By Jeroen Fürst, Digital Experience Architect at TrueLime

On February 9, 2026, the CMS Experts - Digital Experience group gathered at Karel V in Utrecht for an afternoon of lively discussion and shared experiences.

AI’s growing influence on the B2B buyer journey, governance questions around content and automation, and hands-on demonstrations of emerging CMS capabilities all made their way onto the table. The agenda was packed and the conversation moved quickly, with participants exchanging practical perspectives from their own organisations.

Below you can find the moments and insights that stayed with me most from the afternoon.

First up, Marieke Hombrink, Digital Marketing & Communication Director Europe at Diversey led a session on AI’s impact on the B2B buyer journey and buyer behaviour.

The discussion focused on how AI tooling is changing how buyers research and decide, often arriving more informed earlier in the process. That raised practical implications for content strategy: forms and gated content are under pressure, while open, accessible content becomes more important. The conversation moved into how teams can stay close to real buyer questions, make those questions explicit, and translate them into content that actually helps across the journey.

Then Deniz Ergun, Product Manager at Bloomreach shared an interesting perspective from the vendor side, within a broader compliance, personalisation and search optimisation portfolio.

Deniz positioned “Lumia AI” as the umbrella for Bloomreach’s AI and ML capabilities and described the direction towards more agent-oriented experiences. In the discussion, the tension between capability and control was front and centre: how much structure and context you need for reliable AI outcomes, where that structure should live, and how to avoid turning a CMS into a single governance place while still integrating properly with compliance, oversight, and observability needs.

Roy Smeets, Chief Product & Technology officer at CoreMedia)followed with an update framed by “complexity beats velocity”.

This landed because it matched what many teams see in practice: speed is rarely the limiting factor. Complexity, governance, and compliance are. The conversation stayed grounded in customer expectations, especially around transparency about what data is shared with AI, and the operational guardrails required to make AI use auditable and safe in real implementations.

Next up was Sander van Beek, Managing Partner at Enfold Digital who led a discussion on streamlining content creation across channels.

Key themes included the difficulty of identifying the real questions buyers ask (and the prompts they use), why localisation is more than translation, and how channel strategy is shifting beyond the website. Communities and review platforms were discussed as part of authority and discoverability. At the same time, the group was realistic about the operational side: headless is mainstream, but reuse still turns into duplication without clear governance, ownership, and strong content models and metadata. The thread that kept returning was focus: pick channels deliberately based on audience behaviour, not on FOMO.

We also did short updates on accessibility, digital sovereignty, and European cloud.

Accessibility is increasingly requested in RFPs, but implementation remains challenging, and the gap between technical compliance and real user experience came up explicitly. On sovereignty and cloud, the discussion included interest in European alternatives and the practical complexity of moving when architectures depend on specific hyperscaler services.

Finally, we ended with live demos, which is always one of my favourite parts:

The demos from Kontent.ai by Maarten van den Hooven and Plate by Pieter Versloot made the “agentic CMS” topic very tangible. In both cases the conversation quickly moved from cool capability to how this works in production: how structure is captured, how review and rules fit into workflows, and how you keep quality and control when AI is part of day-to-day content operations. It is hard to leave a session like this without concluding that agentic CMS is a very current topic.

I am already looking forward to the next event, CMS Summit 26 in Frankfurt on May 12 to 13.