What if the limits of your content are not set by AI, but by how well you understand and model it?
This question sat at the heart of Marc Salvatierra’s session at CMS Kickoff 26, which has become among the most talked-about conversations at the event. As AI increasingly shapes how content is created, reused, and interpreted, the quality of your content models directly determines what both humans and machines can do with your content.
One idea from the session stayed in the room: WYMIWYG – What you model is what you get.
In an AI-driven landscape, internal schemas and traditional CMS content models are no longer enough on their own.
Read moreSorry folks. An AI prompt is not a product demo in 2026. It’s no longer magic, and we’ve seen it all before. It certainly isn't content management, and it distorts customers’ perception of value. We need something else.
CMS Kickoff is a fantastic event that provides me with the insights and perspectives I need for a year in the CMS industry. However, I think I was the only person to demo a content management UI this year.
You can achieve great things with AI, but in a sea of workflow automations and wait animations, two things seem to have disappeared from the agenda. It’s hurting the industry.
Read moreWe began 2026 with an uncomfortable conversation about green technology and greenwashing.
Our very first member call of the year was an unusual session with Gerry McGovern, setting a very different tone for how we might talk about technology in 2026. Framed as an informal launch of his new book, 99th Day: A Warning About Technology, the session challenged some of the most familiar narratives in digital and technology leadership.
Read moreWebsites can look polished, intuitive, and conversion-friendly, yet still fail quietly for a growing group of users. Not just people using assistive technologies, but also AI agents that are already browsing, comparing, and transacting on users’ behalf.
In this member call, Tom Cranstoun shares insights from his forthcoming book, The Invisible Users: Designing the Web for AI Agents and Everyone Else (due Q1 2026). Drawing on real examples, Tom shows how design decisions that rely on visual feedback alone can lead to misunderstandings, failed tasks, and lost trust, without ever triggering an error message or analytics alert.
We’ll explore how different kinds of AI agents actually interact…
Read moreOver the past decade, I have spent approximately $194,345 USD on themes, subscriptions, hosting, plugins, templates, and licensed media across multiple content management systems. That figure is not an exaggeration, nor is it unusual for organizations that have operated at scale in the CMS ecosystem. What makes it notable is not the amount, but the outcome: despite significant investment, much of this spend produced little durable, compounding value.
This experience is not unique. It is a structural characteristic of how traditional CMS platforms evolved. Tooling, plugins, and hosting models optimized for flexibility and extensibility, but often at the cost of long-term resilience, portability, and efficiency. Over time, complexity became normalized.
As the former owner of a hosting company, an advertising agency specializing in CMS, a board member of Open Source Matters and Joomla, CMO of Magnolia and CMO of Jahia, I believe….
Read more6 healthcare leaders (and me) attended the kickoff in the new healthcare content peer group in London a few days ago.
We naturally covered AI and here’s five hard truths:
1. Great AI solutions start with a bottleneck.
Everyone’s building tools, but few are solving the right problems. Don't ask how can we use AI. Ask what's still broken.
2. Best use cases are boring.
Forget flashy stuff like hyper-personalised content. Think smarter segmentation, faster insights, better messaging. Quiet improvements that add up.
Read moreThis famous Thomas Edison quote was on the wall yesterday as we held two group meetings in Edinburgh, Scotland.
At one of the meetings our member Stratos Filalithis, Head of Website & Communication Technologies at the University of Edinburgh shared their progress with making AI useful and usable, including how to improve search and to power virtual assistants.
AI is a regular topic at our group meetings and conferences, including all the confusion and overwhelming hype that comes with it. It makes me happy that during the past months, the conversation seems to have shifted from sheer, almost blind excitement, to using AI to doing things better and actually delivering value.
Getting things done has always been a popular topic…..
Read moreWith some 300 participants mostly from Europe, Ibexa and their DXP community took to Barcelona at the end of January for their annual kickoff and it was a quite different experience compared to last year.
Unlike last year, where it was 200 participants and partners-only, this year customers also participated at Ibexa Summit 25 and that was far from the only substantial change. Where the 2024 program looked much more inwards, or if you prefer, was more partner-community focused, this time Ibexa curated an experience that set sight on the broader marketplace, bigger customer problems and even touching on industry challenges as faced by AI and the erosion in trust.
In brief: Ibexa is growing, now also with a North American footprint and importantly, the combination of DXP (digital experience platform), CDP (customer data platform) and PIM (Product Information Management) is setting them apart in a marketplace that is as confusing as ever.
