CMS Idol 2026: Kontent.ai wins by tackling the work teams actually dread

Standing 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 more

An AI prompt is not a product demo in 2026

Mathias in action presenting his live demo at the CMS Idols contest at CMS Kickoff 26

Sorry 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.

When I see a CMS vendor demo an AI prompt, I wonder what they've done to their product. Is it gathering dust on the shelf? Where is the search for improved content management and governance?

It is missing from the equation:

  • Content management: While more content and personalization is great, it’s not content management. The sheer quantity of content begs for tools that ensure best practice. Well-managed content will live longer than any single campaign or website iteration.

  • Content governance: Consent fatigue is not the only risk. A CMS should support stewardship through the entire content lifecycle. A growing pool of content is not governed by a prompt; it is managed with a user interface.

These are essential needs for clients in the AI era, just as they were before. CMSs should continuously evolve and adapt to new realities, but the narrative has become warped.

This week in Florida, Karla Santi from Blend Interactive showed how agency customers are struggling to make decisions and plan effectively. I believe this is because they are being presented with AI workflows and content generation misconstrued as content management.

AI is continuously evolving, and the next big thing is always just around the corner. Waiting for it will perpetually delay a CMS decision. The need for real content management and content governance is constant. With a flexible, adaptable, and sustainable CMS platform, customers get what they’ll always need, backed by confidence that their investment is future-proof.

Thanks to Janus Boye and Matthew Garrepy for hosting an event that renewed my purpose for the year ahead!

Canadian Agility wins big with AI at CMS Idol 2025 in Montréal

Canadian CMS vendor Agility calls themselves the Best Canadian Headless CMS vendor. After winning both the votes from the conference judges and participants at the international CMS Connect 25 conference they can also add CMS Idol Summer Edition 2025 winner to their list of accolades.

Held earlier this month in Montréal, CTO Joel Varty went up against industry leaders from five other vendors from Europe and the US. With a comprehensive, impressive and also very timely six minute demo, he managed to show how to go from an idea to fully working components using Gen AI tools like Github Copilot and Claude Sonnet 4 alongside the first ever live demo of the Agility CMS MCP server which was still in private beta at time of the demo.

Sounds like an action packed six minutes? A video recording of the demo is available below

Read more

React Bricks wins European CMS Idol 25

“Can we have true visual editing coupled with a powerful headless CMS?”

This is the opening question that Matteo Frana, Founder and CEO at Italian-based React Bricks asked when he opened his winning six minute live demo at the CMS Summit 25 conference in Frankfurt earlier this month.

Held as a part of the European CMS Idols contest, React Bricks went up against five other vendors and Matteo convincingly answered his question using a new feature that was shown for the first time to the world. 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.

React Bricks competed against Hygraph, Kentico, Plate, Sulu and Webiny and won both the votes from the conference participants and the expert jury consisting of Baddy Sonja Breidert from 1xINTERNET, Jam from Open Strategy Partners and our North American peer group leader Matthew McQueeny.

So what did Matteo actually do to win?

Read more

Demo Day x2: Sweaters Change, Lessons Stay

At the CMS Expert group meeting earlier this week, I received what you could call a refreshing crash course in live demo survival - and walked away with some valuable lessons.

The meeting was held at the diconium office in Hamburg with their harbor as stunning backdrop and so at the end of day #1, I started a live demo wearing my pink sweater, and I thought I was thoroughly prepared.

Then I took a creative turn and veered off script. I figured it’d be fun to show something unexpected - until the unexpected hit me back! The result wasn’t what I anticipated, and I was stuck.

Read more

Kontent.ai wins CMS Idol 2025

Given only six minutes to show a live demo of your software, what would you show them?

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

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 precorded 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 impressingly 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.

Read more