Kontent.ai wins CMS Idol 2025

By Janus Boye

Vojtech Boril from Kontent.ai in action at the CMS Idol 25 contest

If you were given only six minutes to show a live demo of your software to a packed auditorium of conference participants, what would you show?

At the CMS Kickoff 25 conference held last week in St. Pete, Florida, six software vendors joined on stage for a brief live demo followed by commentary from expert judges and a final vote by the participants.

Czech-based Kontent.ai came out a winner and was represented by Vojtech Boril, who in a convincing show and tell, both managed to address a real pain when it comes to cumbersome content workflows, while also having a bit of fun charming the judges.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a six minute live demo (no prerecorded stuff was allowed) gives you even more to tell what a system is capable of. Live demos are a valuable, albeit sometimes lost art, and this was the second consecutive win for Kontent.ai, as they also took the Small Feature Award 2024 title back in November, making them the first vendor ever to win two consecutive live demo contests.

Let’s take a closer look at the winning live demo.

A better way to do content workflows

Without rushing his way into clicking around on the screen, Vojtech opened by setting the stage: He shared a customer pain when it comes to approving content in the highly regulated pharmaceutical industry. Rather than content approval taking days and involving many emails or even print, might there be a better way?

Vojtech seen doing his winning live demo while explaining to the judges what’s going on. On the screen is the impressive Mission Control dashboard

Learn more about this feature in Kontent.ai: Review content with AI

Specifically, Vojtech showed AI content reviews that streamline the content review and approval processes by automatically identifying problematic content sections that are not on-brand or not compliant with guidelines. In his example, a draft content item included the phrasing “guaranteed results,” which went against the guidelines.

Then, he moved onto showing how users can benefit from Kontent.ai to measure and optimise the content performance thanks to Mission Control, a content operations dashboard included in the product.

Live demos bring out innovation

As Vojtech said after the live demo:

“It's not about showing all the bells and whistles of the product, but introducing what problem you're solving, why and how”

Besides Kontent.ai, we also saw a Australian-based Squiz and open source TYPO3, who both came in as runners up. Squiz showed simple, easy personalisation, while TYPO3 showed how they have made it easy to create new websites. Also participating in CMS Idols were the 2024 CMS Idol winner Kajoo, Agility CMS from Canada who won Small Feature Award 2023 and finally Pantheon, who participated for the first time and showed a very capable Google Docs integration.

The 2025 judges were Carrie Hane, Mark Demeny and Matt McQueeny. The big win was announced by Matt Garrepy from CMS Critic during the CMS Kickoff 25 conference dinner.

The winner with both hands in his pocket surrouned by the CMS Idol judges, and Janus to the left alongside our host Matt Garrepy to the right. The conference was held at the James Museum in St. Pete.

Learn more about live demos — and see them soon again

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 CMS Experts community leader 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:

You can also read more about live demos in these posts: