Articles

AI Article

What I Mean to Say: A Practitioner Perspective on AI, Semantics, and Content Evolution

msalvatierra

The Headless Holodeck: Joel Varty of Agility CMS on Warp-Speed Demos, AI, and the Next Generation of CMS

matt-garrepy

Conquer ‘Cold Starts’ with Hot Launches: Uniform AI Helps Teams Ship Digital Experiences Faster

<hr /> The CDP space continues to evolve – and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/hightouch">Hightouch</a> is hitting the gas as it moves into the agentic fast lane.When I recently spoke to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/briankotlyar/">Brian Kotlyar,</a> the company’s CMO, he was more than a little excited about their new <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://hightouch.com/platform/agents">Hightouch Agents,</a> an AI-powered toolset designed to help marketers answer questions, identify opportunities, automate workflows, and make everything work faster. How fast? Like 10x.Of course, Brian was already a fan of Hightouch before AI agents were a twinkle in anyone’s eye. In fact, when he first encountered the CDP four years ago while leading growth Marketing at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://newrelic.com/">New Relic</a> (an observability platform), he was smitten by its potential to automate and scale his marketing efforts.“I was really inspired by the idea of using the complete data in the data warehouse to power growth marketing, lifestyle marketing, ads, web personalization, everything,” he said. “And I was doing it in this very manual and archaic way with tons of data analysts, tons of software engineers. And then I discovered Hightouch as a way to bring all kinds of modern practices and software engineering practices together without needing these huge teams.”As it turns out, Hightouch was so compelling that Brian joined the meteoric scale-up in mid-2022, where he’s now tasked with marketing a product that's designed to help marketers. In many ways, he's marshalling his superpowers to help professionals like him to augment their human creativity with the power and potential of AI.As of late, we've seen significant changes in the customer data platform ecosystem, where DXP consolidation and pure-play reinvention have been the prevailing trends. Through it all, Hightouch has elevated above the noise, positioning itself around its unique composable attributes and AI decisioning as force multipliers for its value. That vision is why it nailed an <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/u-cant-touch-this-cdp-hightouch-nails-80m-series-c-to-power-its-ai-decisioning">$80 million Series C </a>earlier this year. Now, its Hightouch Agents represent the next step on their ambitious roadmap, giving marketers the ability to ideate and brief campaigns and build their strategies by asking customer data questions and receiving instant answers. Along with those core features, Hightouch Agents can do a whole lot more. They can analyze your creative and copy to distill what is and isn’t working, so you can optimize performance. They can cut through the chaos to find the right audiences and save hours in the process. As Brian explained, it’s a potential game-changer for marketers.“We transitioned to be the leading composable CDP company, and now we're introducing this next big wave of functionality where we grab onto the broader LLM trend and really bring it into the marketing workflow,” he said. “If you imagine the way that coding agents have totally transformed the day-to-day work of software engineers, we think something similar is happening with marketing, and we want to be the company that brings that capability to marketers.”Hightouch Agents come pre-trained with core marketing skills, giving you an out-of-the-box edge with their capabilities. They connect to your data, channels, and creative, and come preloaded with deep domain knowledge – enabling them to reason with precision around complex concepts like attribution modeling. It’s not a shocker to see Hightouch move in this direction. The company has been on a rapid rise, and I recently covered the hiring of AI industry luminary <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/hightouch-taps-ai-luminary-akilesh-bapu-to-accelerate-push-into-context-aware-marketing-agents">Akilesh Bapu</a> in early October to lead the company’s generative product development. This was a clear signal of its intentions to drive an agent-focused strategy – and that's precisely where they're headed.<h3 id="giving-marketers-an-agentic-boost">Giving marketers an agentic boost</h3>Marketing teams are really feeling the heat. Every day, they’re struggling with inefficient workflows across a range of considerations and coping with tasks that are labor-intensive and highly disruptive. That’s where Hightouch Agents come in. They promise to accelerate and automate a wide array of previously slow and manual tasks, so teams can bring their ideas to life. The company says this can translate into 10x the speed, and that could make a huge dent in the day-to-day rigors of operating a successful marketing machine. According to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/tejasmanohar/">Tejas Manohar,</a> Co-founder and Co-CEO of Hightouch, the problem is that there are too many manual steps to launch a marketing campaign. And yet, that's still the overwhelming reality for most enterprise brands. As such, Hightouch Agents are starting with data and insights because they’re a huge pain point.As previously mentioned, Hightouch Agents can be tasked with answering really complex questions with laser precision. For example, you can query which ad creative drove the most conversions last month, or whether new audience segments are emerging around a product line. You can even inquire as to which content-driven campaigns performed better when compared to discount promotions, or which Facebook ads are performing best based on CTR. <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:68.71%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/11/image-1762968106697.png" /></figure>Prompting performance questions from Hightouch AI Agents. Source: Hightouch website Brian told me that the quality of the answers is driving more questions – and that's revealing even greater insight. That's all due to the context that informs everything. Unlike generic AI tools, Hightouch Agents connect directly to a company’s data warehouse and marketing stack. This allows them to see all the data that powers marketing decisions, customer transactions, inventory levels, creative performance, and more, without manual uploads or constant context switching.“The reason why the answers are really good is because we have this notion of a context layer,” he said. “We map the data in their warehouse, we map the data in their channels, we map all their brand information. So the answers are just dramatically better than you get when you just throw the exact same question to a generic GPT. And it's this self-reinforcing loop, because if the answers are better, you're going to come back and ask more questions and start to move into much more exploratory, open-ended questions like, 'Hey, I need to move this metric. What do you what should I do? Hey, I've got a bunch of extra stuff over here. What should I do?'"<figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:77.63%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/11/image-1762978067150.png" /></figure>Hightouch Agents make engaging and ideating simple. Source: Hightouch By combining deep marketing expertise with this level of data-driven context, marketers can explore and analyze data independently, uncover new opportunities, and automate recurring workflows such as reporting or audience-building. Hightouch Agents also go beyond recommendations by taking action in key areas of the marketer’s domain, from running A/B tests to adjusting budgets.Hightouch is also more secure because no duplicate storage is required. It reads directly from your data warehouse, where your data remains guarded. That enables it to meet fierce regulatory governance around SOC, GDPR, HIPAA, and other data privacy benchmarks. Hightouch Agents extend the company’s vision for marketing AI by helping marketers access and act on intelligence faster. Future updates will expand agent capabilities into experimentation, content generation, and project management, further unifying marketing workflows under one intelligent context layer.With Agents, Hightouch is bringing the power of AI directly into the marketer’s workflow. According to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/guptakashish/">Kashish Gupta,</a> Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Hightouch, marketers no longer need to switch between tools or wait on data teams for these vital answers. Hightouch Agents make it possible to ask a question, get an informed answer, and take action instantly – all powered by the same trusted data foundation.