By Janus Boye
A pleasantly surprised and happy Joel Varty from Agility seen sitting in the middle of the photo surroundted by the CMS Idol 25 judges and hosts.
Toronto-based CMS vendor Agility likes to call themselves the Best Canadian Headless CMS vendor. After winning both the votes from the conference judges and participants at the international CMS Connect 25 conference they can now also add CMS Idol Summer Edition 2025 winner to their list of accolades.
Held earlier this month in Montréal, CTO Joel Varty went up against industry leaders from five other vendors from Europe and the US. With a bold, inspiring and also risky six minute demo, he managed to show how to go from an idea to fully working components using Gen AI tools like Github Copilot and Claude Sonnet 4. He also weaved in the first ever live demo of the Agility CMS MCP server which was still in private beta at the time of the demo.
Sounds like an action packed six minutes? A video recording of the demo is available below so that you can take a look for yourselves, but it is also worth saying that the competition was exceptionally strong. As industry analyst Matt Garrepy from CMS Critic said after the contest:
“This was one of the best and tightest demo sets we’ve seen, and a real testament to the presenters and their product innovation. It’s clear that AI is deeply influencing our collective roadmaps and enabling some incredible potential for productivity. We saw both edgy and practical applications, and all deserved praise.”
Credit to Contentstack, Kentico, Kontent.ai, Pantheon and Umbraco, who all showed cutting edge demos that not only worked smoothly, but also demonstrated smart solutions to real world problems.
Let us dive into what Agility actually pulled off to win the contest.
The winning pitch: A combo that solves a real problem
In this live demo, Joel wanted to solve the problem of how hard it can be to add a new component to parts of your website.
Powered by the new MCP server here’s in brief the two steps he showed us:
Generating all the code for a new component using Github Copilot and Claude Sonnet 4 to create React components and Agility Component Models to match.
Saving the component model directly into Agility CMS.
Effectively skipping all copy-pasting and manual coding that would usually be involved in doing this.
A very concentrated Joel Varty in action showing his winning demo at the CMS Idol 2025 contest held in Montreal in the beginning of August
In other words from idea to screenshot onwards to fully working component in just six minutes.
The 2025 judges who offered constructive feedback to all vendors were:
Dan Backhaus, with his combination of agency and start-up background, he now does enterprise AI solution sales and strategy at ProfitOps.AI
Joyce Peralta who leads digital experience at McGill University and represented the customer perspective
Industry analyst Mark Demeny from the MACH Alliance, who has previously worked at several of the industry leading vendors.
Commenting on the winning pitch, Dan Backhaus said:
“AI-driven Innovation - the doors it opens, the changes it drives, and the power it provides - resulted in what I felt was a totally novel CMS Idol. All six contestants went in starkly different directions, performed strongly, and delivered amazing results in under six minutes.”
The big win was announced by Matt Garrepy from CMS Critic during the CMS Connect 25 conference dinner.
Would you like to take a look for yourself? You’ll see that he actually forgot the screenshot, but it all worked out. You can lean back and enjoy a recording of the live demo below.
Live demos demonstrate an innovative and vibrant industry
Looking beyond the warm summer days in the charming city of Montreal, it is clear that these are changing times, also for everyone delivering digital experiences. There’s global uncertainty and after years of high growth, some industry analysts are now taking about both failing implementations and referring to headless hangovers and a MACHlash. Both referring to jumping too quickly and uncritically at industry trends. While industry consolidation is nowhere in sight, it is clear that growth has stalled for some vendors.
AI is not the only show in town, and while AI can indeed be used to solve some of the long standing industry problems, like missing accessibility and painfully long implementation times, we also saw cutting edge demos that showed several other use cases, including improving the content editor experience.
This was the third live demo contest this year with Kontent.ai winning at CMS Kickoff in Florida and React Bricks winning at CMS Summit in Frankfurt. Agility now joins Kontent.ai as the only vendor to have one twice as Agility also won the 2023 Small Feature Award.
Learn more about live demos and see them soon again
Think about how important the driving experience is when you buy a car. Would you buy a car just based on some slides? Or perhaps more in the same price range, would you buy a house to live in just based on a fancy deck from a slick realtor? No, you wouldn't, right? But why are so many then buying enterprise software, upwards of millions of dollars, without actually trying it out?
Or like our CMS Experts community leader Matt McQueeny recently said:
“Software presentations without live demos are akin to concerts without the band playing the songs”
To keep the art of the live demo going, we’ve integrated them into our conferences for the past decade and you can experience it next at these upcoming events:
Boye Aarhus 25 in Aarhus in November
CMS Kickoff 26 in Florida in January
CMS Summit 26 in Frankfurt in May
You can also read more about live demos in these posts:
Pieter Brinkman who used to work at Sitecore also enjoys live demos and he wrote this post after the Boye Aarhus 23 conference: The power of live demos at events. At Sitecore they have guided click-through demos that guide you through the product. Pieter has since joined Sanity.
Michael Carter, my personal demo mentor over 25 years ago, generously shared what 94 quarters worth of demos taught him