h3>The CMS and DXP landscape is both wide and deep, but there’s a growing convergence around features – particularly those imbued with AI or agentic systems. This, in turn, is creating confusion, particularly when it comes to assessing AI features within the broader corpus of capabilities. The fact that CoreMedia is enriching its CMS with onboard personalization, experimentation, and search is building on its strong heritage of foundational features, and it's addressing the real challenges teams face with the exponential growth of content assets.While composable stacks offer an array of third-party tools for things like A/B testing, brands need to move faster than ever – and having a performant, purposefully integrated solution provides a clear advantage for enterprises that are looking to accelerate. This is another check in CoreMedia’s column as a single, accountable, and trusted source that addresses critical requirements like governance and compliance. You’re not just buying enterprise software – you’re buying trust. In my opinion, a modern CMS should offer native testing and experimentation features to leverage content provenance and link marketers closer to actionable insights. To facilitate real-time journey orchestration, speed and efficacy are paramount. As such, CoreMedia is listening to the needs of marketers by providing built-in personalization and semantic search as onboard feature sets that accelerate time to vision. At the same time, offering a composable, hybrid headless posture allows a brand to onboard adjacent integrations that expand the core feature set.My recommendation: CoreMedia already has a strong commerce focus, but this added tooling should present a welcome win for users across a myriad of industries and use cases. If you’re considering a move, CoreMedia’s CMS is a solid platform, but pay close attention to how your various data sources will be handled relative to fueling your personalization. Also, as an integrated DXP, I would consider the scope of your roadmap to see if there’s additional alignment within the ecosystem.If you’re interested in seeing more, the company is offering a <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://u7061146.ct.sendgrid.net/ls/click?upn=u001.gqh-2BaxUzlo7XKIuSly0rC39ko2jEDIdJwxcolsDUNbznLFOa0iFUDItIE1EpE2CXIq1KKbIBA7b5SjV14h7GXA-3D-3DOgKO_LYRc62DeCgOg3NLqF-2FA1Nkc-2BB6iSCezTSr7cATVeIt7vbFxqkjj807TkbpGOsHdtP-2FHWYQ8hHG-2Bh0tJIgFVOZO69Re4Ks6syHse342AC9Gvw37kkXSVzTxWGuOeP3fGPq9EXOufW3jPOsSyNAntDgg5r76UG3z9WQ-2B4SeSP2Y8kH6B5Y36WENHz3zspHNwEaDRWiwk-2BO-2BTG1zhj7Gg2FzC7esWi6WuPWJcHfaxfp9-2BXuGLX-2FJVXfSBulQ-2B6jzs4qYy5l-2FNB-2FEN3ANt3TS1abOfO5-2F1nSYji-2B1uzrhzImhavcXNVxQhJVtjg05uNJ58INknrgYXWvk6RmDjmgdYsnJQ-3D-3D">“What’s New” Webinar</a> on January 28th. You can also request a free <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://u7061146.ct.sendgrid.net/ls/click?upn=u001.gqh-2BaxUzlo7XKIuSly0rC39ko2jEDIdJwxcolsDUNbyskU8mw7dKQbCEOpEH5cJkd2DOv6VNuJe-2F1PSX1rYFlg-3D-3Dk5q-_LYRc62DeCgOg3NLqF-2FA1Nkc-2BB6iSCezTSr7cATVeIt7vbFxqkjj807TkbpGOsHdtP-2FHWYQ8hHG-2Bh0tJIgFVOZO69Re4Ks6syHse342AC9Gvw37kkXSVzTxWGuOeP3fGPq9EXOufW3jPOsSyNAntDgg5r76UG3z9WQ-2B4SeSP2Y8kH6B5Y36WENHz3zspHNwEaDRWiwk-2BO-2BTG1zhj7Gg2FzGmk97Kfhpo6s0O7iiDxES-2FnT64AeDLfLwh2LujHv8-2FF7mqpKpNdkb7luHlyXyxnQI9y3U9u34vRTWlFMl-2F7EAHhN6m1ZXhr3rxHa4ZBUPix0RS8yDqvq3Wu-2FvzC-2BTOzvA-3D-3D">demo</a>. <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <img style="width:34.15%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/logo_jday_hor.png" /><h4 id="joomladay-usa-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/">JoomlaDay USA 2026</a></h4>April 29 - May 2, 2026 – Delray Beach, FloridaBe part of the Joomla community in one of the most iconic cities in the world! JoomlaDay USA 2026 is coming to Delray Beach, and you can join us for a dynamic event packed with insights, workshops, and networking opportunities. Learn from top Joomla experts and developers offering valuable insights and real-world solutions. Participate in interactive workshops and sessions and enhance your skills in Joomla management, development, design, and more. And connect with fellow Joomla enthusiasts, developers, and professionals from across the world.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/"> Book your seats today.</a> <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:36.69%" 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>