<h3 id="evolving-cdp-for-the-agentic-era">Evolving CDP for the agentic era</h3>I’ve been watching CDPs with a close eye over the last few years as they’ve been tapped as critical layers in composable stacks and folded into the broader vision for a complete DXP. As Brian echoed, the category has always been a little “funny,” because it’s comprised of a hardcore data infrastructure that’s collecting behavioral events, processing them into identities, and pushing them around the ecosystem – all facets of data engineering. None of this tooling is really designed for marketers, so CDPs try to bridge the gap between engineering and enablement in what Brian calls “unnatural bedfellows.” And for better or worse, that’s sold as a CDP. But he sees the marketing side of the equation as fertile ground for scaling agentic workflows and capabilities – and that’s not necessarily a CDP story.“What we see happening increasingly is that other layer, the more marketer-facing layer, is a place where agents can be really, really powerful and augmentative of those self-serve workflows,” he said. “But it doesn't really stop there. I would say the big insight that is driving Hightouch’s Agent development is actually quite separate from the CDP.”To Brian’s point, marketers don’t actually live in the martech tools they use. They’re typically swimming in Google Sheets and Asana – so a lot of the work they need to do spans technology barriers. “People don't actually log into their email tool of their Meta back end all that much,” he said. “They work in spreadsheets. They work in Docs and project management tools. And it's all these myriad steps and procedures and handoffs and arguments and just waiting that's all happening. Where Agents get really exciting is in their ability to collapse so much of that.”And it’s a lot of stuff that’s creating cognitive overload for marketers. Between briefing agencies, begging data teams for metrics, and assembling weekly reports for stakeholders, they're overwhelmed. It’s in these areas that Brian and Hightouch see untapped potential for AI agents to ease the friction. “We think agents will do for marketers what they’ve already done for software engineers,” Brian said. “That's the real Nirvana we're pursuing.”<h3 id="built-with-composability-at-its-core">Built with composability at its core</h3>One of the big distinctions with Hightouch Agents is that they operate independently of its CDP. In other words, you don’t need their complete customer data platform to harness its Agents in your existing stack. This is a testament to the company’s core composability, but also a conscious decision to make it more portable and accessible to marketers – regardless of how their technologies are composed.  “What we observe a lot of our peers doing is forcing these huge software migrations in their core platform with unfair pricing mechanics and migration mechanics to get access to them,” Brian said. “We don't think that's right, and we don't think it’s actually necessary at a technology level. You should be able to unleash the benefits of Hightouch Agents across your whole workflow without having to change your whole underlying tech stack and all the decisions you've made previously.”As Brian went on to say, customers have that option, and Hightouch will offer some efficiencies with bundled pricing to make it a more compelling offer. But that’s not the central strategy. The bottom line is really a practical one, where enterprise IT teams want best-of-breed technologies without the pain of ripping out everything else. In his mind, the future is comprised of heterogeneous enterprise technology environments, and they don't want to make it hard to adopt Hightouch on any level. “If you want Agents, come knock on our front door,” he said. “We'll give you Agents, and they'll sit alongside everything else you're already doing, just like with our CDP.”<h3 id="the-verdict">The verdict</h3>Marketers, by their very nature, are a scrappy bunch. They're creative, driven, and often do their best work under pressure. But there's a breaking point. Right now, they’re under excruciating pressure to break through the noise and produce results – and they’re being crushed by dozens of tools that aren’t providing the insights they need. How can they be effective with so much to juggle? Agents offer a salve for the cognitive overload, and I’m already seeing that pay dividends in other platforms. But marketers need the next wave of intelligent AI assistants to be ready for battle, and that’s where Hightouch is bringing its purpose-built agents to the front lines. Imbued with a real understanding of marketing functions – and powered by your warehouse data and marketing stack – you now have the business context and an effective toolset for automating and executing with real impact.Can you achieve 10x speed? That remains to be seen. But given the precision that Hightouch Agents are promising and the agility to receive the answers and insights you're after, it seems less of a possibility and more of a probability. The bottom line is that marketers need the boost – and this could be part of the answer. One of the big gripes about agentic features is the need to migrate fully to a vendor’s platform to harness the features. By taking a composable approach that mitigates a wholesale migration, Hightouch is amplifying its extensibility with a real edge. They're also opening up a roadmap for future agent capabilities and delivering it with more flexibility and control.Trust is a key part of any AI strategy, and vendors will need to deliver on that. Given its focus on data and its integrity, Hightouch Agents have the best shot at reflecting the company’s ethos, and its mission for bringing trustworthy AI to the marketer’s workflow with intelligent, adaptive, and creative potential.Agents are making the promise of AI tangible and valuable, and Hightouch is moving in a solid direction. You can schedule a demo of these new features <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://hightouch.com/platform/agents">on their website.</a> <hr /><h4 style="text-align:center" id="looking-for-more-guidance-on-hightouch?-talk-to-an-expert.">Looking for more guidance on Hightouch? <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/contact">Talk to an expert.</a></h4><hr /> <h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <img style="width:29.67%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1761136749603.png" /><h4 id="live-webinar:-can-we-ever-get-composable-without-complexity?"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/webinar-cmscritic">Live Webinar: Can We Ever Get Composable Without Complexity?</a></h4>November 20, 2025 – 6 PM (CET) / 5 PM (GMT) / 12 PM (EST)Composable architecture promised to simplify digital experience creation by giving organizations the flexibility to combine the technologies that met their needs. But for many enterprises, it’s done the opposite, which has led to complex integrations, spiraling costs, and what some are now referring to as composable regret. In this live conversation, Umbraco CEO Mats Persson joins Matt Garrepy, Chief Content Officer at CMS Critic, for a candid exploration of what went wrong in the first wave of composable and what needs to change. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/webinar-cmscritic">Register for the webinar.</a> <img style="width:29.08%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1761594434824.png" /><h4 id="typo3-conference-2025"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://t3con.typo3.com/">TYPO3 Conference 2025</a></h4>November 25–27, 2025 – Düsseldorf, GermanyT3CON is the premier annual event for web professionals, developers, marketers, and decision-makers. Much more than just a TYPO3-focused conference, T3CON spotlights the latest trends, innovations, and leaders shaping the future of content management, covering everything from grassroots initiatives to new technologies, strategies, and success stories. The event is designed to empower businesses and organizations with the knowledge and tools they need to thrive in the evolving digital landscape. The conference culminates in an awards ceremony celebrating the best TYPO3 projects across various industries. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://t3con.typo3.com/">Get your ticket.</a> <img style="width:31.44%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/08/cms-kickoff-2026-logo.png" alt="" /><h4 id="cms-kickoff-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">CMS Kickoff 2026</a></h4>January 13-14, 2026 – St. Petersburg, FLMeet industry leaders at our fourth annual CMS Kickoff – the industry's premier global CMS event. Similar to a traditional kickoff, we reflect on recent trends and share stories from the frontlines. Additionally, we will delve into the current happenings and shed light on the future. Prepare for an unparalleled in-person CMS conference experience that will equip you to move things forward. This is an exclusive event – space is limited, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">so secure your tickets today.</a>

