By Janus Boye
Today, the real problem in most organisations is that they are dealing with busy developers and a marketing team that are finding it too complex to design, develop and deliver experiences that look and feel great.
The founding fathers at Kontent.ai - now a stand-alone company after years of incubating at Kentico. Standing in the middle holding the sign is CEO Bart Omlo
It doesn’t help that the content management systems of the past have not really been designed for content collaboration, so you need to look elsewhere to sort out that problem. Also, while headless CMS has become the defacto standard, it further complicates the picture with more pieces in the puzzle.
Untangling this complexity and addressing the big challenges faced by large, complex organisations, is what Kontent.ai is focused on. They call their next level CMS a modular content platform.
Let’s look closer at what differentiates modular content platform from headless CMS and how Kontent.ai plans to bring the power of AI to content management.
Finally, some words on making it work and what the future might bring.
Introducing a modular content platform
It’s become the norm that when customers look to relaunch their digital experience, selecting a new CMS is considered the most urgent priority - and so this is often where they begin. Search, recommendation, governance and other related tech comes down the road.
Kontent.ai addresses this by framing their platform as a modular content platform at the core of content operations. It’s a cloud-native tool that’s built for content collaboration and founded on all the headless principles.
As shown in the illustration below created by Kontent.ai, a Modular Content Platform (MCP) is a headless CMS with quite a few more benefits.
It’s an important point to the folks at Kontent.ai, that this is both the usual headless CMS benefits with a clear separation between content repository and a presentation layer, rich APIs and best-of-breed integrations but also the advantages of a more traditional CMS with previews and custom workflows. Furthermore, a MCP comes with additional features such as composable AI and content planning.
In a tutorial on ‘What is a modular content platform’ Kontent.ai describes it as both headless on steroids and like this:
“Modular content platforms can be described as an authoring- and management-friendly extension to headless.”
Vojtech Boril is VP Growth and Marketing at Kontent.ai and also a part of the experienced management team that used to work at Kentico prior to Kontent.ai becoming a stand-alone company
Whether on steroids or an extension to headless, it does paint a picture that’s understandable, perhaps in particular to IT decision makers. Based on both looking closer at the product and speaking to Vojtech Boril, VP Growth and Marketing at Kontent.ai, I would say that headless is a part of the foundation, so it’s not just an extension, which sounds a bit like something that’s bolted on top.
I would say, that it’s really a CMS turned platform for content operations. With its flexibility and intuitive authoring experience, Kontent.ai does take headless CMS to a next level. To quote Vojtech:
“Customers rely on the modular content platform to empower both developers and content creators, while governing team operations to protect brand trust and integrity.
If we compare MCP to a standard headless CMS, it not only comes with additional collaboration features such as task management or content calendar, but most importantly capabilities such as Content Collections which allow organisations to consolidate their content on a large scale without any compromises on content modelling or user permissions.”
Interestingly, Kontent.ai also offers simultaneous editing as known from Google Docs, something that we’ve so far not seen in CMS, but rather in other platforms for content collaboration.
One final thing thing on the use of words: While I won’t dive into the semantics of content and platform, let’s just briefly touch on modular. Clearly the goal for Kontent.ai is that editors will like the platform so much that they’ll put all their content into it. Offering collaboration features that actually work naturally helps. Still, being modular means that you can structure your content by using content models and then pull it into whatever system you like.
What does Composable AI bring to the table?
Given that it’s called Kontent.ai, let’s move onto that one specific part of the platform which also has AI in it: Composable AI.
Many CMS vendors have toyed around with artificial intelligence, but without breaching the confidentiality of the conversations we have in our CMS Expert community, it’s fair to say that real world valuable implementations have been few and far between.
For years there’s been some speculation as to the reason why Kentico put their Kontent product on the .ai top-level domain for Anguilla, a British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean. What could the artificial intelligence part be all about? A few years ago Kontent had a ‘smart recommendation API’ in their system, and that was a start, but it also required continuous improvement and maintenance of their own AI services. Meanwhile, on the marketplace there are many other AI services focused on doing a better job at just that use case that you need as a customer.
Now, as a stand-alone company and rebranded to Kontent.ai, it’s clearer how the role of AI in content management has evolved and plays a role towards next level CMS. Or as Kontent.ai would say: How AI fits in a modular content platform.
Kontent.ai talks about composable AI, and makes it clear that they are not yet offering a fully fleshed package of AI services, but more a smooth integration to AI services, so that customers can pick and choose.
To illustrate how it can be put to good use, here’s a few typical use cases:
Creating content: Content quality analysis, editing assistance, smart content creation
Managing content: Automated image tagging, image recognition, SEO optimisation
Delivering content: Content performance, content recommendations, best time to publish
To quote Vojtech Boril, VP Growth and Marketing at Kontent.ai:
“We believe that every organization can benefit from AI to improve content management at scale, from creating more relevant content to automating repetitive tasks. With our modular content platform, we're on a mission to help enterprises get to decide how and where to infuse AI into their content operations.”
What’s next? Making a modular content platform work
When you look at software vendors and their latest and greatest innovative releases, it’s easy to get impressed by shiny new features and new ways of building for the web. Still, while trying to select the right system, my recommendation is always that you keep in mind what problem you are trying to solve and don’t get distracted by vendor tactics or the latest analyst verbiage.
Composability has been the hot buzzword among IT analyst firms in recent years. This is all about enabling organisations to better solve those problems described initially by being more innovative and coping with rapidly changing business needs. We’ve previously covered both composable commerce and composable content management.
Many vendors talk about composable digital experiences, but what makes Kontent.ai interesting is that they take a leap forward towards helping organisations treat content like an asset. It’s about time that you can easily collaborate with colleagues on content that goes on a website, or into your app, without having to jump across systems and silos. A central platform makes good sense.
As usual, the devil is in the detail and we’ll certainly be following progress closely on how Kontent.ai is adopted by customers and partners around the world. In confusing times, customers increasingly turn to their digital agency of choice and how partners adopt Kontent.ai will be key to making it work for everyone. Kontent.ai already has a sizable set of implementation partners in Europe and North America and also partners with some of the hot tech vendors that could sit alongside Kontent.ai in the customer stack, including Conscia, Gatsby and Uniform.
When asked about the future, Kontent.ai points to strengthening their content modelling capabilities, so that each project can better capture content requirements. There’s also improved composability capabilities to both leverage AI microservices and quickly create their desired content ecosystem.
With a recent $40 million in growth capital, Kontent.ai is looking to the future. Similar to a start-up, there’s rapid growth, ambitious targets and product improvements are frequently introduced. Unlike a start-up, Kontent.ai already has an impressive roster of customers and in particular fans among content creators. There’s also an experienced management team and established operational processes. This is a rare combination, which could have a big impact on our industry.
Learn more about content operations, headless and next level CMS
We’ve already written about a few of the early adopters of Kontent. Have a look:
Pan Macmillan - Adventures With Gatsby, Kontent And Netlify (2020)
SFMOMA selected Kontent to separate content from code (2020)
Just a few months ago, I covered how headless CMS needs to be marketing friendly based on a conversation with Martin Michalik, VP Product at Kontent. Back in 2019, I shared an initial analysis of Kontent in this post: With Kontent it’s goodbye to legacy CMS.
If you want to get out from behind the screen, expand your network and learn from the best, do consider joining one of our peer groups or upcoming conferences!