Websites 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 more“The best documentation is written by the people who use it.”
That sentence, offered almost in passing by Milana Cap, neatly sums up a decade and a half of hands-on experience with open-source documentation.
Milana Cap is a WordPress engineer at XWP and a long-standing lead in the WordPress Documentation Team. She has spent more than a decade working inside one of the world’s largest open-source communities, first as a contributor and later as a maintainer and organiser. Few people have seen as many documentation initiatives start, stall, recover, and evolve as she has.
Read moreStanding out in front of around 100 digital leaders is no small task.
That was the challenge facing contestants at CMS Idol 2026, hosted during CMS Kickoff 26 in St. Pete, Florida, in the striking surroundings of The James Museum. The room was filled with architects, strategists, product owners, and practitioners. People who spend their days making hard decisions about platforms, governance, and delivery, and who are not easily swayed by surface-level demos.
CMS Idol puts the outcome in their hands. By the end of the session, the vote was clear. Kontent.ai took home the CMS Idol trophy for the second year running.
What helped them stand out this time was not novelty, but relevance.
Read moreWhat 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 moreWhat matters just as much is who actually shows up for the conversation.
Looking across recent perspectives from industry analysts IDC, Forrester and Gartner, and practitioner-led recognition such as the CMS Critic Awards, a number of the vendors joining CMS Kickoff 26 are already well recognised:
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 moreContent design is often the overlooked key to product success. We all know the feeling: teams ship features at pace, design systems mature, AI enters the workflow, and yet the product still feels confusing, inconsistent, or oddly hard to use. Often it’s not because the interface is “bad”, but because the content decisions, the language, the structure, and the flow are treated as something to polish at the end rather than design work from the start.
That’s where content design leadership comes in and why so many teams are struggling right now. Content designers are increasingly asked to do strategic work (voice and tone, information architecture, onboarding, trust, accessibility, decision-making), but they’re still often positioned as a support function. They’re brought in late, spread too thin, or expected to “fix words” in products that were never set up to succeed. And when content design is under-resourced, everyone feels the friction: teams move slower, quality drops, and customers lose confidence.
In her book Managing Content Design Teams: A Guide for Product and UX Leaders, Melanie Seibert offers a refreshingly practical guide to making content design a real capability
Read moreOnce again, AI dominated many of the conversations this year, but the most-read pieces went beyond technology alone. Questions around discoverability, authoring experience, professional identity and how teams adapt to structural change all featured prominently, reflecting what many members were actively grappling with in their day-to-day work.
As the year comes to a close, we like to pause and look back. Boye & Co is built around conversation and learning together, often in the same room, but sharing those insights more widely is just as important. The blog remains one of the ways we do that: capturing ideas, discussions and perspectives while they are still forming.
In 2025, we published 52 blog posts, up from 35 in 2024, covering everything from AI and CMS evolution to sustainability, equity and the human side of digital work. Keeping with tradition, here are five popular pieces that resonated most with our community, based on readership, engagement and ongoing discussion. Selecting just five from a much larger body of work is never quite fair, but it does offer a useful snapshot of what mattered most this year. As always, the list is presented in alphabetical order.
Read moreA year-end reflection on six books that slowed me down and shaped my thinking, including Careless People, How to Do Nothing, If There Is a Will, There Is a Way, How to Resist Amazon (and Why), How to Know a Person, and This Is for Everyone.
Together, they offered fewer answers, better questions, and a timely counterweight to the speed, noise, and incentives of life online.
Read moreThe traffic collapse is real. Around 800 million weekly users of ChatGPT are already changing how people search, alongside growing audiences for Gemini, Perplexity and other AI services. With more than half of all searches now ending without a click, some organisations are experiencing traffic losses of up to 90%.
These are no longer edge cases or future warnings. Over the past year, AI-generated answers have started to satisfy user intent before visitors ever reach a website, fundamentally changing how visibility, authority and value are created online.
In last week’s end-of-year member’s call, we explored what this shift really means in practice with Jörg Schäffer, a Hamburg-based product marketing leader with more than a decade of experience working at the intersection of content platforms, search and digital commerce
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 moreDigital products are getting smarter and more energy intensive, and AI is accelerating that trend. Many teams are now asking how to design responsibly while still moving fast. In that context, Sustainable UX is shifting from a nice-to-have to a practical necessity.
In a recent end-of-2025 members call with Thorsten Jonas, we explored the latest developments shaping the Sustainable UX Network as it moves towards 2026. Thorsten is known for using memorable quotes to anchor complex topics, and he left us with a fitting one by Jane Goodall, a long-standing environmental advocate known for her work on the relationship between humans and the natural world.
“Just remember that every day you live, you make an impact on the planet.”
As sustainability pressures grow and AI reshapes the digital landscape, the network is gaining momentum around shared methods, tools, and collaborations that help organisations make sustainability a natural part of everyday design work.
As a long-time digital sustainability activist, responsible AI evangelist, and founder of the SUX Network, Thorsten combined reflection with practical direction. The session helped clarify not just why Sustainable UX matters, but how teams can start acting on it more consistently.
Read moreI thought I might retire this year. I quit a company I loved and left people whom I enjoyed working with.
I removed, unsubscribed and eliminated all noise. It took 3 months....but finally, I gained some clarity.
I’m taking the next year to focus deeply on a few areas: how to leverage AI intelligently for investing, how to rebuild and modernize existing applications, and how to redefine my own priorities as an entrepreneur.
This certification pushed me in ways I didn’t expect…
Read moreWe are excited to announce a new addition to our conference programme:
Open Source CMS 26.
Taking place on 20–21 October 2026 in Utrecht, Open Source CMS 26 is a new European conference for the open source CMS community. It brings together practitioners, digital leaders, agencies, and platform builders working with open source CMS in real organisations.
This is a focused, practitioner-led conference rooted in the Boye & Co community. It is designed as a place to…
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