By Janus Boye
CEO and Founder Petr Palas opening his 2024 Small Feature Award demo
AI is clearly a big thing, but as the old saying goes: The devil is in the details, and small details can make a big difference, also when it comes to meaningful usage of AI.
Kontent.ai, a CMS vendor from the Czech Republic, last week won the 2024 Small Feature Award showing how AI can help editors inside the CMS with those details that are a part of every day tasks — tasks that have mostly been under-served in a crowded CMS market so far.
Held at the Boye Aarhus 24 conference and competing with 4 other vendors, CEO and Founder Petr Palas, completed his winning pitch in just less than 6 minutes. In brief: We saw how the review process inside the CMS can assist the editor in adhering to pre-defined guidelines. This could be to assist with the tone of voice, or for regulated industries it could be legal requirements that you need to follow.
Small features can indeed have a huge impact and make all the difference. This has always been the focus of our Small Feature Award since it’s launch in 2019.
Let’s take a closer look at the winning small feature.
An AI assistant that makes content management better
The implementation was Copilot-styled, meaning that adjustments and suggestions were kept and left to the editor throughout the process, also when the text changes hands from say an editor to legal. An impressively transparent way to keep track of how AI had impacted the text along the way.
AI content reviews inside the Kontent.ai CMS interface - notice how the AI assistant to the right is helping the editor
To put the impact of the AI assistant in context, Petr also showed Mission Control, a dashboard, where you can track content progress, task completion and more.
Mission Control, an impressive interface for content producitivity. We’ve seen it before in the CMS Expert community and it’s come quite some way during 2024
Feedback from the judges was both very positive on the impact and also on the user interface design. Clearly Kontent.ai has found an elegant way to design a small feature with a simple interface behind a complex functionality.
In the brief video below you can see the small feature in action.
Small features are the unsung hero of the workplace
Besides Kontent.ai, we also saw a new CDP from Swiss Inoyu, another AI implementation from ai12z, digital sustainability progress by Little Forest and last year’s winner, Canadian Agility CMS, showed AI integration allowing folks to use a chat session to learn how to create content models, translate content, and create content variants.
The 2024 judges were Jens Hofman Hansen, Martin Michael Frederiksen and Shannon Mølhave. The big win was announced by Ivo Lukac during the Boye Aarhus 24 conference dinner.
The three judges shortly after the five demos reviewing notes. The conference participants also voted for their winner — both the judges and participants agreed: Kontent.ai is the winner!
Photo: Ib Sørensen
Enjoy the power of live demos
When I worked at a CMS vendor in Germany from 1999 - 2002, live demos were an important and daily part of my job. Back then there were no pre-recorded elements and certainly no way of doing it remotely. You brought your laptop and made it work, and when it worked, it was incredibly powerful. Like the old adage, where a picture says a thousand words, a live demo could cut through lengthy documentation, requirement specifications and numerous workshops.
Think about how important the driving experience is when you buy a car. Would you buy a car just based on some slides? Or perhaps more in the same price range, would you buy a house to live in just based on a fancy deck from a slick realtor? No, you wouldn't, right? But why are so many then buying enterprise software, upwards of millions of dollars, without actually trying it out?
Or like our member Matthew McQueeny recently said:
“Software presentations without live demos are akin to concerts without the band playing the songs”
To keep the art of the live demo going, we’ve integrated them into our conferences for the past decade and you can experience it next at these upcoming events:
CMS Kickoff 25 in January in Florida. Petr Palas will also joining us here.
CMS Summit 25 in May in Frankfurt
Boye Aarhus 25 in Aarhus in November
You can also read more about live demos in these posts:
Pieter Brinkman at Sitecore also enjoys live demos and he wrote this post after the Boye Aarhus 23 conference: The power of live demos at events. At Sitecore they have guided click-through demos that guide you through the product.
Michael Carter, my personal demo mentor 25 years ago, generously shared what 94 quarters worth of demos taught him