The DXP Catalyst Update - Aug 26, 2026

CMS Connect 2026

EVENTS

Earlier this month was CMS Connect in Montreal, hosted at Montreal CoWork in the Le Plateau neighborhood. It's one of two larger North American CMS Experts events held annually, alongside CMS Kickoff in St. Pete each January. This was my first year attending, and I believe the third year for CMS Connect itself, always held in the early August timeframe. I made the call to attend this year after going to the smaller NYC event back in May.

This is a gathering of analysts, practitioners, agency leaders, and vendors in the CMS and digital experience technology space. As usual, the format mixed 30 to 40 minute sessions, table discussions, CMS Idol competition, and plenty of networking.

Exploring the City

I got into Montreal Sunday afternoon, with a stretch of time before the conference started Tuesday morning to actually see the city. It had been about nine years since I was last there, back when I was heading up every other week for a summer to consult with Canadian National Railway. I stayed on the edge of the Mont Royal neighborhood this time, a spot I’d never really explored, and it turned out to be a good hub for getting around the rest of the city.

Sunday was rainy, so I kept it to Old Montreal: Notre-Dame, a walk along the Old Port, and dinner at Gibby's, a place I'd first been to on a vacation back in 1995. Monday was mostly client meetings, but I broke free mid-afternoon and headed toward Olympic Stadium, which turned out to be under renovation, and the Biodome, which was sold out for the day. I ended up spending about 90 minutes in the Botanical Garden instead before taking the metro downtown. After a coffee stop, I walked up Rue Peel toward Mont Royal and kept going to the peak. The rain finally cleared and the sun came out right as I got to the top, which made for a great set of photos, and I closed out the day with dinner on the edge of the Outremont and Mile End neighborhoods.

By Tuesday morning I'd gotten reacquainted with the city, and it was time for the reason I'd actually come.

Into the Sessions

By Tuesday morning the sightseeing was done and it was time to get down to business. Both Tuesday and Wednesday were full of sessions, roundtable discussions, and networking. Multiple themes emerged throughout the event.

The Themes that kept Showing Up

CMS as system of record, not page builder. This idea ran through several sessions, from the readable-queryable-operable framing to the shift toward agent action covered below. Matt Garrepy's keynote took the same shift and reframed it from the top: CMS should stand for confidence management, since a brand's real product is the trust it builds by consistently getting content right.

Content debt didn't start with AI, but AI is compounding it fast. Carrie Hane's talk was the one people kept referencing afterward. Her argument: most of the web's content sits unused, the industry spent years perfecting how pages look while under-investing in what goes into them, and AI didn't create that gap so much as expose it and accelerate it. Her prescription was blunt: use AI to fix what exists before using it to produce more.

Organizational knowledge, not model quality, is the actual bottleneck. One session put a name to it: the "re-teaching tax," where agents without persistent context force humans to re-supply the same knowledge on every run, wasting tokens and time. As models commoditize, the argument went, the real leverage sits in how well-structured an organization's knowledge already is, not which model gets plugged in.

Governance is now framed as survival, not a compliance step. A recurring line across sessions: the "publish" button no longer has a clear gatekeeper, and most organizations haven't written down who decides the edge cases. Dataweavers went furthest, calling governance the operating system behind AI workflows rather than a policy memo sitting next to it.

Content now has two audiences, and they need different things from it. Chuck Gahun of Forrester gave this the sharpest treatment of the two days. Human consumers and AI agents require separate content strategies, driven by different things (emotion and story versus logic and context) and measured differently. His "machine advantage" framing, built on influence, fluency, and trustworthiness, gives brands a usable structure for a problem most are still guessing at, backed by traffic data showing bot and agent traffic passing human traffic sooner than forecast, and Optimizely's own state of 34% page-view decline.

He extended this into what he called the agentic content system stack. CMS output now splits three ways: human-facing digital experiences, agent-to-agent machine experiences, and ephemeral experiences generated on the fly for a single prompt. Underneath sits the real foundation, in his view: systems of record, a knowledge graph, and a context graph tracking agent decisions over time, with agents and applications sitting on top. Identity and access is the gap he flagged, with WebMCP as one way an agent might hand off to a human mid-session. His thesis: as experience-building commoditizes, the durable value sits lower in the stack, in structured content held as the system of record.

WebMCP is where the agent conversation is heading next. This came up in several sessions and it's the piece I'd watch most closely over the coming months. Optimizely walked through it directly: launched in February 2026, WebMCP works like MCP built into the browser tab, letting a site hand an agent an explicit list of what it can do instead of forcing it to screenshot the page and guess where to click. Contentful called the same shift as the website "talking back," with MCP Apps letting a site's interface travel directly into an AI conversation as a widget or configurator. The underlying point across both sessions: agent traffic has moved past pure discovery (training, search, retrieval) into action, agents actually doing things on a site rather than just reading it, and most sites aren't built for that yet.

Final Thoughts

My flight home got delayed, and I ended up at the airport with a handful of other analysts from the CMS Experts community stuck in the same wait. One of them asked, half joking, "did we really even discuss CMS?" We had, obviously, but the question was getting at something bigger. Nearly every conversation over two days had drifted toward content visibility for AI, WebMCP, agents as a new class of content consumer, governance, the agentic content stack. Worth sitting with, coming from a room full of people whose job title still says content management system.

Great event overall, and I'm already looking forward to heading back to Montreal next year. Next up: Optimizely's Opticon on August 31st, then CMS Experts Boston on September 8 and 9, where I'll be speaking on "What's a DXP in 2026?"