Hightouch Launches High-Performance Agents to Help Marketers Move 10x Faster

‘Seasons of Love’: Sitecore Symposium 2025 Sings, Putting AI and Marketers in the Spotlight

<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/critics/conor-egan">Conor Egan</a> is SVP Product at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/contentstack">Contentstack</a> and a CMS Critic Contributor.<hr /> In order for <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.contentstack.com/platforms/ai">AI</a> to become a truly revolutionary force in life and business, we’ll have to trust it with more than just our grunt work. We’ll have to outsource some of our decision-making as well.That’s where agentic AI comes in.An AI agent is a system you can interact with in plain language that has some amount of capabilities it can manage, including taking actions on your behalf. The simplest AI agents are “helper” agents, such as support agents or virtual assistants. (<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/504767/tragic-life-clippy-worlds-most-hated-virtual-assistant">Clippy</a> was the godfather of this sort of thing). You can ask these agents to book your plane tickets or revise some text, or which barbecue grill would best suit your needs. Other AI agents run when you're not doing anything. They’re constantly listening, and can take some action if they think it's necessary.That makes them close to what we used to call automations. The key difference between an automation and an agent is that the agent has more than one function, and can make its own decisions and interpretations of what it’s supposed to do.  Here are a few thoughts about the value of agentic AI as a force multiplier and facilitator, and why companies that are replacing human beings with AI agents are thinking about this technology the wrong way.<h3 id="why-should-we-use-ai-agents?">Why should we use AI agents?</h3>Not all tasks fit neatly into a simple binary. Think of a governance agent that’s supposed to enforce brand guidelines or highlight when content should get another review. You might want more complexity in its output than a cut-and-dried yes or no. Your AI agent might decide that the problems with a piece of content are egregious enough to block it from being published, or that it needs someone else to review it, or there’s some other review state it should go into. Based on what’s happening, it might decide which tools to apply for the job. There are multiple paths that an AI agent can follow, and it has some agency in deciding what they are. In the Old World, you'd have to account for each of those branching paths, and if the scenario didn't fall into one, then nothing would happen. The advantage of AI agents is that they’re equipped to deal with situations they’ve never seen before. They’re not forced to operate within what they were “programmed” to do.Of course, there's a time-saving aspect as well. Humans are very expensive, and compute is not, so there may be certain repetitive tasks that an agent is better equipped for in terms of resource efficiency.For example, sifting through a great amount of content, summarizing things, identifying outliers — these are all things that can be pretty time-consuming for humans to do. AI agents can do these tasks quickly, and even help you identify opportunities that you might not have discovered yourself.<h3 id="contentstack’s-rule-for-ai-development">Contentstack’s rule for AI development</h3>As <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.contentstack.com/">Contentstack</a> prepares to roll out new agentic AI features this fall, our Product team has benefitted from a simple guiding principle: If it doesn’t deliver significant user value, we don’t do it.So, what is “user value”? In my opinion, it’s anything that falls into one of these three buckets:Number one, it does something that you're already doing, but 10 times better. For example, instead of sifting through all my data and having to hand-identify all the audiences, an AI agent can break up my audiences based on lookalike models. I could have done this myself, but with AI I can do it (at least) 10X faster.Number two, it allows me to do something that I literally could not do before. It's not just helping me with what I could have done otherwise. The AI enables some net new capability that was not possible before. And number three, it can turn a regular user into a power user. Let’s say we wanted to add natural language search in our CMS, so you could type in and find what you’re looking for without having to figure it out through advanced search. Rather than having to become a search power user or rely on your developers, the AI functionality gives you the same abilities as the most skilled users of the platform. If an AI concept does not meet one or more of these criteria, then it's not worth our team’s investment. And by the way, none of those criteria boil down to “it allows your company to cut the size of its workforce.” Which brings me to my next point…<h3 id="why-ai-agents-should-enhance-human-effort,-not-replace-it">Why AI agents should enhance human effort, not replace it</h3>So far, companies have taken a couple of different approaches with agentic AI. One is trying to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dude-wheres-my-job-conor-egan-shj6e/">literally replace people</a>. So, if you have someone whose job is to do X, they’ll seek to create an agent that does exactly that.But I think we get a lot more value from AI agents when we use them as facilitators, not workforce replacers. You hired smart people to use their talents, right? If that’s the case, you should probably get rid of all the things they have to do in the course of the day that don't differentiate you and your brand. Are there capabilities that you can give a team member via an agent that provides a force multiplier or allows them to provide more value? Start there.We’re quickly entering a world where AI will be able to put marketing on autopilot. It will create the campaigns, it will write the