Diving into AI and AEO insights with the Digital Leaders peer group.

CMS Critic was on the scene in San Francisco for some deep learning, and the human algorithm was front and center.

I was fortunate to facilitate a lively conversation with a diverse set of minds from across the industry as we explored the AI frontier. Meeting in person like this always leads us down unexpected corridors, and that’s exactly what happened at yesterday’s West Coast Digital Leaders group.

AEO was the central throughline, and for good reason: every brand and business is aiming to influence the answer engines, and I’ve been carefully following many vendors in the CMS and DX space as they launch new offerings.

Hosted by Contentful’s personalization pro Gabriel Dillon at the company’s hip SF offices, we were treated to some fantastic presentations from the best thinkers in the Bay Area:

Jason McGhee, who is driving Contentful’s new Palmata AEO platform, gave a thought-provoking presentation on the opportunities and relevant insights emerging in the LLM era. He also shared how agentic development has exposed bottlenecks, and how surprising revelations – like anomalous pages or articles that are arming negative citations – are constantly emerging.
Wei Zheng of Conductor, a leading enterprise SEO and AEO platform, reminded us that content is how humans discover information, and AI is changing how we behave as it begins to perform more tasks. She gave relevant examples of where AI can simplify workflows and help solve the content aggregation bloat. What does winning look like in the AEO game? Simple: being disproportionately recommended by AI.

Geetha Rajan of Freshworks (and a brilliant CMS Critic contributor) asked a simple question: what should we be measuring in the age of AI? It’s not lines of code anymore or the corpus of activity. Leveraging her dynamite research and insights, she shared why outcomes matter more than ever – and how her proprietary Pilots to Scale™ framework is helping to clarify the signal through the noise.
Andreas Ramos, a prolific marketer, author, and professor at California Science and Technology University, gave a rousing lecture on the many challenges we face in this era of AI-generated content. How do we prove authenticity in a swell of slop? How do we ensure provenance? It was a charged conversation that raised a multitude of questions, and Andreas provided tangible recommendations that can serve as verification anchors.

A huge thanks to Curtis Northcutt of Handshake AI for taking us through the layers of the onion as algorithms search for truth, and Sharon Ni of Google for some linguistic intel on the agentic side of Gemini and the pressures facing UX.

Props to Kim Ceseña, John Alderman, Marko Dugonjic, and Marc Salvatierra for your incredible reflections throughout the afternoon from across the spectrum. It was a privilege to have your voices in the room.

‘Answer-engines: an audience' — the room leaning into what that really means for how content gets discovered in the age of AI.

If you’re interested in joining a future group meetting, check out the Groups page.