Gerben van Diggelen
Owner & CTO, Axendo
I’ve been active in software development for around 30 years, including more than 20 years with Umbraco. As the owner of a digital agency and a long-time member of the Umbraco community, I’ve seen how the platform grows through collaboration between developers, agencies, and the core team.
I’m particularly interested in how AI will shape SaaS and open source ecosystems and how it will influence technology careers in the years ahead. I believe AI offers Umbraco a real opportunity to further differentiate itself. My interest is both in applying AI to improve internal (developer) workflows and in exploring how AI capabilities can help customers achieve better results.
What is the next AI feature you hope to see in Umbraco backoffice?
"I would especially welcome AI features in the Umbraco backoffice that integrate with existing editorial workflows, such as previewing, reviewing, and explicitly approving AI-generated suggestions before they are applied."
Jenny Bradshaw
Managing Director, Moriyama
I'm Jen, MD with Moriyama, Umbraco MVP, and Umbraco user of 10+ years. I'm interested in how AI tools can really enhance productivity and solve challenges for our clients, freeing them up from mundane or labour-intensive repeatable tasks, to focus more on high-value activities that drive their site and business forward. AI as an enabler and enhancer, rather than as a replacement for human-driven activity.
What is the next AI feature you hope to see in Umbraco backoffice?
"An AI governance layer, supporting consistency across tone of voice for content - this would be a great benefit for clients like ours where often there are large numbers of content editors - having the CMS guide you on Tone of Voice would be a great help to ensure consistency."
Minty Bos-Rich
Project Manager, true digital
I have a master’s degree in business and economics and moved from marketing into agency life about four years ago, where I now work as a project manager. I’m very lucky to work across a variety of projects with a team of brilliant people. I’m really interested in how AI can make every day work easier and more creative, especially tools that help people think more clearly, stay organised, and bring ideas to life without the faff. Seeing how AI can take on the heavy lifting makes me want to help others use it in ways that feel practical, accessible, and genuinely useful. Outside of work, I’m happiest around horses, exploring new places, or hunting down great food!
What is the next AI feature you hope to see in Umbraco backoffice?
"AI-driven content and placeholder image generation would be incredibly valuable for creating realistic test environments... to stress test layouts, components, and user journeys with believable sample data."
Rachel Hand
Head of Stretegy and Performance, Pixelbuilders
As Head of Strategy and Performance, I work at the intersection of data, creativity, and experience, helping organisations turn exciting possibilities into measurable progress. I believe AI will fundamentally reshape how we create, manage, and optimise content, unlocking new levels of insight, efficiency, and creativity. Its real power, however, lies in augmenting human expertise, not replacing it. I’m particularly focused on guiding how AI evolves CMS platforms like Umbraco, empowering users while ensuring human judgment, ethics, and context remain at the centre of digital experiences.
What is the next AI feature you hope to see in Umbraco backoffice?
"Editors could rate, refine, and adjust AI outputs, and the system would learn from these interactions to develop a 'brand brain' within that CMS instance. Over time, the AI would become increasingly aligned with a client’s voice, style, and goals…Combined with AI-driven SEO insights, optimising keywords, metadata, and structure, this would make content creation smarter, faster, and more effective.”
Luca Minetti
Digital Solutions Director, This is Embrace
I’ve been working with Umbraco for several years, building and managing client websites, developing features, and helping teams get the most out of the CMS. Working closely with clients over this time has given me a strong understanding of their needs and expectations. At Embrace, we have been exploring AI for some time to support our clients and improve their back-office experiences, and I’m genuinely excited to provide my input and contribute to making the platform more efficient and user-friendly.
What is the next AI feature you hope to see in Umbraco backoffice?
“I’d love an AI sidekick to help the team migrate thousands of articles. Beyond that, I’d love to see AI automatically generate unique metadata for multi-lingual and multi-regional sites; that would be fantastic."
Jefferey Schoemaker
I’m a digital strategist and developer with more than 15 years of experience building complex platforms with Umbraco. Over the past few years, I’ve been actively exploring how AI can enhance digital platforms—speaking about AI at CodeGarden and working on AI-driven projects.
