Rethinking AI’s Role in Content Management

By Janus Boye

Tom Cranstoun is a seasoned CMS consultant and an Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) expert, renowned for steering some of the most significant digital transformations in the tech world

It's now been two months since CMS Kickoff 24 in Florida and in a recent members’ call we heard reflections on the impact of AI from seasoned CMS consultant Tom Cranstoun who joined us from the UK.

While CMS Kickoff 24 wasn't all about AI, the speakers made Tom rethink AI's role in content management.

To quote Tom:

“Given the translation, bias, regulation challenges and lack of trust in AI, one needs to employ reviewers and editors to correct the content; AI is better suited for consuming content. Let’s think that the current state of AI creating content is a beta experiment, best left to the tech guys; we have a business to think of.”

In this call, Tom shared how “AI Simplicity” affects your business, the need for better content modelling and also the key responsibility of an emerging team role: The AI evangelist.

Tom is an independent CMS consultant with over 12 years of experience in designing and delivering exceptional CMS solutions for some of the world's largest and most reputable brands. He’s widely known as "The AEM Guy" for his focus on Adobe Experience Manager (AEM).

A deeper understanding of the future of CMS – and how AI is changing everything

Tom has previously shared his key insights in an article on CMS Critic titled: The AI Tipping Point: A Consultant's Takeaways from CMS Kickoff 2024.

In the call, he took us through a slide deck covering his key points, which I’ll summarise as:

  • It’s less about AI creating the content – it’s more about AI reading the content. AI-generated content has many problems

  • What happens when AI reads content? It behaves like an eight-year-old

  • As AI interaction increases, our reliance on traditional KPIs must fall

  • Our websites need to target 4 device types: Mobile, Tablet, Desktop, and Machine in the future

  • It’s time to reconsider our content strategies in the face of AI's evolution

  • Adopting a structured, semantic approach to content management is more crucial than ever in building cross-team strategies

On the Squarespace support site, you can find an interesting page on excluding your site from AI scans. Basically, you can request AI web crawlers to exclude your site from scans, while leaving it available for visitors to access, but unlike in the past you cannot request that AI crawlers only scan specific pages

Going beyond what you’ll find in the excellent article, in our call he also used the recent Air Canada disgraced chatbot example to illustrate how the machine today tends to act like a child. As covered by many, including the BBC, Air Canada was held liable for its chatbot giving passenger bad advice.

Tom also mentioned how AI crawlers tend to ignore robots.txt - the text file that governs the behaviour of web crawlers by telling them which web pages not to put in their search index. Read more on The Verge: With the rise of AI, web crawlers are suddenly controversial.

What does this mean for customers?

As Tom pointed out, the rise of AI in content management presents both challenges and opportunities for customers. Importantly, organisations must reevaluate their content strategies to deliver value to both human and machine audiences.

This involves adopting a structured approach to content creation, focusing on clear hierarchies, metadata, and semantic relationships. Might AI finally drive home the need for proper web content management and not just content creation for marketing purposes?

In the past the transition from print to online forced new skills onto a new generation of communicators (eg. writing for the web, SEO). With the advent of AI, we are once again forced to adapt. Content editors, managers and everyone else in content roles will need to develop new skills, such as understanding AI algorithms and optimising AI for machine consumption.

By successfully integrating AI into content management practices, organisations can achieve greater efficiency, personalisation, and engagement, delivering more relevant and valuable experiences to their customers across all channels and devices.

A sound recommendation from Tom is for organisations to choose a smaller part of their content estate to trial, improve, and iterate until sufficient organisational learning has taken place, noting privacy concerns, data security, and the ethical use of AI in content curation and recommendation. It is not recommended to use a big bang approach.

Remember, AI is like an eight-year-old it has to grow to fit in with the real world.

What does AI mean to CMS vendors?

Clearly needs are changing based on AI. We’ve recently seen vendors add what I would call cute features to their tools, which allows digital communicators to modify a text (e.g. make a text longer, more formal) using Gen AI. Time will tell which features will stick and become an expected part of the stack and which will remain cute demos.

According to Tom, key areas for improvement include developing robust content modelling capabilities and integrating stronger and more powerful AI-powered features directly into the content management systems.

While vendors are searching for that famous feature that will drive 10x growth, work is in particular needed to help customers maximise the potential of AI-driven content consumption and streamlining content management processes.

Learn more about what’s happening with CMS and AI

The conversation about successful implementations naturally continues in our peer groups and conferences. You can meet Tom in person at our upcoming CMS Expert sessions and expect to see this topic on the agenda in the foreseeable future. You can also join us in Montreal in August for CMS Connect 24 or next year for CMS Kickoff 25.

We’ve covered this emerging topic extensively in the past years and have also shared openly what we’ve learned along the way. Back in October, we were joined by Sree Sreenivasan, who is the former Chief Digital Officer of New York City, the Metropolitan Museum, and Columbia University and he shared Sree's Non-Scary Guide to AI.

Our Canadian member Seb Barre at TELUS has generously hosted two members’ calls on his learning progress:

Our Swiss member Samuel Pouyt at AXA has also authored two important pieces on the topic:

Finally, you can also download the slides (PPT) and even lean back and enjoy the entire recording below.