The DXP Catalyst Update - Sept 12, 2025

INTRO
Welcome to This Week’s DXP Catalyst Update

We were on the road in Boston for the first half of this week. In this week’s DXP Catalyst Update, we cover some highlights from this year’s CMS Experts event in Boston on Sept 9-10.

EVENTS

CMS Experts Boston

This year’s Boston session took place in a private room at Trident Booksellers & Café in Back Bay. As with all CMS Experts gatherings, the mix included practitioners, vendors, agency leaders, and analysts, with practitioners representing local organizations. A few key highlights stood out.

Harvard’s Digital Accessibility Journey

A practitioner from Harvard shared how accessibility has evolved from a compliance requirement to a university-wide transformation. What began with a formal policy in 2019 has grown into a coordinated program anchored by central IT leadership, a network of accessibility liaisons, and the HarvardSites design system with accessibility built in. Accessibility reviews now happen early in design, testing includes assistive technology users, and design standards extend beyond WCAG. The university also introduced community mechanisms like a “Report a Web Accessibility Concern” feature, turning issue reporting into opportunities for inclusion. The result is an accountable model that positions accessibility as a foundation for scalable and consistent digital experiences.

HBS Search Lab

A principal engineer from Harvard Business School presented work from their Search Lab, comparing three types of semantic search to traditional lexical search. The primary use case was improving discovery across Harvard’s extensive publications and research libraries.

Intelligent Search Demos

A couple vendors did some brief demos on their intelligent search platforms.

ai12z presented first. I have seen several of their demos over the last eighteen months, and I appreciate how they refresh the scenarios by season. Their point of view is that every company will eventually have an agent that becomes a primary brand interface. They outlined a multi-stage path toward a personalized agent:

• Stage 1: Help users answer questions using RAG, multilingual support, voice input, and image understanding.

• Stage 2: Go beyond answers to help users complete tasks using integrations, comparisons, structured data, calls to action, and forms.

• Stage 3: Personalize experiences across the customer journey, then analyze and optimize the overall experience using CRM or CDP data, content targeting, and MCP.

After walking through these stages, he showed some tool configurations I had not seen before. In their “Answer AI Questions” setup (RAG-based ingestion across an entire site), you can specify context and instructions to guide how prompts are handled.

Aigensei followed and showed some tool configurations I had not seen before. In their “Answer AI Questions” setup, which uses RAG-based ingestion of full site content, you can specify context and instructions within it to guide how prompts are handled. They also covered their search tool, which is fenced into the content you provide but can still leverage back-office systems through MCP. While they do offer a UI, they expect most customers will consume the API and render results in their own front end. They demo’d an example of search on the HBS website after ingesting the entire site in a few minutes - that was pretty impressive.

The presenter also showed an AI assistant running directly on the Magnolia website. The interface was polished and allowed embedding images, videos, and charts, as well as opening PDFs as a search source. A notable advantage was that the site did not need to be pre-optimized for AI consumption. The platform integrates with multiple CMS platforms, and on each create, read, update, or delete event, an API call fetches the content.

Acquia Observations

Former Acquia employees shared candid perspectives: Drupal community engagement has seemingly been declining, which partly motivated Drupal’s founder (and Acquia’s CTO) to step away and focus on revitalization. The SaaS version of Drupal, while marketed as more marketer-friendly, was described as equally complex. Not surprisingly, agencies still prefer to work with Drupal core over the new version.

Analyst Observations

We shared trends we’re seeing across the DXP space, including the rise of specialized agents and multi-agent orchestration, agent-driven UI component generation, and conversational search powered by RAG. Conversational search, in particular, is becoming highly relevant for industries targeting younger audiences whose digital behaviors are shaped by natural language interaction and discovery-first experiences.

Contentful Transition / Telus

A speaker with past experience at Telus explained how they transitioned from multiple technology stacks to Contentful early in its lifecycle. Later they layered Uniform for orchestration and Adobe Target for personalization. The discussion touched on Contentful’s broader transition from headless CMS to DXP, with new capabilities like Contentful Studio, design system integration, personalization (via the Ninetailed acquisition), experimentation, and automation.

Fastr

Fastr’s CTO presented their evolution from the short-lived Digital Experience Composition (DXC) category into optimization and analytics, focusing on creative teams in retail. Their Optimize product includes a “heatwave” feature showing click patterns on dynamically generated content. While still focused on web and mobile web, the tool stood out to me for its visual insights.

Final Thoughts

It was another great digital forum discussion in Boston. Next stop: CMS Kickoff in Florida in early January.