A packed room for our Atlanta peer group meeting

They call it 'HOTlanta,' and this group really turned up the heat. We had a packed session at yesterday’s digital experience leaders group meeting, where Matthew McQueeny and I covered everything from the state of martech to the angles of agentic AI, with a through-line focus on open source CMS.

Building on a whirlwind global tour of insights that took us from New York to Frankfurt to the vibrant Poncey-Highland neighborhood of ATL, we were treated to some fantastic perspectives from a diverse international group of attendees.

A huge thanks to Daniel Fau and the TYPO3 community members who joined us yesterday. It was a great opportunity to pre-game the open source CMS’s North American Summit at the Georgia Aquarium, and to hear from voices like Luisa Sofie Faßbender and Kendall Litton of TYPO3, as well as agency partners like Benni Mack of b13 and Pat Ramsey of Crowd Favorite as we navigated the challenging topic of how AI is transforming the product landscape.

The meeting opened with some lively debate surrounding Scott Brinker’s 2026 Martech Supergraphic – and the impacts we’re all feeling as vibe coding disrupts everything. We examined the expanding spate of CMS platforms within a flattening curve of tool growth, and how noise and confusion are rampant.

New vendors keep arriving in the CMS & Web Experience Management category

We were also treated to some great presentations:

✅ George Chang of Hexagon brought us on a journey from prompt to page, building on his CMS Kickoff 26 theme of AI enabling the content supply chain. As he noted, speed is great – but it also brings its share of problems. In an era where the “contentpocalyse” is a mounting reality, he explored how swimming in the seas of mediocrity and “slop laundering” have consequences for content teams and brands.

✅ Michael Thompson of Sesimi reoriented the group’s perspective on the interconnected landscape of content systems, performance layers, and ad activation. As he noted, the case for templated creative isn’t efficiency, it’s enablement. And as Altudo’s Matt Connolly observed about the layering of AI beyond approved solutions (and channeling his best Jurassic Park reference), “Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.” That applies to a great many things.

✅ Alec Steene of Umbraco gave us a revealing demo of the new Umbraco.AI, which shows promising potential – especially around practical, real-world applications. To his point, organizations are deeply interested in AI, but crave control in the form of humans in the loop. Umbraco’s foray into AI offers strong governance and an open-source foundation that opens the door to future transformation.

I’ll be covering the TYPO3 Summit later today, and catching up on the big takeaways with Crowd Favorite CEO Karim Marucchi. What does this push signal about the future of open source CMS? How is the theme of digital sovereignty playing into the decision-making for enterprises?

The opportunity to learn and connect is what this community is all about. Stay tuned.