CMS Idol 2026: Kontent.ai wins again

By Janus Boye

Standing out in front of around 100 digital leaders is no small task.

That was the challenge facing contestants at CMS Idol 2026, hosted during CMS Kickoff 26 in St. Pete, Florida, in the striking surroundings of The James Museum. The room was filled with architects, strategists, product owners, and practitioners. People who spend their days making hard decisions about platforms, governance, and delivery, and who are not easily swayed by surface-level demos.

CMS Idol puts the outcome in their hands. By the end of the session, the vote was clear. Kontent.ai took home the CMS Idol trophy for the second year running.

What helped them stand out this time was not novelty, but relevance. The winning demo showed how AI can streamline one of the most painful and risk-laden parts of CMS work: migration. A process that typically drags on for months, consuming teams and budgets, was reframed as something faster, more controlled, and far less draining.

CMS Idol has quickly become one of the most popular sessions at the conference. Short, high-energy demos. Six minutes per contestant. No slides to hide behind. Just a system, a story, and a room full of experienced digital leaders deciding what genuinely stands out.

A familiar format, a different story

Last year, Kontent.ai impressively showed how AI could simplify content reviews. This year, the focus shifted to something many organisations quietly dread: migration.

Lukas Martinak, VP of Customer Success at Kontent.ai, took the stage to demonstrate how AI can streamline the migration process. What traditionally takes months, and often an extra team of interns, was reduced to a handful of prompts, with a human review step where it actually matters. It was a clear, practical story that resonated with an audience who know just how painful migrations can be.

What stood out was not the promise of replacing people, but of removing the most repetitive and draining parts of the work. The message landed well: let teams spend more time making good decisions, and less time pushing content around spreadsheets.

Strong competition, real community spirit

CMS Idol is never short on strong contenders. Alongside Kontent.ai, this year’s line-up included Kajoo.ai, Pantheon, TYPO3, and Umbraco, all working within an unforgiving six-minute demo window.

Open source CMS TYPO3 narrowly took second place with a confident and well-paced demo from Mathias Bolt Lesniak. He showcased a new QR code backend module in TYPO3 v14.1, demonstrating how editors can create reusable QR codes with permanent URLs and flexible download options. It was a small feature on the surface, but one that clearly hit a nerve with the audience. Anyone who has ever had to manage QR codes across campaigns could immediately see the value. The demo struck a good balance between technical clarity and editorial relevance, and kept the final vote interesting right to the end.

Umbraco also deserves an honourable mention, not for chasing polish, but for leaning into the spirit of the event. Merch was handed out, a music band made an appearance, and the demo leaned into having fun with the format. It was a reminder that very good live demos are as much about energy and connection as they are about features.

The judges, Karla Santi, Matthew McQueeny, and Sara Green, brought sharp questions and thoughtful commentary, but as always, the final decision rested with the audience. That mix of expert insight and community voting is what gives CMS Idol its particular energy.

Olga and Lukas from Kontent.ai posing with judges Karla Santi and Matt McQueeny alongside CMS Idol host Matt Garrepy from CMS Critic

Why this win matters

Winning CMS Idol once is an achievement. Winning it twice in a row suggests something more durable.

Across both wins, the pattern is consistent. The Czech-based Kontent.ai team is not chasing abstract AI narratives. Instead, they are applying AI to very specific, very real business problems: reviews, governance, migration, localisation. The kind of work that rarely makes headlines, but quietly determines whether digital teams succeed or burn out. Read more about their work in our post from September: The rise of Agentic CMS

For the wider CMS community, this is another signal that AI-assisted workflows are moving from experiment to expectation. Not as a replacement for strategy or judgement, but as a way to give teams back time and headspace.

The fact that demos built around AI prompts continue to resonate perhaps says something about the gap between AI hype and what is actually implemented in most organisations today. Many editors and marketers still do not spend their day prompting away inside their CMS of choice.

What is changing more visibly is the rise of agents and automation. These approaches are already reshaping how we work with CMS platforms and how we manage content at scale. As prompting becomes more familiar and more embedded, expectations will inevitably rise. CMS Idol is proving to be a useful lens for watching that shift happen in real time.

Learn more about live demos — and see them again soon

Think about how important the driving experience is when you buy a car. Would you buy one based purely on slides? Or, at a similar price point, would you buy a house just from a slick deck prepared by a realtor? Of course not.

Yet organisations routinely commit millions to enterprise software without ever really trying it.

That is why live demos matter. They cut through positioning and promise. They show what actually works, what breaks, and what it feels like to use a system when the pressure is on.

As our CMS Experts community leader Matthew McQueeny put it:

“Software presentations without live demos are akin to concerts without the band playing the songs.”

CMS Idol exists to keep that discipline alive. For more than a decade, we’ve made live demos a central part of our conferences, not as theatre, but as a way to ground conversations in reality.

You can experience them again at these upcoming 2026 conferences:

If you want to explore the role of live demos further, these posts are a good place to start:

And finally, Mathias Bolt Lesniak from TYPO3 wrote a constructive post after CMS Idol on An AI prompt is not a product demo in 2026.