content, generate the assets, etc. And my question is always, “If everybody has the exact same tools, how is a great marketer going to beat a good marketer?” Because if you have a system that can spit out average content and everybody's doing it, things are going to be very noisy.It's not that AI can't help you develop novel experiences. But if you're creating content for other humans, then humans need to serve as the judge of taste. When AI tools are generating the same campaign ideas, the most successful marketers are the ones who will be better at deciding which ideas to pursue. <h3 id="looking-ahead:-ai-agents-will-eat-more-tasks-from-the-bottom-up-(and-that’s-a-good-thing)">Looking ahead: AI agents will eat more tasks from the bottom up (and that’s a good thing)</h3>Whether it's industrial farming or computers, new technology always eats jobs from the bottom up. It could be literal jobs that you have to do, or those “jobs” could be abstraction layers.In the early days of code, we were interacting directly with the hardware itself and writing in ones and zeros. Then we added operating systems, and now you can use a mouse, which is a layer on top of an operating system. We used to have to manage our infrastructure by taking racks to a server farm and plugging in the cables, and installing the software, and now we have cloud services. We used to write JavaScript and HTML by hand. Then we developed code frameworks where you don't even need to know the underlying JavaScript. AI is the latest layer on top of all this. Soon, you won't necessarily need to know how to use Contentstack. Our platform is an abstraction of an abstraction of a database that you used to have in order to do all these jobs. AI agents are simply the most recent iteration of what technology has been doing for a long time. The real purpose of AI — just like all the advancements that came before it — is to get you to the value part faster. You can now spend most of the hours in your day doing the high-value things that are going to have an impact, and less time figuring out how to learn the software. <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <figure class="image image-style-block-align-left image_resized" style="width:28.08%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1759840698475.png" /></figure><h4 id="raise:-lifting-content-into-the-future-with-agentic-cms"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://kontent.ai/events-and-webinars/raise/">RAISE: Lifting Content into the Future with Agentic CMS</a></h4>November 11, 2025 – London, UKJoin Kontent.ai at RAISE: Lifting Content into the Future with Agentic CMS, a premier free event for forward-thinking marketing and technology leaders shaping the way today’s most ambitious brands create and deliver content. Expect bold ideas, discover innovative strategies, engage with industry leaders, and gain insights that will lift your content strategy to new heights. At RAISE, you'll learn how to deliver faster, more engaging content experiences while AI does the busywork of audits, compliance, and localization with Agentic CMS, built to give you and your teams more time on creativity that matters. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://kontent.ai/events-and-webinars/raise/">Reserve your seat today.</a> <img style="width:29.67%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1761136749603.png" /><h4 id="live-webinar:-can-we-ever-get-composable-without-complexity?"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/webinar-cmscritic">Live Webinar: Can We Ever Get Composable Without Complexity?</a></h4>November 20, 2025 – 6 PM (CET) / 5 PM (GMT) / 12 PM (EST)Composable architecture promised to simplify digital experience creation by giving organizations the flexibility to combine the technologies that met their needs. But for many enterprises, it’s done the opposite, which has led to complex integrations, spiraling costs, and what some are now referring to as composable regret. In this live conversation, Umbraco CEO Mats Persson joins Matt Garrepy, Chief Content Officer at CMS Critic, for a candid exploration of what went wrong in the first wave of composable and what needs to change. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/webinar-cmscritic">Register for the webinar.</a> <img style="width:29.08%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1761594434824.png" /><h4 id="typo3-conference-2025"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://t3con.typo3.com/">TYPO3 Conference 2025</a></h4>November 25–27, 2025 – Düsseldorf, GermanyT3CON is the premier annual event for web professionals, developers, marketers, and decision-makers. Much more than just a TYPO3-focused conference, T3CON spotlights the latest trends, innovations, and leaders shaping the future of content management, covering everything from grassroots initiatives to new technologies, strategies, and success stories. The event is designed to empower businesses and organizations with the knowledge and tools they need to thrive in the evolving digital landscape. The conference culminates in an awards ceremony celebrating the best TYPO3 projects across various industries. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://t3con.typo3.com/">Get your ticket.</a> <img style="width:31.44%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/08/cms-kickoff-2026-logo.png" alt="" /><h4 id="cms-kickoff-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">CMS Kickoff 2026</a></h4>January 13-14, 2026 – St. Petersburg, FLMeet industry leaders at our fourth annual CMS Kickoff – the industry's premier global CMS event. Similar to a traditional kickoff, we reflect on recent trends and share stories from the frontlines. Additionally, we will delve into the current happenings and shed light on the future. Prepare for an unparalleled in-person CMS conference experience that will equip you to move things forward. This is an exclusive event – space is limited, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">so secure your tickets today.</a>