Read moreLast year, I dismissed AI coding assistants as fancy autocomplete tools. After five decades of programming, I thought I'd seen every productivity promise come and go. I was wrong.
My journey started simply enough with vanilla Visual Studio Code. Microsoft Copilot came next, making big promises about revolutionizing coding. Skeptical but curious, I tried that, then Cursor, a VS Code fork that actually delivered when pointed at the right code along with the manufacturers documentation. Adding Claude through Cline opened new possibilities, followed by Roo Code with its specialized prompts for architecture, coding, and code review.
Then DeepSeek-R1 arrived, unlike the other leading AI LLms, it is open-source, meaning anyone can use, modify, or share it for free. matching Claude's capabilities at a tenth of the cost. This constant evolution taught me something: yesterday's cutting-edge tool could be tomorrow's expensive luxury.
5 new tools to learn in one year, it’s what I live for.
Read moreIn an age of AI-driven workflows and hybrid or remote setups, how do we keep our people at the heart of communication?
During our recent Employee Experience group session hosted by Microsoft in Toronto, I tried to tackle this head-on with the help from the group. Drawing on tactics for AI-powered communications, lessons on psychological safety, and the importance of hyper-personalized messaging, together we illuminated what it truly takes to reclaim genuine connection.
Below are the “big questions” that framed our discussion—and the key takeaways every employee experience and digital workplace leader needs to know.
Read moreIn 1977, I made what felt like a monumental investment: $795 for a Commodore PET computer. But that was just the beginning. The need for storage led to another equally significant purchase – a disk drive system for another $795. That's a total of $1,590 in 1977, equivalent to approximately $7,950 in today's money. For context, that total investment would have bought you a decent used car back then. The PET was revolutionary for its time, featuring a built-in monitor, keyboard, and cassette deck in one integrated unit. It came with a whopping 4KB of RAM (yes, kilobytes), ran at a blazing 1 MHz, and with the disk drive, offered unprecedented storage capabilities for a personal computer.
Fast forward to 2025, and I find myself contemplating another significant investment in computing technology, this time for running the full DeepSeek-R1 AI model locally. The parallels in terms of technological ambition – and cost – are striking.
Read moreLet me share something fascinating: The Web is experiencing its most significant transformation since its beginning in the 1990s, shifting from human-centric design to a "robot-first" approach where AI systems are becoming primary consumers of web content.
While early web protocols helped manage human access across devices and restrict access by robots like search engine crawlers, today's websites actively court robot engagement for improved user experiences, automation and to feed the algorithm and language models. However, this shift brings challenges – from AI manipulation concerns to questions about data privacy and algorithmic bias.
Remember when "mobile-first" was the hot trend in web development? Well, get ready for "AI-first," or with all the confusion around AI as a term, let’s just call it what it really is: Robots-first.
New standards and protocols are emerging to help website owners manage AI interactions while preserving the web's core mission of democratized knowledge sharing. This article will explore how these changes impact web development strategies impacting how one approaches web development.
Read moreOnce again the big stories this year covered AI (surprise!), but also articles on designing sustainable systems and digital equity made it to the top 5 alongside a piece on universal CMS.
It’s that time of year, where we look back at another year of learning and networking. We really like to have a good conversation and meet in person, but sharing openly as much as possible is also an important part of what we do. Sharing is caring!
Keeping with tradition, here are the five posts, which seemed to resonate the most based on readership and engagement numbers.
Read moreAt this year’s annual end-of-year collab meeting in Hamburg, we took a closer look at what we have learned in 2024 by bringing together our local groups with an open invite to other community members, a few selected speakers and created a curated packed afternoon with a dozen lightning talks.
Attending this year was a bigger crowd than past years — a diverse set of digital leaders from large, complex and global organisations like Canyon, Jungheinrich, Lufthansa, OTTO alongside agencies such as Diconium and Thoughtworks as well as software firms like CoreMedia, Magnolia, Staffbase and a few other friends from near and far.
Employee communication platform software firm Haiilo hosted us in their charming offices, which was a fitting scene for learning and networking.
Read moreAs someone who has witnessed the evolution of programming languages over five decades, I've noticed an interesting parallel:
Writing prompts for AI is remarkably similar to traditional programming. The only real difference is the syntax we use to express our intentions.
Let me take you on a journey through time.
Read more