Do 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.
Read moreMaybe there was a fly in the AI, but the first day of the Boye & Company CMS Connect 2026 conference was anything but buggy.
I had the honor of kicking off the third annual edition of our summer event in the ever-charming foothills of Montreal, where I shared some of the patterns surfacing in my coverage on CMS Critic.
Jeff Goldblum’s classic sci-fi film “The Fly” served as my thematic backdrop, reflecting the unforeseen consequences as agentic AI mutates everything. But that was just the beginning, and this assemblage of digital explorers was treated to some powerful presentations throughout the day.
Read moreIn Elizabeth Strout’s new novel The Things We Never Say, the teacher Artie asks a memorable question that has stayed with me over the past few months:
“I wonder why people never say anything real.”
Later, he comes to understand that “it was a private thing to be alive”.
There is something recognisable in the distance between those two observations. Much of what matters inside an organisation remains private, even when many people are experiencing the same uncertainty. Difficult decisions are presented as settled. Experiments become success stories. Doubts are removed before the work is shared.
Perhaps that is why the most useful professional conversations rarely begin with polished answers. They begin when someone says something real about what is working, what is difficult and what they still do not understand.
Read moreMost organisations have spent years creating knowledge. The challenge today isn't simply producing more content, but making sure people can find it, understand it and, increasingly that AI systems can too.
The way content is structured has become just as important as the words themselves. Whether you're publishing knowledge base articles, press releases, documentation or blog posts, clear structure makes information easier to navigate, easier to maintain, and far more useful for both human readers and machines.
Zoltán is co-founder at Lombiq Technologies and an open-source maintainer
In this member call, we'll explore practical approaches to structured content management in the AI era. We'll look at how to identify recurring patterns across documents, formalise them where it makes sense, and build content that is easier to reuse, maintain and discover.
The call is hosted by Zoltán Lehóczky, co-founder and managing director of Lombiq…
Read moreBuilding digital products has changed dramatically.
For years, bringing an idea to life meant assembling a team, securing a budget, and committing months of development. Today, AI and modern no-code tools have lowered many of those barriers. Yet many great ideas still never make it beyond the planning stage.
This raises an interesting question: if technology is becoming easier, what actually determines whether a product gets built?
Karla Fernandes is a product designer and educator with 25+ years of experience building digital products.
In this member call, we'll be joined by Karla Fernandes who will explore how product thinking, design judgement, and rapid experimentation are changing the way digital products are created. Rather than focusing on the latest AI tools, we'll look at the mindset behind designing, building, shipping, and continuously improving products in a world where one person can accomplish what once required an entire team.
Read moreEarlier this year I wrote about the AI Engineering Maturity Model — a five-level framework for understanding how engineers actually work with AI, from ad-hoc chatbot use all the way through to bounded autonomous workflows. This post is the first set of results.
We all feel that the use of AI in software engineering will be transformative, and there are a lot of enthusiastic evangelists around. Going behind the hype reveals a much more mixed picture of adoption. My goal was to get behind the great anecdotes and get an honest, org-wide picture of how engineers are really using these new tools.
For those who haven’t seen the original post: the AIMM is a five-level maturity scale scored from 1.0 to 4.0. L1 (Explorer) is where engineers are experimenting individually with AI tools. L2 (Tool Adopter) is active, habitual use — IDE plugins installed, regular AI interaction — but practice is still individual.
Read moreMy sails are full after an amazing day at Full Sail University in Orlando with the Boye & Company Digital Leaders group, where we were treated to an amazing tour by the incomparable Kassidy Pierce, the school’s community engagement manager.
From the cavernous Drone Innovation Center to the state-of-the-art Cyber Range (sponsored by Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM, and Cloud Range), we were given VIP treatment, taking us behind the scenes to explore how this campus prepares students for the high-tech jobs of tomorrow.
Read moreAI agents can still feel like others have already started figuring them out. You hear a few confident stories, see a few hands go up in the room, and suddenly the question shifts from what is this? to am I already behind?
This member call is for anyone who is curious, slightly uneasy, or ready to get more hands-on. It starts from the practical reality of daily work rather than a grand strategy. What happens when you stop waiting to understand everything first and simply begin experimenting?
In this conversation, we’ll explore what it looks like to learn by doing. Chris Weier set out with a simple question rather than a plan to build an AI-powered sales team.
Read moreSometimes a conversation leaves you with more questions than answers.
That's certainly how I felt after our recent Employee Experience Group meeting in Hamburg.
Whether it's true or not is almost beside the point. It captures something many people seem to be feeling right now.
Work is changing. Tools are changing. Some tasks that once took hours now take minutes. Others may disappear altogether.
Read moreLast week I had the privilege of attending the Kentico MVP Summit 2026 at Kentico HQ in Brno, Czech Republic. As always, it was an intense week filled with product discussions, strategic conversations, hands-on workshops and valuable time with people across the Kentico ecosystem.
A few weeks earlier, I attended the Boye & Company CMS Summit in Frankfurt. Many of the themes discussed there resurfaced in Brno. Frankfurt highlighted where our industry is heading. Brno made that future feel much more concrete.
Across both events, the conversation moved beyond AI features and tools. The deeper question was how AI is changing the way organisations learn, coordinate and execute. It increasingly seems that competitive advantages are becoming shorter-lived as new tools and workflows spread rapidly across the industry.
Several sessions and discussions during the week offered different perspectives on that shift.
Read moreOrganisations know more than they publish.
Brand guidelines exist. Product knowledge exists. Audience insights exist. Editorial standards exist. Yet when AI generates content, much of that knowledge often remains out of reach.
The challenge is rarely a lack of information. More often, organisations struggle to make their knowledge available where it can be used.
That tension was visible throughout CMS Summit 26, held in May at Frankfurt's Museum für Kommunikation. The event brought together around 100 digital leaders to discuss content management, digital experience, and AI.
One of the highlights was the European CMS Idol competition, where CMS vendors demonstrate their platforms live before an audience of peers and practitioners. Representing Webiny, founder and CEO Sven Al Hamad demonstrated an approach to AI-assisted content creation
Read moreHave you also asked your favourite AI assistant for travel advice?
I did. I asked mine a simple thing: get me from Rovinj to Malaga on 16 June.
The answer was completely wrong.
It gave me a ferry that did not run on that date, a bus to the wrong airport, and a flight from an airport that the bus did not serve. The timings overlapped. The whole thing read like an itinerary. None of it would get me to Spain.
Read more