Synthetic users and AI personas came up as something In October 2018, fresh from hosting the Emerging Tech track at the Boye conference, I wrote a post on this blog about how AI assistants would change business. Assistants, at the time, could set a timer and mispronounce your calendar. Writing about them reshaping commerce felt slightly reckless.
Eight years is long enough. Most predictions die politely - nobody checks them, including their authors. I'd rather grade mine in public, because the pattern of what held and what didn't turns out to be more useful than any of the individual claims.
Read moreDo we still need websites in the age of AI? That was one of the more provocative questions raised during the latest Benelux Digital Leaders Peer Group, organised by Boye & Co and hosted at Crossphase Presenter in Leiden on 27 August 2026. It was also only one of many.
Around the table were digital leaders, agency owners, content specialists, platform experts and people responsible for some complex digital environments. The afternoon moved from a mid-year reality check on AI and the CMS market to changing content roles, the state of content modelling, and the practical challenge of deciding what comes after a fragmented CMS landscape. Tridion came up often enough during the introductions to trigger a few shared memories, and judging by Janus Boye’s reaction, possibly a few flashbacks too.
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