By Janus Boye
Photo from the CMS Connect 25 conference in Montreal where Martin Michalik gave a brief presentation on The Rise of Agentic CMS: How AI Agents Are Redefining Content Management
AI agents are transforming how organisations create, manage, and deliver content.
In a recent members call, Martin Michalik from CMS vendor Kontent.ai explored the concept of the Agentic CMS and shared how it represents a big shift. It’s not just faster, but fundamentally different.
Martin is VP of Product at Kontent.ai and in the call, he also shared examples of agent-driven workflows, and went deeper into how this shift different from traditional automation, and finally how to prepare your content strategy for an agent-powered future.
2025 is the year of agents. Read much more in this post: Principles of Building AI Agents
Let us start at the beginning. By now, you have probably heard of AI agents, but what is agentic CMS?
What is agentic content management system?
Simply put, an agentic CMS contains autonomous AI agents who handle tasks like content generation, compliance, and governance. One simple example, more to follow later, could be to go through existing content and suggest changes to make the language more inclusive.
As you might know, contrary to the name, Content Management Systems are rarely used to manage content. Most organisations use CMS as a content-entry tool, while the “management” part is often orchestrated using email, Excel and Word. That’s not scalable, nor efficient.
In an agentic CMS, AI can help automate content governance, in particular useful for large-scale content operations.
To fully understand the impact, then let’s take a step and Martin offered us a timeline.
Agentic CMS in a confusing 2025 marketplace
Kontent.ai won the Small Feature Award 2024 showing a live demo of a copilot-styled AI assistant that makes content management better
Martin zoomed out and put the introduction of agentic CMS into a broader context of increasing demands and expectations in the past decades.
On a timeline, he started at the turn of the millennium with Web-centric CMS that enabled marketers to create content and publish content via page-based templates. This was followed by the era of digital experience platforms (circa 2010) which introduced suites that could unify content, analytics, and customer experience.
Then in circa 2015, the headless CMS came which decoupled content from presentation, allowing better content reuse and multi-channel publishing.
Forward to around 2020, we saw the Composable era going from suites to tech stacks and similar to in the headless CMS era, the pendulum swung towards the developers, which could compose their own stack from specialised API-first tools.
Finally, now we have had a few years of AI everything and we are seeing the big impact GenAI is having, also on the content management systems.
Learn more about AI agents and agentic CMS
The conversation naturally continues in our peer groups at conferences in Europe and North America. Why not join us and be a part of it?
You can also lean back and view the recording from the call