Core Value: CoreMedia Adds Native Personalization and Experimentation to its CMS

<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

Backoff on the AI Layoffs: Domo’s Chris Willis on the Future of Work in 2026

<hr /> SEO is a hard-fought battle. Marketers spend a lot of time – and treasure – on manual audits, digging through spreadsheets and poring over tables just to make an incremental dent in performance. Meanwhile, they’re wrestling with the cognitive overload of juggling multiple tools across the stack, forcing swivel-chair moments as they gaze into a swarm of data.Of course, the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/joetoscano1/2025/09/03/ai-is-destroying-seo-rank-now-requires-answer-engine-optimization/">seismic shift to AI answer engines</a> is compounding an already precarious challenge. Keeping content accurate, structured, and discoverable across both traditional search engines and AI-driven discovery platforms like ChatGPT is haranguing teams in a vice grip as website traffic withers on the vine – and institutional metrics go out the window.  But this is where <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/kontentai">Kontent.ai </a>is building on its <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/agentic-cms-why-kontentais-vision-for-the-future-of-content-management-is-inspiring">“Agentic CMS” foundation</a> to deliver some relief. Today, the company announced a set of new workflows that are purpose-built to impact the cost and friction associated with these challenges. They’re designed to enhance not only traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but the emerging and uber-critical practice of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_engine_optimization">Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).</a><h3 id="building-on-an-ai-vision-and-heritage">Building on an AI vision and heritage</h3>Kontent.ai has long embraced its artificial intelligence roots (it’s been part of the name since day one), but repositioning its value as an Agentic CMS speaks to its laser focus on AI and its impact on content management and operations. That gives it an edge for addressing the existential challenges that traditional SEO and GEO are presenting to brands and marketers.According to Kontent.ai’s VP of Customer Success, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukas-martinak/">Lukas Martinak,</a> something has changed in the CMS and digital world, and brands are feeling the heat. This came into crystal clarity at the recent <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">Boye &amp; Company CMS Kickoff 26. </a>“There was one topic that kept coming up in almost every session and every hallway chat: GEO. Generative Engine Optimization,” he said. “Traffic is down, AI answers are up, and GEO has moved to the boardroom.”He’s absolutely right. Unlike SEO, the C-Suite is hyper-focused on GEO, making it a mission-critical imperative as zero-click searches and crashing traffic become the status quo. This is where Kontent.ai’s new workflows are aiming to make an impact. <h3 id="optimization-without-the-manual-madness">Optimization without the manual madness</h3>Like an intern that never stops for coffee breaks, Kontent.ai’s autonomous agents continuously analyze content for a bevy of issues that can impact SEO and GEO – detecting things like missing or inconsistent metadata, unclear structure, outdated terminology, and weak internal linking. Users can also prompt for an SEO analysis and recommendations across content like blog posts. <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:67.69%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/seo-analysis.png" /></figure>Source: Kontent.ai But the automation goes even further. Instead of simply surfacing issues for manual follow-up, these intelligent agents can recommend improvements or even apply updates directly within Kontent.ai, mitigating the need for repeated audits and manual rework.  <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:68.66%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/image.jpeg" alt="A screenshot of a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect." /></figure>Source: Kontent.ai According to Kontent.ai, some early but compelling use cases demonstrate the success of these new agentic workflows. For example, a global organization managing more than 400,000 content items used them to automate SEO metadata audits and implementation, cutting optimization time by as much as 80%.There’s more. When applied consistently across editorial workflows, Kontent reported that teams saw palpable results – including a 30% increase in organic impressions and expanded keyword coverage, all without increasing paid media spending.  As GEO surfaces as a business mandate, brands are rapidly adopting practices and channeling resources towards optimizing for AI visibility. Many of the agent-driven principles for SEO also support GEO, as they share structural and foundational tenets. With Kontent.ai’s automation, teams can help ensure these content structures are clear and concise for AI systems to interpret accurately – particularly as buyers are increasingly turning to generative search and AI assistants earlier in their discovery. It's worth noting that, unlike most modern SEO tools that are used after publishing, Kontent.ai embeds its optimization directly into the content model and enforces it universally. The net effect is simplification: agent-driven changes are validated against editorial governance, enabling teams to scale optimization without increasing operational complexity or risk. “As SEO and AI-driven discovery converge, optimization can no longer rely on manual effort,” said <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/iannorton/">Ian Norton,</a> VP Marketing at Kontent.ai. “By embedding agentic SEO and GEO directly into content operations, we help teams reduce cost, improve performance, and stay in control at scale.” <h3 id="the-verdict">The verdict</h3>Kontent.ai continues to impress with its clear, elegant, and high-utility application of agentic AI across its platform. While many tools are introducing complexity, Kontent’s focus on real-world use cases for applying its agentic capabilities is a winning position as brands scrutinize the value of their AI tooling and investments. Adding these workflows is yet another example of how it addresses real problems that marketers and content editors face when managing the minutiae of SEO – and the emerging morass of GEO. My recommendation: Since demoing Kontent.ai’s earliest foray into agentic territory, I was instantly drawn to its concise framing of the problem and how its focused application of AI is the solution. That concise delivery is one of the key reasons why it won our “CMS Idol” competition at the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">Boye &amp; Company CMS Kickoff 26</a>. With its headless heritage and composable posture, Kontent presents a great solution for enterprise-grade stacks that are leaning AI-forward and require speed and control at scale. During your demo, pay close attention to the real-world content management use cases that their agents are solving – it’s all the proof you’ll need. <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>

