Just about 2 weeks ago, I attended the Boye & Co CMS Kickoff event.  It’s an engaging and thoughtful start to the year, bringing together vendors, users, and agencies/SIs from around the content management community.  Much has already been written about the conference on LinkedIn (search CMSKickoff26), and I would echo the sentiments about how open attendees were to sharing and making new connections.  

Having now reflected on the talks and presentations, I  am memorializing my impressions and feeling bold enough to make a prediction or two.  I’ll be collating my thoughts in accordance with the Grand Venn Diagram of Content Management as depicted in the image above.  The trademark is not real, but my AI Image generator thought it was a nice touch.  Let’s dive in.

My initial thoughts on content creation from the event was that there wasn’t as much coverage as there has been previously.  Then I went back and reviewed the program and recalled the CMS Idol lightning demos and realized this topic was discussed more than I first thought.  From AI ingesting pdfs and automating page creation + image upload to the asset repo (from Kontent.ai) to creating and managing QR codes within the CMS (Typo3.org) to George Chang’s (hexagon.com) talk about the content supply chain (with AI of course), content creation was definitely a topic.  For me, it was a bit overshadowed by another element of the Grand Venn.

This was a topic where content practitioners and users had a strong voice.  From the post-luch roundtables to Sara Faye Green’s (webmd.com) presentation about governance and content models build trust with visitors to Marc Salvatierra’s (icann.org) talk on conceptual content modeling, managing and governing content was also a well represented topic but also a bit overshadowed by the remaining Grand Venn category.  

It’s usually a big topic, so it’s no surprise that this was the area of most discussion (to me at least).  The horse has bolted from the barn with regards to zero-click searches, so GEO was one of the main topics of the entire conference. Coupled with companies trying to determine how AI will impact user behavior the topic of user experience felt even more palpable this year.  Nika Karliuchenko (Contentful.com) shared some very practical advice on how to appear in the AI search results, while Bill Rogers (Ai12z.com) showed how chatbots can provide better answers and help site visitors do what they set out to achieve, and Chad Solomonson (rdadigital.com) spoke about driving outcomes with AI embedded in the experience layer.  Beyond the presentations, many of the conversations I had or overheard were about how AI will impact, distrupt, improve, or possibly do nothing for the overall user experience. 

Which leads into one of my predictions for content management.  But first, some observations from outside the Grand Venn.  

I had a few conversations with attendees who are using AI coding tools.  Some were just experimenting, yet others were creating apps that provide value - initially personally, but potentially for others as well.  A few of note to me: Patrick Ferdig has built a few tools to help streamline his professional and personal life, Mark Marsiglio built a tool to better understand avionics data to inform aircraft maintenance decisions, and Ryan Breen has deployed a team of coding assistants to reduce risk in the R&D of a new product.   Which also leads into…

User Developed Applications (UDAs) make a comeback.  I can still remember the freedom and the risk that Microsoft Access brought to companies many years ago.  The coding capability of AI will further democratize creating apps; I think app proliferation is inevitable.  Hope the infosec teams are ready. 

AI will be the interface.  To everything.  Some CMS vendors are already moving in this direction; Sara Faatz (progress.com) teased the Generative CMS that their team is building.  I can easily envision a few steps beyond where a multi-modal AI sits on top of your file repo of choice answering questions and handling transactions.  Lot’s of risk, governance, and brand concerns to be thought through and tested.  However, more and more of the content creation and management tasks are being automated, why wouldn’t the experience layer be next?

Admittedly the predictions are not so far out on a limb. But given how fast this space is moving, anything more feels like wild guessing. I highly recommend joining a Boye & Co (boye-co.com) community to keep pace and join the conversation.