I spent a very engaging couple of days with Boye & Company last week at the UK Digital Leadership and CMS Experts meetups. It’s a great community, expertly steered by Janus Boye and is always a highlight for me and chance to slow down, listen and reflect.
It was great to hear about people’s challenges in diverse fields such as banking, biotech, charity, education, CMS vendors (open source and commercial) and agency side.
I really liked the talk about structured content and how important content strategy to a successful CMS strategy. An area that is often forgotten, with so much focus on web page layout rather than structured content that can be delivered in multiple ways.
AI and agentic dominated a lot of the CMS Expert talk. I appreciated hearing how others are using AI in their business. Clearly many are finding success. And many are coming up with interesting ways to understand it. Ethical points were raised too, from challenging the inevitability of AI to sustainability and concerns on how juniors of the future will learn. But it is clear AI is hugely dominant in the tech space at present.
There was talk that coding work is now replaced as a practice by AI and we’re here to just solve customer problems now. I have thoughts about this and will think more about it in the coming months. I believe AI is better as an assistant than outsourcing your code writing to it completely. Technical skills are important and I can’t see that fundamentally changing (without huge risk). It’s important to check the quality of AI solutions (which means you need to understand it).
But I can’t deny that many seem to be using AI for complete code generation, with the example of Spotify engineers not writing a line of code since December.
Is this just a short-term win, or something that will work reliably in the long-term? And how successful is this where security, reliability, accessibility and other “enterprise” factors matter? Steven Pemberton is talking about this topic at the Boye Open Source CMS conference in October.
While AI can feel overwhelming at times, there were lots of friendly people to exchange ideas with. I came away with ideas on what to look at next.
I talked about CMS accessibility and digital sovereignty. A small few in a room of around 35 had heard of the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG), many had worked on accessibility reporting tools for CMS users, and I hope I sparked ideas and CMS vendors will start testing their CMSs against ATAG.
A lot of talk about the pace of change, the importance of people, and the importance of getting together to talk openly about all this! The tech may change, but the underlying problems rarely do.