Charting the Future with Umbraco

In our latest iteration of product strategy, we added the word “platform” after CMS. This is to signify that Umbraco CMS is not “just content”, but rather something that you can build upon. The solid foundation, to work from and on top of. We don't tell you how to build, but give you some great tools to utilize and do our best to make them easy and efficient to work with - so you can focus on creating value!

Content Management is here to stay. The adoption of generative AI will mean the amount of content will increase significantly in the coming years. In fact +60% of B2B enterprises plan to increase their spend on content and content management.¹

Generative AI

It’s clear to anyone following tech, even from afar, that AI is rising and the hype is real. It will be interesting to see how the peak of inflated expectations² could be reached at the same time the chip shortage becomes a real supply problem for AI services. Leading us through the Trough of Disillusionment as we collectively encounter supply issues but also realize the unacceptable GreenHouse Gas Emissions that follow and how those factors drive the costs up until a new breakthrough in efficiency is due. 

However, AI does bring some unignorable opportunities to content management. Or maybe rather content generation and content variation. Scenarios that were previously not worth considering due to people's cost, may become relevant. Gartner Predicts that +80% of enterprises will use AI by 2026.³

"With 85% of the content journey happening before the CMS, I think we can use AI to make that final 15% a great and efficient experience."

With 85% of the content journey happening before the CMS⁴, I think we can use AI to make that final 15% a great and efficient experience. This could be end-user-facing features like content validation, not only for spelling and grammar like we’ve become used to, but also for tone-of-voice, implicit bias, plagiarism, etc. And possible to not only point out issues but even come up with suggested fixes. Furthermore, transforming the shape of your content from a blog post to an FAQ or vice-versa can make content much more accessible to a broader audience with ease.

Also when it comes to media, I think AI can improve the content management journey. Knowing what a media item actually contains (both images and video, but also longer pdf documents, etc.), could enable great suggestions for relating content and media. And even generating missing illustrations, or making variations of existing content.

Our Marketplace is already flowing over with different pieces of AI functionality like this. Our ecosystem is strong and innovative, and we highly encourage this. As features mature and show market fit we might choose to adopt some of them directly.

Our strategy is to be a PLATFORM to build on. A Platform for AI enables you to quickly and without hassle try out things and be quick to monetize them. We do this by having extensive APIs that are well-documented and intuitive to work with. This allows you to choose which AI products to adopt and to what extent they should be tightly integrated with content management.

Of course, we are also exploring how AI can help us run our Cloud Platform. Detecting code smells and suggesting code fixes to customer projects. It's an interesting balance though. This could potentially help make websites faster and emit less carbon, but the process itself is so resource-intensive that it might not be worth it.

Personalization

As the web has evolved from essentially just a digital phonebook to being an “everything platform”, the need for personal experiences has surfaced. Today’s users expect to have tailored experiences and 3 fourths report feeling frustrated⁵ when it isn’t the case. Enabling personalization is a must for content managers today and the same McKinsey and Co. research finds that personalization lifts revenue and significantly reduces CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost).

Personalization is no longer a new thing, but two new factors have emerged that are changing the scene. With our recent acquisition of uMarketingSuite, we are taking the marketeer experience to the next level. Personalization used to be hard and complicated, but now you can spend your time thinking about your approach and goals instead of struggling to set up new campaigns.

"...Generative AI services like chatGPT make this financially feasible and will be at the core of the next generation personalization"

Furthermore, AI is finally making personalization scalable. For years, enterprises have had personalization capabilities, but many have found it too costly to actually use at scale, because of the additional copywriting needed, when you want to show different texts depending on the user. Generative AI services like chatGPT make this financially feasible and will be at the core of the next generation personalization that is coined as “individualization” - meaning 1-1 dynamic experiences instead of the pre-defined segments of today.

Orchestration

As the digital landscape continues to grow, so will the need to connect multiple sources in a composable setup. Connecting CMS, PIM, Email marketing, CDP (etc etc), allows for a great user experience to be built. 93% of organizations would like to add even more data sources to their current setup⁶, and more than 70% of enterprises prefer composable architectures⁷. Forrester predicts that the next frontier for CMS will be orchestration of digital experiences.⁸

I think a dedicated orchestration product allows for the promises of composable DXP to finally be a reality. Actual freedom in choosing best of breed, without the vendor lock-in from suites or agency-lockin from custom integration and orchestration.  Connecting it with API delivery in the headless world of today will further accelerate this. Orchestration should be dealt with in a low-code SaaS way. 

Composable architecture today has been at the expense of the content editors. It has solved some IT problems like separation of concern, scaling, etc., but still, to this day, it has led to a suboptimal editing experience for the marketeers, who often struggle, or at least need a lot of training, to keep the overview in a multitude of systems. I think we can do better here, and I think the center of these projects from a marketeer’s perspective is, and should be embraced as the CMS.

Search

Finding stuff should be easy! The demand for search from the customer and end-user side has exploded after AI. To enable you to make great custom digital experiences the future of search with Umbraco has 2 faces.

Starting with structured search. When we know the shape of the content or any data type we can facilitate super efficient and highly relevant searching. Features like faceted product search continue to be critical in ecommerce. When we know the shape of all the content and can connect multiple sources, we can provide a fantastic experience for the end-user of the website. But also to the content editors who work day after day on the content. Also knowing the sources of data will allow us to build better cross-system editing experiences AND even handle cross-system previews from unpublished data. 

That leads us to AI-powered search. The LLMs of today allow us to actually understand user intent rather than just the typed-in words. From suggesting typo fixes (e.g. did you mean…) to generating the answer the end-user is looking for. From doing simple word-matching to advanced fuzzy- or synonym suggestions to understanding product features and matching that with user requirements.

Come aboard

So, what do you think? Does this excite you, worry you, confuse you, inspire you?  These 4 Lighthouses are not just abstract concepts. They are clear trends that will shape the industry as a whole, and we’re making sure the help guide our product development and translate into real, tangible offerings and features for the Umbraco platform.

I will be attending all the local Umbraco festivals and partner summits in the coming months and I hope this can be a good starting point for some exciting conversations. You’re of course also welcome to send us your take on product@umbraco.com. 

Join the conversation as we go on this journey for Umbraco and help us shape what these things will be translated to when it comes to actual products, features, and services.

 

1. The End Of The Monolithic CMS - Forrester 
2. Gartner Hype Cycle
3. Press Release - 2023 - Gartner
4. The First 85% - Deane Barker
5. The value of getting personalization right - or wrong - is multiplying - McKinsey & Company
6. Future of Content - Hygraph
7. Gartner, 2024
8. CMS wave 2023
9. The Forrester Wave™:Cognitive Search Platforms, Q4 2023