Agentic AI 101: What's an AI agent and when should they be used?

conor-egan

Welcome to the ‘Collaborative CMS’: Directus Breaks the Bottlenecks with its Native MCP

Shock and AI Awe: Sitecore Unleashes SitecoreAI, its Next-Gen AI-Powered DXP

JoyConf Stories: Netlify’s Matt Biilmann on the Power of the Storyblok Partnership

Hotjar - Spot what confuses

Spot what confuses your users with Hotjar & AI

#ffffff

<hr /> When I recently connected with <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandeep-menon-1087901/">Sandeep Menon</a>, we talked a lot about the customer journey. In many ways, it's a perilous trek for marketers. Kind of like scaling Mount Doom in The Lord of the Rings.But good prevails in that epic tale – and there's hope for downtrodden teams that are trapped by monstrous hoards of data. As co-founder and CEO at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://auxia.io/">Auxia</a>, Sandeep spends a lot of time thinking about ways to improve the marketer's magic across a growing expanse of channels and touchpoints. Auxia is part of that solution: an AI-powered platform that enables enterprise marketing and product teams to harness their first-party data to seamlessly orchestrate 1:1, adaptive, hyper-personalized customer journeys. Built by former <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/google-cloud-platform">Google</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms">Meta</a> engineers and leaders, the Auxia platform is giving marketing teams the ability to unlock hidden signals from their data, fueling a flexible suite of intelligent growth models that automate months of data science and engineering work.Customer Journey Orchestration – or often just “Journey Orchestration” – has become a fixture in DXPs, marketing clouds, and CDPs. It’s a concept that’s found its way into myriad features, enabling brands to identify audiences throughout the buying cycle and connect relevant marketing campaigns that align with their behaviors.At the center of it all is data, the Gold Standard in digital currency that fuels the tailoring of customer experiences with real-time, AI-driven personalization. It also enables meaningful cross-channel coordination that can send proactive alerts or actions based on specific signals. This is where agents entered the conversation with Sandeep, because they’re having a profound impact on how Auxia is evolving the space. As he explained, his tool combines advanced infrastructure with agentic AI to seamlessly orchestrate hyper-personalized customer journeys. <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:33.88%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1761791281990.png" /></figure>Auxia co-founder and CEO Sandeep Menon. Source: LinkedIn “We’re really trying to be an agentic customer journey orchestration platform,” he said. “We are going from the ‘Old World,’ which is about static, rule-based systems, to one that is much more dynamic.”Now, Auxia is taking a major leap forward with its marketing platform, launching a new AI-native interface for marketers that brings decisioning, insights, and content generation together in one unified experience. The new interface addresses a central challenge for marketers that we’ve been talking a lot about recently: cognitive overload. The transformative design replaces complexity with clarity, so marketers can see their ideas, data, and creative work come together in a visual manner. Armed with enhanced strategic and holistic control, they can manage disjointed campaigns and design, optimize, and analyze every customer journey in a unified space. Auxia’s agentic capabilities are key to this, but it all feels streamlined and thoughtfully crafted, more like a ride-along co-pilot and less like another tool in the toolbox. And for marketers, less chaos means more calm. They don't need another unruly dragon to ride – but they do want the power to rule it all. <h3 id="harnessing-the-potential-of-ai-for-marketers">Harnessing the potential of AI for marketers</h3>Since launching in early 2024, Auxia has been on a meteoric rise. The scale-up has added several Fortune 1000 clients and delivered some astounding results. That led to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://venturebeat.com/ai/auxia-raises-23-5-million-to-tackle-enterprise-marketings-reacquisition-treadmill">$23.5 million Series A</a> funding round to tackle a huge gap in the marketing ecosystem: transforming raw data into personalized customer experiences.AI has been a core pillar for Auxia since its inception. When I spoke to Sandeep a few months ago, they were on the cusp of introducing new agents that were focused on enhancing various dimensions of the marketing experience. At that time, marketing teams were still dealing with fragmented experiences that lacked intuitiveness – where campaigns, assets, and insights were piled together without clear guardrails based on use case or objective.Like many modern enterprise software platforms, AI capabilities have been historically reactive in nature. Marketers needed to ask the right questions, rather than having an AI system that could proactively anticipate their needs. Again, this exacerbated the cognitive load – especially for teams juggling multiple campaigns.As Sandeep explained, the ideas for Auxia’s agents sprang from the needs of real marketers who have been hamstrung by these challenges, specifically the “black box” areas where data science needed to shine a light on the missing insight. Back in July, the company released an enhanced version of its <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250709871181/en/Auxia-Announces-New-AI-Analyst-Agent-to-Help-Marketing-Teams-Convert-Campaign-Data-Into-Revenue-Insights">AI Analyst agent.</a> Using a natural language interface, it provides marketing teams with high-speed insights into campaign performance. Before, it was hard to know why AI-powered campaigns were succeeding or failing without complex data analysis. Now, marketers can just ask Auxia’s agent for the answers.“One of my frustrations as a marketer was that I would launch, and I would have these systems doing stuff on my campaigns,” he said. “And then if I wanted to go back and determine what worked, or what didn't work, I had to rely on a data scientist or spend endless hours playing with Excel to find out. Now, imagine you can get those answers within a platform through a natural language interface. That's what prompted us to launch our Analyst agent, where you, as a marketer, can go in and interact with the data set and gain deep insights. So you don't need to rely on a data scientist or data engineer. We do it.”With Auxia’s new interface, teams have these agent resources in arm’s reach through a more unified experience, powered by agentic AI that’s helping them move from idea to execution with less friction. Built from the ground up with native AI capabilities, the console is designed to think and act alongside marketers – surfacing insights, suggesting actions, and automating complexity behind the scenes.<h3 id="a-unified-experience-that-streamlines-everything">A unified experience that streamlines everything</h3>One thing that immediately pops up for me is the elegance of Auxia’s new UX. It’s lightweight, intuitive, and makes it incredibly simple for marketers to navigate the ecosystem. You can access its agentic capabilities – like the Decisioning or Analyst agents – from one consistent, chat-based interface that modifies content based on your query. And rather than waiting for prompts, Auxia’s AI is humming constantly in the background, anticipating what you might need next. It surfaces insights and content recommendations automatically, cutting through the noise and reducing cognitive load.The console offers a reimagined home screen experience that brings campaign health, performance trends, and creative recommendations into a single view, helping teams take action faster. There’s also this concept of a “Spark,” which is a lightning moment of insight that agents uncover and proactively surface for marketers. You can review the insight daily from the dashboard, where it is ranked based on overall confidence. <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:84.6%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/auxia-featured-2.jpg" alt="" /></figure>Auxia home screen featuring Sparks. Source: Auxia “One big shift that we are making is this whole idea of a Spark,” Sandeep described. “You have our Analyst agent working in the background, trying to understand and highlight insights that they are seeing. It will take an analyst team maybe days, if not weeks, to come up with insights like these, and then they would also need to know what to look for. Our agents are constantly working in the background, trying to determine what insights are relevant based on the current campaigns you're managing.”Drilling into the insights also provides recommendations, and you have the persistent presence of the “Ask Auxia” copilot for targeting natural language queries. <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:84.97%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1761772811781.png" alt="A screenshot of a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect." /></figure>Detail view from a Spark. Source: Auxia Campaigns are now organized into core marketing workflows called Journeys that align with customer needs. This includes Evergreen journey, which are always-on journeys optimized for continuous AI decisioning – and Burst journey, which are time-bound campaigns where marketers can override and steer based on their desired experiences.