Contentstack says Content Management is dead and personalization is over. So what replaces them?

Content Management is dead, and the era of personalization is over!

Those are fighting words coming from Contentstack. It’s up to Neha Sampat, Founder and CEO of Contentstack, to put some context behind these bold claims, because, while it may not be the reality for many brands today, it’s certainly the road they need to be headed for right now.

Yes, Contentstack is pitching that Content Management is dead and yet it still talks about Content Management on its brand website. So what is the company trying to say?

Sampat argues that the future is bigger than content as a standalone thing, proposing that most buyers are still searching for Content Management because people still look at websites to find information. But content alone is no longer the game. This is something we’ve known for a while, which is why every brand has struggled with the challenge of personalization, and why many are looking to AI to help them create more personalized experiences.

And then there’s a need for more data to improve a brand’s understanding of its audience’s needs when they visit the website or another digital property.  To sum it up. It’s not just content a brand needs. It also needs data and AI, argues Sampat:

Having content plus data, plus the ability to use AI to actually build and develop and generate content, essentially delivers a new way of consuming, creating, and delivering content and experiences that matter. And so when we think about the transition we've made from a content management platform to where we are today as an adaptive experience platform, what puts the adapt into the mix is that every experience should be generated for the person that is consuming it in real time, so that it's relevant at that point in time.

Introducing Agent OS

AI is not a new capability or feature for Contentstack. Automations have been powering the platform for a while now; some were pre-built, some available in the Marketplace or as workflows in the platform. These are all (or almost all) agentic, Sampat says, and part of the new Agent OS.

Agent OS is Contentstack’s unified foundation for AI agents and automation. It brings together content, data, and brand intelligence to deliver customer experiences at scale. There are a few pieces to Agent OS:

1. Polaris - a conversational, interactive co-pilot that lives across the platform. Sempat called it an augmentation of your work, helping you be more efficient and superpower your workflows.
2. Agent Builder - you build custom agents to help handle repetitive tasks or integrate with systems. Agents have access to a brand kit, in addition to other Contentstack tools.
3. Automations - create automations to remove the need to switch between tools, such as setting up manual workflows and configuring repetitive, low-value AI prompts.
4. Digital Concierge - an external conversational AI that website visitors engage with. As a visitor engages with the AI, the website experience adapts in real-time.

The Brand Kit maps out a brand’s guidelines for visuals, voice, tone, along with audience profiles (we talked about the Brand Kit before).

Agent OS helps brands shift from the work of creating personas and rules-based personalization to a reasoning process powered by AI at a scale that was impossible to do before. Sampat says:

To us, it's kind of just the obvious next step, right? It's like, how do you bring together the power of content, content models, and everything that you're doing to build out a purpose-built front end with data, which is now being built in real time, and putting those together in a way that allows you to scale.

We talked about this a year ago when we launched personalization. But personalization at scale was never real, and brands have been trying to do personalization for a really long time, and it's been a problem, right? And so the way that we tried to solve that problem was essentially making it possible to utilize AI to make personalization happen at scale. But the piece that was missing was data, and so by adding Lytics to the equation and essentially unifying our platform around data and content, we've now unlocked an ability that nobody else has really figured out how to unlock in our ecosystem, around tying together the benefits of content plus data plus AI.”

Agent OS gives brands the power to build better experiences on the front-end, but also improve things in the back end.

Sempat provides the example of a prompt-based Digital Experience creation on the fly. She notes that through prompts you create the experience, including the front-end design and visual identity directly in the Contentstack platform and with one more click, you could host that experience.

The end of personalization is driven by context

But if the personalization era is over, what is replacing it? Sempat suggests that we’re at the point where value is not created by what brands publish (content) but by how intelligently they can adapt in the moment (context). The personalization era is marked by personas and segments and mapping those to use cases or scenarios using rules.

Today, with access to real-time insights and the use of AI to infer intent based on those insights, along with its ability to create marketing content for buyers in the moment, Sampat posits that the most valuable currency is “context”, and a brand’s ability to adapt to that context:

You're creating value, and you're earning the right for your audience to opt in, to share their preferences, to share their data, to act in a way that allows you, as a brand, to deliver a real time experience that matters. And so value creation is essentially changing. It's not just about on a website. We used to measure, obviously, eyeballs, and then we'd also measure conversions, but now it's even deeper than that, because you're starting to build a one to one relationship with your viewer as they're on your digital property, which just did not exist before.

This is what Contentstack is calling the “Context Economy.” Context brings together not only who the website visitor is, but why they are there. Sampat said it’s a shift in how brands relate to buyers.

Gurdeep Dhillon, CMO of Contentstack explains it further in a blog on the context economy:

To borrow an old phrase, context is “the new oil” — hyper-valuable when refined. Because now it’s possible to convert buyer context into an N=1 segment (meaning, an audience of one) in real time, versus spinning our wheels doing old-school segmentation. That’s the future of personalization, and the future is now.

The Context Economy is even more revolutionary when you consider that context is what gives meaning to AI. Prompt engineering is being replaced by context engineering as we finally realize that LLMs need context to reliably solve problems.

There is still a gap between humans trusting AI to develop experiences on the fly and the fact that it’s happening, according to Sampat. She explains that a content editor or a webmaster using AI to build an experience may not fully trust it. To help them build that trust, Contentstack has developed the Brand Kit which contains all the knowledge about a brand. With it, AI creates experiences that are on brand, in the brand’s voice, and connected to the audiences that the brand wants to speak with. This additional layer helps to create trust more quickly.

Contentstack refers to itself as an “adaptive Digital Experience platform” and Agent OS is only taking that further, concludes Sempat:

The way AI is being used is being changed every day. The way that we get jobs done is being changed. So in a world where things move faster than humans can keep up, you have to be adaptive. And so adaptive is essentially the combination of creating front-end experiences that for your end viewers or audiences that adapt to their needs, but it's also adapting to the change around us, and adapting to what is best of breed, and remaining true to our composable architecture, and just being able to say, okay, you know what? There's something better to plug into this. We want to remain adaptive in the way that we think about building out our front-end experiences.

My take

It’s clear that Contentstack is entering new territory for the Content Management/Digital Experience world by declaring the death of both Content Management and personalization and the new world of context. But here’s the challenge: most organizations are still struggling with basic personalization and disconnected silos of data. Context sounds great, but if they can’t get past the basics and get their data in order, they won’t get context right anyway.

Real-time, AI-powered context may be the right direction, and yes, rules-based personalization really doesn’t work, but there’s a lot of work that needs to happen to get brands not only thinking in this new direction, but making the changes to see it happen.

Contentstack with its adaptive DXP and Agent OS can help brands operationalize this vision, but Agent OS is not generally available yet (Sempat says the firm expects to release it by the end of the year), so we’ll have to wait and see.