My main interest is how AI can unlock the value of structured CMS content in new ways, while also making the daily work of editors, marketers, and content teams easier and less time-consuming.
I’m excited to contribute practical ideas, tooling, and guidance that help the Umbraco community apply AI in meaningful and responsible ways.
What is the next AI feature you hope to see in Umbraco backoffice?
"I’d love to see AI help editors and marketers generate, adapt, and maintain content variations that make personalisation actually practical at scale. If AI can lower that content barrier and become a tool editors truly use in their daily work, we could finally unlock the full potential of personalisation in Umbraco."
Tosh Balding
Senior Head of Delivery, Enjoy Digital
From shipping ringtones to Nokia 3210s to shaping digital agency teams, I've spent 25 years learning that the best work happens when creative and technical minds come together. I've been lucky enough to work alongside brilliant people and brilliant brands, and every experience has taught me something new. My greatest lesson? People tend to hate two things: change, and the way things are. AI is that change for all of us right now. I care deeply about making sure this generation helps shape it thoughtfully — so the next one inherits something worth building on.
What is the next AI feature you hope to see in Umbraco backoffice?
“I'd love to see AI take the guesswork out of content modelling. By providing your sitemap, IA, and CMS user data, it should recommend a structure that actually makes sense to the people maintaining it — not just the people who built it. Content managers deserve tools they can own confidently from the start, and AI feels like a powerful tool to make that happen.”
Teunis Roes
Product Manager, Proud Nerds
Hi, I’m Teunis Roes, Business Developer at Proud Nerds. I focus on identifying and driving AI opportunities within our existing client base, helping organizations turn AI potential into practical solutions. In addition, I work as a Product Manager for our Umbraco solutions, where I’m involved in shaping and improving digital platforms. My interest in AI is centered around making it truly useful within content management and optimizing business processes.
What is the next AI feature you hope to see in Umbraco backoffice?
"Automatic image generation based on page content. As editors create or update content, AI could generate on-brand, relevant visuals that match the tone and message of the page... ensuring visual consistency while significantly speeding up the content creation process."
Mark Hendriksen
Product Owner, HSO
At HSO, a global Microsoft-focused technology and consulting company, I'm the Product Owner of HSO.com, a web platform running on Umbraco. I oversee both the public website and a restricted area for collaboration within HSO and the Microsoft Partner channel. Alongside my platform work, I'm closely involved in HSO's Marketing AI and data initiatives, helping design and deliver solutions for content workflow efficiency, advanced reporting, and AI agents. My interest in AI for Umbraco sits at the intersection of these two worlds: making AI practically useful for editorial teams, while keeping governance, multilingual complexity, and real business outcomes front and center.
What is the next AI feature you hope to see in Umbraco backoffice?
“I'd love to see AI-powered content quality scoring built right into the content node. Not just readability or tone of voice checks, but contextual evaluation enriched with real data: engagement and conversion metrics, SEO/GEO and social signals, even structured feedback from third-party APIs. Editors shouldn't have to ask AI to review their work. The backoffice should surface quality signals proactively, both before and after publish.”
Scott Wintheiser
Founder & CEO, Lightburn
I’m the CEO and co-founder of Lightburn, a digital agency based in Milwaukee. We work with mid-size manufacturers and growth-stage businesses who need to improve their digital customer experience, streamline their tech stacks, build websites and marketing strategies that drive results with solutions that are right-sized for their teams and budgets.
We're excited about AI's potential to streamline content creation and management, as well as to make "enterprise level" experiences such as personalization more feasible for smaller businesses. AI is really allowing those small teams to keep up with their much larger competitors.
What is the next AI feature you hope to see in Umbraco backoffice?
“I'm excited about the AI features Umbraco already has on their roadmap. Looking ahead, I would love to see how AI can help provide insights around customer journeys. For example, what content may be missing, underperforming, or a candidate for A/B testing or personalization.”
Kaare Engell Holm
Client Manager, Knowit
Hi, I’m Kaare and I work as a Client Manager at Knowit, where I act as a strategic advisor to clients and build longterm relationships. I collaborate closely with stakeholders and internal business units to create alignment and drive progress across teams and customers. I’m motivated by bridging business and technology, challenging clients’ thinking, and making sure customer needs are turned into concrete, actionable initiatives.