<h3 id="availability-and-pricing">Availability and pricing</h3>Auxia’s new console is already rolling out to select enterprise partners, with general availability planned for Q4 2025 – so any time now. If you’re interested in early access or live demos, you can visit<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://auxia.io/"> auxia.io</a>I asked Sandeep about pricing, which is a bit of an enigma. That said, this isn’t a standard model. As he explained, a typical engagement would involve going deep into a specific marketing journey or use case that an enterprise wants to transform, and pricing is based on the calculated volume of decisions and usage. In other words, it’s highly custom – so you’ll need to connect with their team for details.<h3 id="the-verdict">The verdict</h3>Customer Journey Orchestration is becoming an elevated imperative as marketers look for new ways to optimize and enhance their campaign performance. Enterprises are hungry to get personalization right – and the stakes have never been higher. Journey orchestration is bridging the gap, but AI is making it more effective than ever. Auxia’s pure-play solution is challenging some of the built-in features of other platforms. From a first-party data standpoint, it’s been handling security and privacy from day one with GDPR compliance and other features that help ensure governance. Sure, pricing is vague, but that’s part of the discovery process. That said, if you can fill the role that data scientists play to divine insights and automate decisioning, it could be worth its weight in gold. One thing I do like is the composable, agnostic nature of the product. As Sandeep indicated, they work natively at the cloud layer, and they’re able to play with CMS and enhance 1:1 personalization with content decisioning via their agents.“We connect to content management systems, where you can use our agents to determine what is the right content to showcase to somebody at a point in time in their journey to get them to the objective,” he said. The redesigned UX is something to marvel at. It’s clean, concise, and delivers the unified experience that Auxia was aiming for. For marketers, reducing those “swivel chair” moments and crushing cognitive overload is key – especially in a dark landscape drowning in data and apps. If that sounds a bit like Mordor, relax. Auxia might just be your one UX to rule them all.  <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <img style="width:31.61%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/08/storyblok-joyconf-2025-logo.jpg" /><h4 id="storyblok-joyconf-2025"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://joyconf.storyblok.com/">Storyblok JoyConf 2025</a></h4>November 4, 2025 – New York, NY November 6, 2025 – Los Angeles, CAJoin us at JoyConf 2025, where the future of content meets the people shaping it. Built for developers, marketers, and digital innovators, this free conference goes way beyond product updates or yet another strategy playbook. It’s where you’ll get inspired, get real, and get connected – to ideas, to the community, and to what’s possible when you build joyfully. Whether you're building lightning-fast frontends or launching cross-channel campaigns, this is where content becomes connection and collaboration becomes second nature. Come for the talks. Stay for the community. Leave with joy. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://joyconf.storyblok.com/">Save your spot.</a> <img style="width:28.9%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/08/sitecore-symposium-2025.jpg" /><h4 id="sitecore-symposium-2025"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://symposium.sitecore.com/">Sitecore Symposium 2025</a></h4>November 3-5, 2025 – Orlando, FLAt Sitecore Symposium, you’ll learn how to meet your customers where they are – across channels, moments, and touchpoints that didn’t exist a year ago. You’ll hear how the boldest brands in the world are transforming content into outcomes and creating experiences that are fast, relevant, and human. Join 1,500 marketers, digital leaders, and technologists in Orlando to see what’s possible when personalization scales, AI accelerates creativity, and trust becomes your competitive edge. This is the Third Wave of the Internet. And this is your moment to lead in it. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://symposium.sitecore.com/">Get your tickets today.</a> <figure class="image image-style-block-align-left image_resized" style="width:28.08%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1759840698475.png" /></figure><h4 id="raise:-lifting-content-into-the-future-with-agentic-cms"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://kontent.ai/events-and-webinars/raise/">RAISE: Lifting Content into the Future with Agentic CMS</a></h4>November 11, 2025 – London, UKJoin Kontent.ai at RAISE: Lifting Content into the Future with Agentic CMS, a premier free event for forward-thinking marketing and technology leaders shaping the way today’s most ambitious brands create and deliver content. Expect bold ideas, discover innovative strategies, engage with industry leaders, and gain insights that will lift your content strategy to new heights. At RAISE, you'll learn how to deliver faster, more engaging content experiences while AI does the busywork of audits, compliance, and localization with Agentic CMS, built to give you and your teams more time on creativity that matters. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://kontent.ai/events-and-webinars/raise/">Reserve your seat today.</a> <img style="width:29.67%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1761136749603.png" /><h4 id="live-webinar:-can-we-ever-get-composable-without-complexity?"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/webinar-cmscritic">Live Webinar: Can We Ever Get Composable Without Complexity?</a></h4>November 20, 2025 – 6 PM (CET) / 5 PM (GMT) / 12 PM (EST)Composable architecture promised to simplify digital experience creation by giving organizations the flexibility to combine the technologies that met their needs. But for many enterprises, it’s done the opposite, which has led to complex integrations, spiraling costs, and what some are now referring to as composable regret. In this live conversation, Umbraco CEO Mats Persson joins Matt Garrepy, Chief Content Officer at CMS Critic, for a candid exploration of what went wrong in the first wave of composable and what needs to change. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/webinar-cmscritic">Register for the webinar.</a> <img style="width:29.08%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1761594434824.png" /><h4 id="typo3-conference-2025"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://t3con.typo3.com/">TYPO3 Conference 2025</a></h4>November 25–27, 2025 – Düsseldorf, GermanyT3CON is the premier annual event for web professionals, developers, marketers, and decision-makers. Much more than just a TYPO3-focused conference, T3CON spotlights the latest trends, innovations, and leaders shaping the future of content management, covering everything from grassroots initiatives to new technologies, strategies, and success stories. The event is designed to empower businesses and organizations with the knowledge and tools they need to thrive in the evolving digital landscape. The conference culminates in an awards ceremony celebrating the best TYPO3 projects across various industries. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://t3con.typo3.com/">Get your ticket.</a> <img style="width:31.44%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/08/cms-kickoff-2026-logo.png" alt="" /><h4 id="cms-kickoff-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">CMS Kickoff 2026</a></h4>January 13-14, 2026 – St. Petersburg, FLMeet industry leaders at our fourth annual CMS Kickoff – the industry's premier global CMS event. Similar to a traditional kickoff, we reflect on recent trends and share stories from the frontlines. Additionally, we will delve into the current happenings and shed light on the future. Prepare for an unparalleled in-person CMS conference experience that will equip you to move things forward. This is an exclusive event – space is limited, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">so secure your tickets today.</a>

