CMSWire Contributor Akshay Sura presents some key takeaways from Kontent.ai’s conference this week in Manhattan.
NEW YORK CITY — On Thursday, Nov. 17, Kontent.ai kicked off the Kontent.ai Horizons conference on the heels of a successful fundraising of $40 million from Expedition Growth Capital to bring the power of AI and more to content management. The event was hosted at Glasshouse Chelsea in Manhattan and drew attendees worldwide.
Kontent.ai is a headless content management system that enables content and engineering teams to create, organize and reuse valuable content, making every experience consistent and relevant. The company was founded in 2015 in Brno, Czech Republic.
CEO Delivers State of State on Economy, Digital Transformation
Bart Omlo kicked off the Kontent.ai conference with a keynote. Omlo, the CEO of Kontent.ai, has vast experience in the Web CMS world and was the managing director of Kentico before the companies split. Kentico is a Web CMS provider and offered Kontent by Kentico until the split in July of this year. Omlo has been a leader in the field for over 20 years.
Omlo talked about the war in Ukraine, the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic situation, which is challenging for everyone with utility bills. He also acknowledged the massive layoffs at well-established companies.
Bart says that even in these challenging times, we need business transformation and boldness.
He says that organizations:
- Know that digital transformation is key
- Are cost aware
- Are not taking risks
- Are focusing on best of breed
- Want to reduce costs and be efficient
- Want to reuse content across multiple channels
- Want to save costs on their content operations
Omlo and the team wanted to find an investor with a suitable DNA and culture. Expedition Growth Capital fits well with the values of Kontent.ai and gets its money from Oxford University’s endowment fund and the American National parks. He mentioned that if Kontent.ai is successful, it would be helping the causes mentioned above.
Omlo also highlighted that his company is now operating as a separate entity from Kentico and is excited about getting recognized as a MACH Alliance member.
Related Article: 5 Things Your CTO Will Ask You About MACH
2023 Focus: North America Growth
The 2023 focus for Kontent.ai will be on growth in the United States and Canada. To help that effort, Kontent.ai is opening its New York City office in the Chrysler builder on Friday, Nov. 18.
According to Omlo, investing in people and focusing intensely on the US market is key to success. Kontent.ai will hire in many functions, including marketing, customer success, presales and sales. According to its website, Kontent.ai has more than 140 employees across six offices in six countries.
The AI Story
Kontent.ai wants AI to be something other than a buzzword; it wants to bring composable AI as part of the composable story. Clever automation can help organizations in day-to-day content operations at an enterprise scale.
Omlo talked about how user-generated content like reviews can be processed by AI, filtering them based on sentiment and other attributes for review by a human being. Kontent.ai is working with an existing Australian customer on such a use case. Kontent.ai is also looking at other real-world use cases where AI can benefit content operations.
Related Article: How AI Can Impact Your Marketing, Customer Experience
Headless Is Now the New Norm
Martin Michalik followed Omlo and talked about product strategy. Michalik is the vice president of product of Kontent.ai. He was the product manager at Kentico in the past and has over 10 years of experience in the IT space.
Michalik acknowledged that enterprises know about headless, unlike before. Based on research, they see that most enterprises are using a headless CMS. The need to explain the concept of headless CMS to enterprises is gone.
Michalik feels that enterprises are not worried about which technology they use. They want to find problems and solve them. He said that the omnichannel strategy is excellent, but Kontent.ai sees a lot of use cases where organizations primarily focus on websites — reusing content between the brands.
Companies, he added, struggle in multiple areas like:
- Too much focus on technology
- Headless vendors are only solving simple content operations
- The content inventory is not designed to handle multisite complexity
- There is limited support for visual multisite content editing and navigation experience
Michalik made the following bold statements:
- We want to be the first with native support for multisite scenarios
- We will be the player with the “new blueprints”
- We will tame complex content management
- We will make doubts of business users history
- We will redefine what a headless market is about
Native Support for Multisite Website Management
Kontent.ai wants to be the first headless CMS to provide native support for multisite website management.
It aims to achieve this by:
- Unifying multisite content in one place and dividing its management
- Enabling easy control and distribution of content changes across multiple sites
- Enabling multisite visual navigation, preview and editing
- Introducing new flexible language and content fallback configuration
Conclusion: Excited for Next Path for Content
To summarize here are my top three takeaways from the Kontent.ai conference:
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2023 focus is on growth and enterprise in the United States
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Kontent.ai will be the first headless CMS to provide native support for multisite website management
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AI is not just a story. Kontent.ai will use AI to help with day-to-day content operations
Kontent.ai has made its mark as an innovator in the industry. Horizons proved this by offering a unique experience for content professionals. We’re excited to see what comes next!
Editor’s note: Akshay Sura is a new CMSWire Contributor whose debut column was published this week. He served as a speaker at the Kontent.ai conference and his company served as a sponsor.
