From assistive to agentic: Redefining the future of content

When we launched AI capabilities in Kontent.ai in early 2024, the industry was in the middle of an AI gold rush. Everyone was racing to “add AI” to their products. Most took the easiest path: a ChatGPT plugin or API connection, a simple prompt box embedded into the interface.

At Kontent.ai, we took a different path. We built AI natively into the platform:integrated, secure, contextual, and aligned with the content workflows our customers were already using. There was no separate login, no data exposure, no reliance on an external plugin that might break tomorrow.

That decision turned out to be the right one. It let us apply AI across the entire content value chain: from structuring and organizing content, to writing, translating, and publishing it.

And most importantly, it gave us the foundation to build what comes next.

What we got right

Looking back, several of our early design choices became the building blocks for the Agentic CMS.

1. Integration, not imitation.
   While many CMS vendors were content to imitate ChatGPT inside their products, we built AI into the workflows themselves. That made AI feel invisible: no prompting, no context-switching, just intelligent help at the right moment.
2. Security and control.
   By keeping data sandboxed and disconnected from model training, we earned the trust of enterprise customers who couldn’t compromise on data privacy. That same architecture now underpins our agentic approach, where AI agents act securely on behalf of users.
3. A holistic view of the content value chain.
   From the start, we treated AI not as a gimmick for content generation, but as a force multiplier across every stage, from planning and creation to translation, publishing, and optimization. That holistic vision made it possible for AI agents to now act autonomously across the same continuum.
4. Human-first design.
   Our early AI capabilities always left the final say with the user. Rather than replacing human creativity, AI accelerated it. That philosophy remains unchanged: in an Agentic CMS, AI doesn’t take over. Instead, it takes initiative, under your supervision.

What’s evolved

In 2024, AI inside the CMS meant faster authoring, smarter organization, and more efficient publishing.

In 2025, it means something fundamentally different. It means the CMS itself can act.

Agentic CMS turns AI from an assistant into an operator, an intelligent partner that can manage and execute work across systems, not just within a single interface.

Here’s how it’s evolved:

• AI as agent, not just assistant.
  In the native AI era, Kopilot provided contextual support: summarize this, rewrite that, tag this item. In the agentic era, AI agents can handle multi-step workflows: conduct a content audit, localize an entire campaign, or generate and publish multimedia assets, all without human handoffs.
• Autonomous execution, human oversight.
  Agentic CMS is built on the principle of “autonomous content management.” AI takes over predictable work while humans focus on strategy and exceptions. Tasks that once took days or weeks now happen in seconds.
• A new interface paradigm.
  Instead of navigating through nested menus and rigid forms, users can now work through natural conversation. Ask an AI agent to “find and refresh all product descriptions older than six months,” and it will do it.
• Open and extensible by design.
  Each agent in the system has an LLM as its “brain,” but customers can bring their own models or fine-tune existing ones. Custom integrations can be replaced by reusable actions and remote calls, allowing AI agents to orchestrate other systems across the marketing tech stack.

What this means for content teams

Agentic CMS represents a leap forward for every role in the content ecosystem.

For creators: It removes the blank page, handles repetitive tasks, and allows them to focus on storytelling and strategy rather than formatting and handoffs.

For marketers: It delivers speed and scale, moving from idea to campaign in minutes.

For developers and engineers: It redefines their role. Instead of wiring together integrations, they’ll enrich the environment, exposing actions and data for AI agents to use.

For leaders: It turns content operations into a source of competitive advantage by drastically increasing content velocity and lowering operational overhead.

Why this evolution matters

The CMS market has long been stuck in a cycle of surface-level innovation: adding more buttons, dashboards, and templates while the core problems remain.

Agentic CMS breaks that cycle. It redefines what it means to manage content. No longer a static repository or editing tool, the CMS becomes a living system. One that understands, executes, and learns within secure, enterprise-grade boundaries.

Just as native AI marked the first real evolution of the CMS in years, Agentic CMS is the next one. It’s the moment where AI truly transforms from a plugin to a partner.

The road ahead

It’s been just a few months since we introduced Agentic CMS, but the response has been extraordinary. Early adopters are already seeing massive gains in efficiency, from automated content audits to instant campaign localization.

And this is only the beginning.

We’re continuing to expand the Agentic CMS ecosystem with new agents, integrations, and learning capabilities, all grounded in the same values that got us here: trust, usability, and the relentless pursuit of better content outcomes.

We’re proud to have been the first CMS with native AI. Now, we’re even prouder to be the first with Agentic AI.

If you’d like to experience Agentic CMS for yourself, schedule a demo today and experience the future of content management.