The DXP Catalyst Update - July 25, 2025

INTRO
Welcome to This Week’s DXP Catalyst Update

As generative AI tools continue to evolve, they’re changing the way content is created across the organization. But are they also disrupting your content operations in ways you didn’t anticipate?

In this week’s edition of The DXP Catalyst Update, we’re digging into an issue we’ve seen across lately: what happens when GenAI content workflows develop outside of your CMS strategy. If ChatGPT is your new copywriter, what happens to governance, structure, and reuse? And when CMS platforms themselves start embedding GenAI features, is that enough to bring content operations back into alignment?

Let’s take a closer look.

LEADERSHIP GUIDANCE

When AI Content Tools Undermine your CMS Strategy

For years, the CMS has served as the system of record for digital content. But as generative AI tools become more embedded in how teams draft and produce content, the CMS is no longer the sole environment where content is created or managed. This shift introduces real risks to governance, consistency, and content quality. Many organizations have not fully accounted for these changes.

How AI-Created Content Escapes CMS Governance

In many organizations, the initial adoption of generative AI tools was not part of a coordinated strategy. It began as a series of experiments, with teams using platforms like ChatGPT or Jasper to draft emails, landing pages, and long-form articles. These drafts were often created in tools like Google Docs or Microsoft Word, shared informally across teams, and then pasted into the CMS when they were ready to go live. While this process may have seemed efficient or harmless at the time, it gradually established a parallel workflow that existed entirely outside the controls of the CMS.

The challenge this presents is not limited to the tools themselves but reflects a deeper operational disconnect. Content created outside of the CMS tends to bypass structured fields, metadata tagging, approval workflows, and accessibility checkpoints that exist to maintain quality and consistency. As these informal processes become standard, the CMS is reduced to a simple publishing mechanism rather than functioning as the central hub for content governance and collaboration. This shift can compromise both efficiency and oversight across marketing and digital teams.

The Rise of a Fragmented Workflow

When your content lifecycle is spread across multiple disconnected tools and platforms, the strategic benefits of centralization begin to erode. It becomes difficult to maintain version control, and editorial consistency often declines across channels and campaigns. Governance frameworks, approval workflows, taxonomy structures, and asset management protocols are harder to apply and enforce. Most critically, teams lose visibility into where content lives, how it moves, and who owns it.

These fragmented processes frequently lead to duplicated work and missed opportunities to repurpose existing assets. Teams may spend time recreating materials that already exist in slightly different forms, simply because there is no easy way to discover or track them. Marketing leaders lose their ability to coordinate messaging across touchpoints, IT teams struggle to monitor platform usage or content velocity, and legal and compliance teams are often left completely out of the loop. What begins as an isolated convenience can slowly undermine operational alignment and effectiveness across the organization.

What About GenAI Built into the CMS?

Most modern CMS vendors have introduced native generative AI features in response to the widespread adoption of third-party tools. A number of platforms now offer capabilities that allow marketers to generate copy, metadata, summaries, and more directly within the CMS environment. These features hold real promise because they bring AI-assisted creation back under the umbrella of structured governance and workflow oversight.

However, native AI functionality is not a complete solution. In many cases, these tools are limited in scope and designed more for content refinement than for full-scale creation. Their performance and reliability can vary significantly between platforms, which often leads teams to continue using external tools for early-stage ideation and writing. As a result, many organizations end up with a hybrid process in which content is partially drafted outside the CMS and then optimized within it.

To see real value from these native tools, organizations need more than access. They must define when and how these features should be used within their workflows, and ensure that those workflows are aligned across teams. Without clear boundaries and strong enablement, teams may fall back into inconsistent habits that limit the effectiveness of both the CMS and the AI capabilities embedded within it.

The Real Problem: Strategy, Not Just Tools

At its core, this is not just a technology problem. It reflects a broader strategic challenge. The real issue is not whether your team is using generative AI, but whether your content operations are evolving in a way that aligns with those tools.

Many CMS platforms were originally designed to manage structured content within clearly defined workflows. Generative AI, by contrast, introduces rapid, flexible, and often unstructured content creation at scale. That raises important questions about how these two approaches are being reconciled within your organization. Are your workflows adaptable enough to support new modes of creation? Are teams being trained on how to use generative AI effectively, where to store drafts, and how to move that content through the publishing process?

Without a clear and well-aligned strategy, your CMS may begin to feel like a constraint instead of a core part of your content engine. It risks being treated as a final stop in the process, rather than a system that drives consistency, efficiency, and governance across your entire content lifecycle.

Moving Toward Operational Maturity

To avoid misalignment between technology and process, content teams need to take a step back and recalibrate. This is not about rejecting generative AI or slowing down progress. Instead, it is about deliberately defining how these tools fit into your overall content operations and governance framework.

Consider the following actions as part of that recalibration:

• Document the entire content lifecycle, from initial brainstorming and drafting through review, approval, publishing, and eventual reuse.

• Determine where generative AI can provide value, and where human oversight, structure, or quality controls are still essential.

• Provide clear training for teams on how to use AI tools embedded within your CMS, how to handle outputs from third-party tools, and how to bring those pieces into your formal workflows.

• Assess whether your CMS is still meeting your operational needs, or whether a shift in platform or process might be required.

The objective is not to eliminate the use of external tools. Rather, it is to ensure they are integrated in a way that supports your structured content processes, allowing you to scale output without losing consistency or control.

Final Thoughts

Generative AI has changed how content teams work, offering faster and more flexible ways to produce digital assets. Still, it has not eliminated the need for structure, governance, or consistency across platforms. As AI tools become more deeply embedded into marketing and editorial workflows, organizations must ensure their CMS environments are evolving to support those changes. This requires thoughtful planning, not just technical upgrades.

If your CMS is no longer functioning as the foundation of your content operations, now is the time to re-evaluate. It is worth asking what role that system should play in a landscape where generative tools are influencing every stage of the content lifecycle.