One UX to rule them all: Auxia powers customer journeys with AI agents in new unified experience

At CDP World 2025, Treasure Data Signals an Evolution from CDP to AI Marketing Cloud

<hr /> <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro">MCP</a> (that’s “Model Context Protocol” if you have an aversion to acronyms) is becoming a posh objective for technology vendors up and down the stack – and digital analytics platforms are no exception. In the past few weeks, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/umbraco-accelerates-ai-transformation-by-appointing-senior-software-engineer-to-focus-on-mcp">I’ve already covered MCP</a> in multiple places. But my proximity goes back to late last year, when the noise around agentic AI and agentic commerce was steadily increasing. In a matter of months, we went from a handful of early-stage MCP servers (based on the standards created by <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.anthropic.com/">Anthropic</a>) to tens of thousands. And there’s no slowdown in sight.The hype is well-founded. Along with the engineers I’ve connected with across CMS, DXP, CDP, and other platform categories, I personally competed in an AWS hackathon in July that required harnessing MCP for enterprise agent applications – so I know firsthand what the potential represents.This week, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/amplitude">Amplitude</a> joined the growing chorus of Model Context Protocol believers with the release of its <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://2b78cec6.streaklinks.com/Cn_nauWNjVaTJuhqDwH11l85/https%3A%2F%2Famplitude.com%2Fdocs%2Fanalytics%2Famplitude-mcp">Amplitude MCP Server</a> – and it sounds spot on. By leveraging MCP, the analytics leader is making its real-time behavioral insights available directly inside AI environments like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://claude.ai/">Claude</a>, the ever-popular <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cursor.com/">Cursor</a>, or any MCP client. The benefits here are almost self-explanatory, but here’s a great use case: A marketer queries in natural language something like “What features drove the most retention this month?” or “What caused the drop in sign-ups last week?” Based just on that, you can get instant answers via live Amplitude data. As Amplitude's Co-Founder and CEO <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/spenserskates/">Spenser Skates</a> said, MCP was made for data analytics. You can ask a vague question and have an AI model iteratively query Amplitude to find insights. Amplitude's MCP exposes all of its functionality so an agent can interact with it directly, allowing you to use Amplitude without having to know anything about its user interface or your data taxonomy.By having everything consolidated in one place, users can also reduce that dreaded “swivel chair” effect and the immense cognitive overload of switching between dashboards. With this heightened consolidation and control, teams can focus their time and energy on drilling into what customers like, where the bottlenecks are, and what actions might streamline the experience.“Behavioral context is one of the most critical inputs behind every great product and digital experience. The problem is, AI tools are only as good as the context they leverage,” explained <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/wadechambers/">Wade Chambers</a>, Chief Engineering Officer at Amplitude. “Amplitude already captures and organizes behavioral data across the full user journey. So by extending this into MCP-enabled environments like Claude, we’re giving AI direct, governed access to that data. This makes the context instantly available and marks a major step toward the insights-to-actions loop becoming automatic.”According to Amplitude, one of its customers, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://zip.co/us">Zip,</a> is already seeing results – scaling expertise, accelerating analysis, and uncovering opportunities that were previously hidden.“Amplitude’s MCP is a real game-changer,” said <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mpauly/">Moss Pauly,</a> Technical Product Manager, Data &amp; AI at Zip. “We’ve been able to embed our internal domain knowledge – how certain events are used to drive complex analysis – directly into an LLM’s context and have it interact seamlessly with Amplitude. It’s opening up access to cross-domain insights that previously only a few specialists could uncover. It’s a genuine step change in democratizing data across the organization.”<h3 id="building-an-agentic-strategy-to-power-analytics">Building an agentic strategy to power analytics</h3>Amplitude has been on an innovation tear as of late, adding <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/amplitudes-new-web-experimentation-upgrade-gives-marketers-3x-faster-testing-and-more-control">new web experimentation</a> capabilities with low-code, drag-and-drop editing, group cohort targeting, and self-service control.Earlier this summer, the company teased its forthcoming AI agents, which complement its MCP trajectory. This included a limited beta for its first series of AI Agents – intelligent assistants that continuously monitor product data, detect anomalies, and surface insights before teams even ask. With agents, teams can move faster, scale decision-making, and transform analytics into an ever-present system that drives growth proactively.Back in August, I connected with Amplitude’s <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/nithya-r-2a72794/">Nithya Rajendran,</a> a project manager working on the Web Experimentation and AI initiatives, about the frontier of Amplitude’s agentic investment. She provided some insight as to what kinds of functionality we can expect and the benefits. “Our Agents work in parallel with teams to tackle essential but tedious activities like monitoring data, spotting patterns and changes, watching user sessions, forming hypotheses, running experiments, shipping changes, and monitoring impact,” Rajendran said. “Our AI Agents are built directly into the platform to help automate these tasks, meaning work that used to take weeks can now take minutes."<h3 id="new-ai-agents-are-now-available-to-all-customers-">New AI agents are now available to all customers </h3>Last week, Amplitude’s AI agent beta program was opened to all Amplitude customers, with two AI Agents available at launch. The first is its Dashboard Agent, which analyzes dashboards and summarizes meaningful changes in trends, metrics, and issues proactively. With it, you can surface trends that require immediate attention and detect key week-over-week or month-over-month shifts.Amplitude’s Dashboard Agent also performs high-utility actions like root-cause analysis to identify segments or behaviors driving metric changes, giving marketers even more granular insight. It also enables follow-up analysis using natural language, generating new charts and answers automatically. You can also push these insights to Slack, email, or directly within Amplitude – so you have multiple channels to access the results.  <figure class="image image-style-align-center image_resized" style="width:82.77%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1761595961580.png" /></figure>Amplitude's new agents will provide automated actions and insights. Source: Amplitude website The other agent that’s now available is targeted at Amplitude’s popular <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/replay-it-again-sam-amplitudes-session-replay-everywhere-rocks-with-analytics-visualizations">Session Replay</a> capabilities, a handy resource that I’ve written about previously. The new Session Replay Agent automatically analyzes session replays across funnels or event paths at scale. It also surfaces behavioral patterns, drop-offs, and friction indicators like rage clicks, dead clicks, and user errors.The Session Replay Agent provides end-to-end qualitative analysis, backing insights with a curated playlist of relevant replays for faster investigation. And like its Dashboard Agent companion, it shares insights proactively via Slack, email, or directly within Amplitude.