Kontent.ai Adds AI-Powered SEO and GEO Workflows, Accelerating Content Optimization and Enhancing AI Visibility

<hr /> Over the years, I’ve built websites a-plenty using no-code builders, from stand-alone products to plug-ins for open source platforms. I’ve experimented with everything from <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/elementor">Elementor</a> to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/squarespace">Squarespace</a> to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/webflow">Webflow</a>, and had a mix of results up and down the scale. The devil, it seems, is always in the details.I remember seeing the first entries in what we’ll call the “modern” era of AI-powered tools that promise a “prompt and a dream” to a working site. In my early trials, I ran into the limitations of what was possible – but improvements have certainly been made over the last year.The current crop of vibe coding tools is now fairly robust. Watching laypeople conjure apps using <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://base44.com/">Base44</a> for example, is kinda magical. But it’s also a bit misleading. As I’ve <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/joyconf-stories-netlifys-matt-biilmann-on-the-power-of-the-storyblok-partnership">discussed with Matt Biilmann</a> of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/netlify">Netlify</a>, you wouldn’t run these prototypes across the finish line without a competent developer's eye, but they’re giving laypeople a solid starting point. Websites are a different bailiwick. While some projects might only require a static page, most need a backend to manage the concerns. In other words, you need a CMS to complete the equation. That’s where <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/strapi-casts-for-growth-in-the-headless-sea-a-conversation-with-ceo-pierre-burgy">Pierre Burgy</a> saw an opportunity to do it better with a new platform called <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://fimo.ai/">Fimo.ai</a> – which officially launched today.As Pierre explained, existing vibe coding tools are great for building apps, but websites have their own set of unique requirements. As the founder and CEO of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/strapi">Strapi</a> – the most popular open source headless CMS – he’s spent the last decade focused on a better backend experience. Strapi has amassed thousands of GitHub stars and contributors, and millions of downloads, winning the hearts of users across the globe. <figure class="media"><div data-oembed-url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKN3fbDE_Sg"><div style="position:relative;padding-bottom:100%;height:0;padding-bottom:56.2493%"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qKN3fbDE_Sg" style="position:absolute;width:100%;height:100%;top:0;left:0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe></div></div></figure> With this in mind, Fimo.ai positions itself as an AI-native CMS that focuses on the really important aspects of managing a website – things like translating and updating content with ease, accessing reusable assets, optimizing SEO/GEO, running A/B tests and personalizing pages, scheduling releases, and more. Already a fixture on <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.producthunt.com/products/fimo-2">Product Hunt,</a> Fimo.ai is a snap to get started with. I created an account using my GitHub creds and was playing around with a sample project in seconds. The UX is sleek, elegant, and incredibly easy to navigate. It all feels fluid. Even a novice will find it comfortable to get around.<h3 id="fimo.ai-is-rich-with-features">Fimo.ai is rich with features</h3>Fimo.ai has a bold roadmap, but it’s rolling out with a complete set of features that will allow you to build with intention and take your project live. For the purposes of my very first demo sample, I replicated an existing site and prompted a blog to be added. As billed, the process was quick – although the complexity of your task will likely impact your wait time. Still, it’s all like waving a magic wand to cast your project into existence.  <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:84.06%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/image-1769004638929.png" alt="A screenshot of a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect." /></figure> Once inside, I was able to peruse the various entities with little to no friction. Everything is logically within reach, so you can navigate anywhere in seconds. If I wanted to, I could invite users to work with me – and there’s also a sense of presence, so you can see what your team is doing in real-time. Prompting changes is a slam-dunk. Once my site was fully generated, I was able to start conversationally styling the mechanics. You can adjust content, elements, and even classes across the site. Like any AI generator, feeding it richer, more detailed prompts can improve your outcomes. <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:82.98%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/image-1769004638907.png" alt="A screenshot of a video chat