I’ve always had a bit of a Gyro Gearloose mindset when it comes to technology, and I enjoy exploring AI hands on through my own projects. I’m interested in its strategic impact, how it shapes competitiveness, ways of working, and where it creates real versus perceived value.
What is the next AI feature you hope to see in Umbraco backoffice?
"A proactive 'content health' feature that scans your entire site and tells editors: here are the 10 things that will make the biggest difference right now... [and] AI that monitors when translations fall out of sync and flags exactly what's changed."
Jonna Robertson
Senior Strategy Lead, Emerging Technology, Diagram
Jonna Robertson is Senior Strategist for Emerging Technologies at Diagram, a Chicago-based digital agency, where she helps organizations apply AI practically within their digital and marketing operations. With extensive experience leading digital transformation, CMS and DXP initiatives, and marketing operations, she is passionate about using business intelligence and technology to solve business problems for clients.
What is the next AI feature you hope to see in Umbraco backoffice?
“I’m obsessed with efficiency, so I’m going to say a workflow-focused AI sidekick that lives alongside the editing experience and exposes concrete, editor-defined tasks rather than a generic prompt box. I imagine it would understand the current node, content type, and media in context, then offer a small menu of “Do this for me” actions that map to real units of work editors perform every day.”
James Jemmett-Page
Senior Consultant, Cantarus Ltd
Hi Everyone! I’m James, a Senior Consultant at Cantarus with over 15 years’ experience working for and advising the Membership sector. These days, my professional focus is firmly fixed on AI! As a member of Cantarus’s AI working group, I’m an evangelist for AI adoption both internally and within client organisations, advising them on how to navigate the practicalities of implementation and governance. Elsewhere, I regularly write blogs and co-host webinars to help organisations navigate AI adoption in a safe and impactful way! I’m excited to bring a blend of strategic expertise and hands-on enthusiasm to the Advisory Board.
What is the next AI feature you hope to see in Umbraco backoffice?
“Imagine an editor drafting a campaign while Umbraco Copilot proactively taps into Engage’s persona data to instantly suggest tonal tweaks, or automatically scaffolding block-level variations for specific audiences. Bringing this data-driven personalisation directly into the everyday editorial workflow could help to position Umbraco’s AI tooling as a core driver of digital strategy.”
Ståle Engen
Senior Advisor, Novacare
I work at Novacare in Norway, currently the only Umbraco Gold Partner in the country. I have more than 15 years of experience working with Umbraco as a CMS, primarily within advisory, project management, and training. Throughout my career, I’ve focused on helping organizations get the most value out of their digital platforms. I’m particularly excited about how AI can be implemented in practical, user-friendly ways in Umbraco. Especially to enhance the editorial and administrative experience in the backoffice.
Daniel Horn
Founder & CEO, Phases
Daniel Horn works with AI through his company, Phases, helping organizations unlock new ways of working through intelligent technology. With a strong background in digital solutions and a lifelong passion for innovation, he focuses on turning AI from hype into real-world impact. He is particularly interested in how AI reshapes workflows, products, and the future of digital platforms.
What is the next AI feature you hope to see in Umbraco backoffice?
“An AI agent that you can collaborate with on different tasks, such as extending the website, extending the backoffice, or updating content.”
Umbraco HQ participants
This initiative is equally exciting for the super users at Umbraco HQ who manage the Umbraco project backoffice daily. To incorporate that perspective, three experienced HQ users are joining the Advisory Board:
Miriam Husted Dahl, Marketing Campaign Manager, Umbraco HQ
Vera Green Andresen, Product Marketing Manager, Umbraco HQ
Niels Christian Krogh Laursen, Head of Lead Generation, Umbraco HQ
Umbraco Stewards
Joining the AI in Umbraco Advisory Board as HQ stewards are Matt Brailsford and myself, Bolette Kern.
Matt is Staff Engineer in the AI team and the driving force behind Umbraco.AI, the foundational package bringing AI into the backoffice alongside other HQ-provided AI tooling.
As Product Manager in the CMS and AI team, my role is to ensure that partner and user requirements are strongly represented, both in our day-to-day decisions and in our longer-term roadmap planning.
