It all happened on January 13 - 14 in St. Pete, Florida and the conference program have links to slides. You can also browse the conference photo album. Use the photos as you see fit.

CMS Kickoff 26

Thanks for a great conference!

What a great start to the year! Amazing to experience the open conversations, collaboration and how the community is growing.

To quote Michael Spenceley at J&J:

Had a great time at CMS Kickoff 26 in St. Pete this week. The content management landscape is evolving so quickly. Always great to hear perspectives from across the industry

The conversation continues in our CMS Experts community and at our upcoming conferences:

CMS Summit 26 in May in Frankfurt
CMS Connect 26 in August in Montreal

and you already save the dates for CMS Kickoff 27: January 19 - 20.

Here’s a few blog posts and useful summaries from the conference:

Cruce Sanders from Aramai on reimagining from first principals how content is generated and managed
Daria Kolchina from First Line Software on the AI boom and what it takes for AI to deliver results
David Steeb from b13 with Perspectives on AI, Open Source, and Digital Sovereignty
Janus Boye on CMS Idol 2026: Kontent.ai wins again
Kendall Litton from TYPO3 highlighting their new feature for editors which was shown live for the very first time in North America
Lukas Martinak from Kontent.ai with two posts
- Customer success and community over competition
- Stop Designing UIs for Tasks That Shouldn’t Exist: The Future of Content Management Is Agentic
Mathias Bolt Lesniak from TYPO3 on An AI prompt is not a product demo in 2026

Speakers at CMS Kickoff 26

What is the CMS Kickoff?

In brief: CMS Kickoff 26 is Boye & Co’s annual gathering of the global CMS and digital experience community — held January 13–14, 2026, at The James Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. It’s where digital leaders, partners, and practitioners connect, share real-world insights, and explore what’s next in content and experience platforms.

An optimistic event built around people and conversations — where you’ll meet the people you don’t know you need to meet.

For some more background: The event is curated and designed in close collaboration with our CMS Experts community. We started with CMS Kickoff 23, which was quite well received as a vendor-neutral place for the industry to meet across customers, vendors, agencies and analysts.

Open source was also well represented at Kickoff 25 with participation from the WordPress, Drupal and TYPO3 community. Karim Marucchi, who leads Crowd Favorite, shared an update on what’s happening in the WordPress community

We made it bigger and importantly better at CMS Kickoff 24 and also at CMS Kickoff 25, where we moved from the beach venue to the museum in St. Pete.

Now we’re working on making it even better with input and participation from our community. We’ll cover a wide array of topics, from AI over making Websites work in China to navigating a crowded vendor marketplace.

Who joined us?

It is an international conference with confirmed participants from Europe and North America. A friendly mix of vendors, agencies, analysts and customers who get together to learn, network and talk about what really matters when it comes to creating better digital experiences right now and for the foreseeable future

At the conference you could learn from practitioners from Amazon, Hexagon, ICANN, JLL, Johnson & Johnson, McGuireWoods, Mirion, WebMD Ignite, and several others.

Among the vendors and open source projects who attended were ai12z, aigensei, Agility, Brightspot, ButterCMS, Contentful, dotCMS, Fastr, Kajoo.ai, Kentico, Kinsta, Kontent.ai, Magnolia, Pantheon, Progress, SearchStax, Sitecore, Solodev, SpaceMade, StreamX, TYPO3 and Umbraco. As you can see, it’s not just the usual vendors, but also from the larger ecosystem.

On the agency and consulting side you could meet Altudo, Americaneagle.com, B13, BizStream, Blend Interactive, Codal, Contextual Code, CoreMedia, Crowd Favorite, Evolving Web, First Line Software, Havas CX Canada, iMedia, RDA, SilverTech and TechGuilds. Talk to them about what happens “when the rubber hits the road” and they’ll help you towards 2026 project success.

Among the analysts joining us were Dan Drapeau from DXP Catalyst, Matt Garrepy from CMS Critic and our host Janus Boye from Boye & Co in Denmark.

Conference partners

Venue

Once again we will be at the The James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art in downtown St. Pete. It is an ideal setting for a conference like ours with its spectacular modern and historic works of art that evoke the spirit of a wide-open frontier and the beauty of life in the American West.

For accommodation, St. Pete has many hotels in all budget ranges within walking distance.

And how to get there: Tampa International Airport is about 30 minutes drive away.