AI-generated content may be incorrect." /></figure> The live preview allows you to access any element to tweak styles and properties, and the built-in CMS lets you manage the content all in one place. As far as assets are concerned, there’s a media library for keeping everything organized and accessible.  <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:82.64%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/image-1769004639006.png" alt="A screenshot of a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect." /></figure> One thing I really like is the ease of toggling into code. There’s a split-view that really makes it comfortable to assess and modify components, and you have access to dependencies and resources at all times. After I added a blog, I was able to seamlessly access all of the entries and make edits on the fly. The whole experience was very easy to customize and update, and there’s plenty of runway for building this out as part of a robust content strategy – with the underlying structure and fundamentals to support your SEO and GEO goals.  <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:81.81%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/image-1769004639029.png" alt="A screenshot of a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect." /></figure> Of course, you’re probably asking, “what if I screw up?” Like any good CMS or system of authority, there’s a content history you can access, allowing you to roll back to previous versions as needed. On that note: I intentionally created an error in my build (removing a wrapper div for an image), and Fimo not only detected it, but offered to fix it. Seven seconds later, I was back to a proper build and preview – and ready to rock and roll. <h3 id="hosting">Hosting</h3>Fimo.ai doesn’t require a lot of fancy DevOps footwork to bring your site to life. You can go live globally in one click with its secure, built-in hosting. Just click the button in the upper right and it builds and deploys the current preview state. Fimo takes care of everything. If you have a team, the obvious benefit is the ability to collaborate freely in the preview mode without affecting any visitors to your live production site. In other words, you have a staging environment with a one-click pathway to production.Every project is published by default under a free fimo.site subdomain. But you do have the option under a premium plan to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://docs.fimo.ai/publish/custom-domains">add your own custom domain</a>, which provides a fully branded experience. On the roadmap, you’ll soon be able to connect your Fimo.ai project to your GitHub account, so your code and history live in a repo. This will augment the benefits of controlling your version history, collaborating with other team members, syncing with changes, and managing granular code-based considerations like setting up CI/CD pipelines to manage the flow.<h3 id="documentation">Documentation</h3>Based on the quality of the documentation, it’s evident that seasoned content and development people were behind this project. From end to end, the guidance is clear, concise, and well-structured. There’s also a cache of learning resources on vibe coding, prompt engineering, and even how to optimize the use of your AI credits in Fimo.I particularly like how they’ve simplified many of the instructional posts with a quadrant of benefits, making the explanations much more accessible to laypeople without any coding or technical background. There’s also the presence of meetups, community, and even a referral program for earning credits – giving it all a grassroots vibe that could grow organically. <h3 id="pricing">Pricing</h3>As I just mentioned, Fimo is an AI website builder, so it’s devouring credits with every prompt. Being judicious and strategic about how you use those prompts is key – and I’m impressed at how proactive they are with advocating for solid prompt engineering. At launch, Fimo.ai is offering two simple options. The first is a Free plan that offers up to 3 projects and 2,500 monthly credits. That’s enough to trick out a basic site and experiment with the possibilities. The only downside with the Free tier is the presence of the Fimo platform badge, which makes the case for upgrading. Fimo’s Premium plan is just $25 a month and provides a lot more power. Along with 25,000 monthly credits, you get unlimited projects, 30 days of version history, and the removal of the platform badge. It’s pretty robust considering what you get.<h3 id="the-verdict">The verdict</h3>The market is awash with AI builders, so there’s plenty of choice if you’re looking for the “easier lane” for launching a project. But having a solid CMS baked into the recipe is a key differentiator, and something that’s only been available in certain platform offerings. I’ve long been a fan of Strapi, and their collective knowledge and experience have clearly been injected into Fimo. That gives it a content management framework and structural mindset that other builders might be lacking. As someone who also wants access to code – and potentially to a Git-powered solution – Fimo is also tracking in the right direction with its current features and broader roadmap. It really appeals to a wide range of users up and down the technical spectrum.There’s also a spirit of startup magic in this tool. I love how they tapped Product Hunt as a channel for marshalling grassroots momentum while inviting seasoned builders from the Strapi side into the mix. It feels fresh, even if it's entering a noisy segment of the building experience ecosystem.My recommendation: It's early days (um, day one, actually), so running a workload is still something I need to assess. With websites, there's a lot to explore in the way of forms, A/B testing, and other factors – as well as the ability to connect with other systems as part of an integrated, composable play. But based on what I've already seen, you should create a free account and give Fimo a spin. When I compare it to other enterprise-grade builders, it's achieving a simpler, more intuitive flow that most users will find satisfying. Be sure to check out the sample projects in the gallery to see just how far uses are pushing it. You might feel a little FOMO, but that should light a fire under you to create some beautiful sites of your own. <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>

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