AI is already part of many content workflows. The harder question is whether, where and how its involvement should be disclosed.
New transparency requirements under the EU AI Act have prompted strong reactions, new tools and plenty of uncertainty. The rules are narrower than some headlines suggest, while important practical questions remain unresolved: Should the label apply to a paragraph, a page or an entire website? What about translated or AI-assisted content? And when is human editorial oversight enough?
By the time we meet, the initial turbulence may have settled a little. This member call is an opportunity to look at what has become clearer, what remains uncertain and what content teams can sensibly do without overreacting or waiting for perfect guidance.
Read moreHow do you make sure the trust you’ve earned through your work is visible to the people who need it?
Many organisations have valuable stories to share: successful customer projects, knowledgeable colleagues, trusted partnerships and years of experience. Yet that credibility can remain scattered across conversations, presentations and other people’s memories. How can content help bring it into view?
Matt McQueeny calls his approach Earnfluencing, bringing together earned media, storytelling and influencing. He launched the idea at our CMS Kickoff conference a few years back, in 2024. We’ll revisit it together and hear how his thinking has developed since then.
Read moreThere are powerful, solemn moments when our personal and professional lives intersect. When the darkness of grief finds a counterweight in the brilliant light of celebration, and gratitude fills our cup.
I had the privilege of working with Jon Panella while serving on the executive advisory board for the MACH Alliance. We met in person at numerous conferences, but most of our connection was through screens. Even when separated by great distances, his force was undeniable.
When Jon passed away suddenly in March of this year, his loss was felt far and wide. He was a respected leader in our industry, but more than that, a kind and generous soul. He was the sum of our best parts, a pioneering explorer who pushed this MACH experiment from possibility to promise. He was a giant in our small corner of the tech world, and I often marveled at his quiet ability to shape the air in a room with charged positivity.
Read moreFor the first time, I’ve received an award for building communities and connecting people.
Yesterday in Amsterdam, I became the first recipient of the Jon Panella Award from the MACH Alliance. I’m proud, grateful and still taking it in.
The award honours someone whose work has advanced open, composable and connected technology across the wider industry through building, teaching, connecting or advocating. It recognises the people influenced, the projects enabled and the ideas shared.
Read moreEveryone is asking whether AI actually delivers.
I met with two leadership groups in Hamburg over the past two weeks, and nobody really has the answer to who owns what happens after.
We met for Boye & Company’s Digital Leadership group at Vattenfall, followed by our Employee Experience group at HafenCity Hamburg GmbH.
Very different rooms. Definitely more overlap than I expected.
Read moreFour new colleagues since early June.
Emma Elaine Brown, Katrine Villadsen, Rostislava Kenebas and Peter Dahlstrøm Andersen have all joined Boye & Company over the past few months.
Yesterday, we spent our team day co-working around Aarhus. We visited Banken and Porter’s, the city’s new jazz venue, where we spent time with Jens Hofman Hansen and the Aarhus UX community. We also fitted in a walk across the new High Line bridge and a team dinner with past Aarhus conference speaker and ethical design expert Martin Michael Frederiksen.
Read moreSynthetic users and AI personas came up as something In October 2018, fresh from hosting the Emerging Tech track at the Boye conference, I wrote a post on this blog about how AI assistants would change business. Assistants, at the time, could set a timer and mispronounce your calendar. Writing about them reshaping commerce felt slightly reckless.
Eight years is long enough. Most predictions die politely - nobody checks them, including their authors. I'd rather grade mine in public, because the pattern of what held and what didn't turns out to be more useful than any of the individual claims.
Read moreCreating content is only part of the challenge. The harder part for many organisations is turning content, data and assets into the banners, advertisements and videos needed across a distributed network, without losing control of the brand along the way.
That was the practical problem at the centre of the winning CMS Idol demonstration at CMS Connect 26 in Montréal last month.
It was the first time that Sesimi, an Australian platform for brand management and content automation, had joined the conference. Michael Thompson represented the company in a demanding format: six minutes, a working product and no slides to hide behind. Using the example of a car dealer, he showed Sesimi generating banners, social media advertisements and video while maintaining control of approved assets, templates and brand requirements.
Read moreSome conversations only happen when we show up
This week, I stayed home while our team brought the community together in Bjerringbro, Boston and Toronto.
Matthew Garrepy led our digital leaders and CMS experts in a charming Boston art gallery. Julian Mills brought employee experience leaders together in Toronto, while Peter Dahlstrøm Andersen visited the Grundfos headquarters with our UX researchers.
This was quite a change for me. I have spent this week of September in Boston for more than a decade, without missing a year or a bowl of clam chowder.
Read moreBoston has always been a beacon for creativity and innovation, and that undeniable spirit is thriving in the SoWa Art + Design District. It was the perfect backdrop for our recent Boye & Company CMS Experts & Digital Leaders meeting, which was held at the charmingly eclectic New England Art Center.
Surrounded by a vibrant pastiche of paintings and sculpture, we hosted a diverse group of leading minds in the content management and digital experience field, where we discussed the continued impact of AI on every aspect of our work.
Read moreAI works well when it understands the context in which it is operating. Yet much of that context has never been written down.
Systems carry years of decisions, exceptions and compromises that may look like mistakes to anyone—or any AI—without access to their history. The obvious correction can easily break something that was done deliberately.
Before CMS Connect 26 in Montréal, Andrei Kalamkarov wrote about the memory he was building for AI. His conversations at the conference expanded that thinking: perhaps this is not only about helping an AI work with one system, but about preserving institutional memory more broadly.
Read moreDo we still need websites in the age of AI? That was one of the more provocative questions raised during the latest Benelux Digital Leaders Peer Group, organised by Boye & Co and hosted at Crossphase Presenter in Leiden on 27 August 2026. It was also only one of many.
Around the table were digital leaders, agency owners, content specialists, platform experts and people responsible for some complex digital environments. The afternoon moved from a mid-year reality check on AI and the CMS market to changing content roles, the state of content modelling, and the practical challenge of deciding what comes after a fragmented CMS landscape. Tridion came up often enough during the introductions to trigger a few shared memories, and judging by Janus Boye’s reaction, possibly a few flashbacks too.
Read moreYou go to edit a page. The CMS stops you politely: this item is locked by jsmith. You check. jsmith left the company in 2022.
If you have run an enterprise CMS for any length of time, you have met a ghost like this. A lock with no owner, holding a piece of content hostage, left behind by someone who is no longer here. It is a small thing. It is also more revealing than it looks.
Read moreBack before AI filters could turn any photo into a sketch, I was pretty handy with a pencil or a piece of charcoal.
In high school, I had a penchant for figure drawing, and spent many hours trying to capture ephemeral poses with live models in studio classes. I won a few awards for it, actually - and carried that love of gestural creation into college.
Of course, not long after, I succumbed to the internet bug, trading in paper for pixels, carbon for code. I had a fine arts concentration and even produced a thesis portfolio show, but eventually my brushes took a back seat to the zeroes and ones.
Read moreCMS Critic was on the scene in San Francisco for some deep learning, and the human algorithm was front and center.
I was fortunate to facilitate a lively conversation with a diverse set of minds from across the industry as we explored the AI frontier. Meeting in person like this always leads us down unexpected corridors, and that’s exactly what happened at yesterday’s Boye & Company West Coast Digital Leaders group.
AEO was the central throughline, and for good reason: every brand and business is aiming to influence the answer engines, and I’ve been carefully following many vendors in the CMS and DX space as they launch new offerings.
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