<h3 id="availability">Availability</h3>According to the company’s press release, its MCP is now available to all Amplitude customers. One thing we can watch for as its AI Agents roll out is the introduction of deeper MCP integrations, which the company says we can expect over the coming months. You can <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://amplitude.com/ai">learn more on their website.</a> <h3 id="the-verdict">The verdict</h3>Observability and insight are becoming paramount in the tidal wave of data and connected systems. AI is amplifying the volume of everything, and brands need more insight than ever – not only to assess and optimize their product performance, but to understand customer behavior as it responds to changes and market pressures. As buyers move to different channels like answer engines, marketers need to make sense of these seismic shifts.Amplitude continues to reinforce its position as a leading voice in the digital analytics space, providing self-service visibility throughout the customer journey. This is precisely the space where agentic automation and MCP are right at home, and can potentially impact productivity and improve outcomes in profound ways.I like the dimensions of these initial agents. Marketers need to be closer to their data than ever, so they can make meaningful decisions; there's just so much of it, and it's impacting their strategic agility. As such, these tools are focused on key challenges that marketing teams face – and if they deliver as promised, could provide significant value. We’ll be watching to see how the roadmap unfolds for other agents within the ecosystem, and how a deeper integration with MCP brings additional capabilities to the table.  <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <img style="width:31.61%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/08/storyblok-joyconf-2025-logo.jpg" /><h4 id="storyblok-joyconf-2025"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://joyconf.storyblok.com/">Storyblok JoyConf 2025</a></h4>November 4, 2025 – New York, NY November 6, 2025 – Los Angeles, CAJoin us at JoyConf 2025, where the future of content meets the people shaping it. Built for developers, marketers, and digital innovators, this free conference goes way beyond product updates or yet another strategy playbook. It’s where you’ll get inspired, get real, and get connected – to ideas, to the community, and to what’s possible when you build joyfully. Whether you're building lightning-fast frontends or launching cross-channel campaigns, this is where content becomes connection and collaboration becomes second nature. Come for the talks. Stay for the community. Leave with joy. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://joyconf.storyblok.com/">Save your spot.</a> <img style="width:28.9%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/08/sitecore-symposium-2025.jpg" /><h4 id="sitecore-symposium-2025"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://symposium.sitecore.com/">Sitecore Symposium 2025</a></h4>November 3-5, 2025 – Orlando, FLAt Sitecore Symposium, you’ll learn how to meet your customers where they are – across channels, moments, and touchpoints that didn’t exist a year ago. You’ll hear how the boldest brands in the world are transforming content into outcomes and creating experiences that are fast, relevant, and human. Join 1,500 marketers, digital leaders, and technologists in Orlando to see what’s possible when personalization scales, AI accelerates creativity, and trust becomes your competitive edge. This is the Third Wave of the Internet. And this is your moment to lead in it. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://symposium.sitecore.com/">Get your tickets today.</a> <figure class="image image-style-block-align-left image_resized" style="width:28.08%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1759840698475.png" /></figure><h4 id="raise:-lifting-content-into-the-future-with-agentic-cms"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://kontent.ai/events-and-webinars/raise/">RAISE: Lifting Content into the Future with Agentic CMS</a></h4>November 11, 2025 – London, UKJoin Kontent.ai at RAISE: Lifting Content into the Future with Agentic CMS, a premier free event for forward-thinking marketing and technology leaders shaping the way today’s most ambitious brands create and deliver content. Expect bold ideas, discover innovative strategies, engage with industry leaders, and gain insights that will lift your content strategy to new heights. At RAISE, you'll learn how to deliver faster, more engaging content experiences while AI does the busywork of audits, compliance, and localization with Agentic CMS, built to give you and your teams more time on creativity that matters. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://kontent.ai/events-and-webinars/raise/">Reserve your seat today.</a> <img style="width:29.67%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1761136749603.png" /><h4 id="live-webinar:-can-we-ever-get-composable-without-complexity?"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/webinar-cmscritic">Live Webinar: Can We Ever Get Composable Without Complexity?</a></h4>November 20, 2025 – 6 PM (CET) / 5 PM (GMT) / 12 PM (EST)Composable architecture promised to simplify digital experience creation by giving organizations the flexibility to combine the technologies that met their needs. But for many enterprises, it’s done the opposite, which has led to complex integrations, spiraling costs, and what some are now referring to as composable regret. In this live conversation, Umbraco CEO Mats Persson joins Matt Garrepy, Chief Content Officer at CMS Critic, for a candid exploration of what went wrong in the first wave of composable and what needs to change. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://umbraco.com/webinar-cmscritic">Register for the webinar.</a> <img style="width:29.08%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1761594434824.png" /><h4 id="typo3-conference-2025"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://t3con.typo3.com/">TYPO3 Conference 2025</a></h4>November 25–27, 2025 – Düsseldorf, GermanyT3CON is the premier annual event for web professionals, developers, marketers, and decision-makers. Much more than just a TYPO3-focused conference, T3CON spotlights the latest trends, innovations, and leaders shaping the future of content management, covering everything from grassroots initiatives to new technologies, strategies, and success stories. The event is designed to empower businesses and organizations with the knowledge and tools they need to thrive in the evolving digital landscape. The conference culminates in an awards ceremony celebrating the best TYPO3 projects across various industries. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://t3con.typo3.com/">Get your ticket.</a> <img style="width:31.44%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/08/cms-kickoff-2026-logo.png" alt="" /><h4 id="cms-kickoff-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">CMS Kickoff 2026</a></h4>January 13-14, 2026 – St. Petersburg, FLMeet industry leaders at our fourth annual CMS Kickoff – the industry's premier global CMS event. Similar to a traditional kickoff, we reflect on recent trends and share stories from the frontlines. Additionally, we will delve into the current happenings and shed light on the future. Prepare for an unparalleled in-person CMS conference experience that will equip you to move things forward. This is an exclusive event – space is limited, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">so secure your tickets today.</a>

Amplitude’s New MCP Server and Open Beta for AI Agents Bring Behavioral Data into AI Tools

Your Next CMS Decision Could Make or Break Your AI Strategy

katie-austin

Power your CMS on AWS

Manage your websites & apps in the most trusted cloud.

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

News

Spot what confuses your users with Hotjar & AI

Power your CMS on AWS