With some 300 participants mostly from Europe, Ibexa and their DXP community took to Barcelona at the end of January for their annual kickoff and it was a quite different experience compared to last year.
Unlike last year, where it was 200 participants and partners-only, this year customers also participated at Ibexa Summit 25 and that was far from the only substantial change. Where the 2024 program looked much more inwards, or if you prefer, was more partner-community focused, this time Ibexa curated an experience that set sight on the broader marketplace, bigger customer problems and even touching on industry challenges as faced by AI and the erosion in trust.
In brief: Ibexa is growing, now also with a North American footprint and importantly, the combination of DXP (digital experience platform), CDP (customer data platform) and PIM (Product Information Management) is setting them apart in a marketplace that is as confusing as ever.
Read moreLast year, I dismissed AI coding assistants as fancy autocomplete tools. After five decades of programming, I thought I'd seen every productivity promise come and go. I was wrong.
My journey started simply enough with vanilla Visual Studio Code. Microsoft Copilot came next, making big promises about revolutionizing coding. Skeptical but curious, I tried that, then Cursor, a VS Code fork that actually delivered when pointed at the right code along with the manufacturers documentation. Adding Claude through Cline opened new possibilities, followed by Roo Code with its specialized prompts for architecture, coding, and code review.
Then DeepSeek-R1 arrived, unlike the other leading AI LLms, it is open-source, meaning anyone can use, modify, or share it for free. matching Claude's capabilities at a tenth of the cost. This constant evolution taught me something: yesterday's cutting-edge tool could be tomorrow's expensive luxury.
5 new tools to learn in one year, it’s what I live for.
Read moreIn an age of AI-driven workflows and hybrid or remote setups, how do we keep our people at the heart of communication?
During our recent Employee Experience group session hosted by Microsoft in Toronto, I tried to tackle this head-on with the help from the group. Drawing on tactics for AI-powered communications, lessons on psychological safety, and the importance of hyper-personalized messaging, together we illuminated what it truly takes to reclaim genuine connection.
Below are the “big questions” that framed our discussion—and the key takeaways every employee experience and digital workplace leader needs to know.
Read moreIn 1977, I made what felt like a monumental investment: $795 for a Commodore PET computer. But that was just the beginning. The need for storage led to another equally significant purchase – a disk drive system for another $795. That's a total of $1,590 in 1977, equivalent to approximately $7,950 in today's money. For context, that total investment would have bought you a decent used car back then. The PET was revolutionary for its time, featuring a built-in monitor, keyboard, and cassette deck in one integrated unit. It came with a whopping 4KB of RAM (yes, kilobytes), ran at a blazing 1 MHz, and with the disk drive, offered unprecedented storage capabilities for a personal computer.
Fast forward to 2025, and I find myself contemplating another significant investment in computing technology, this time for running the full DeepSeek-R1 AI model locally. The parallels in terms of technological ambition – and cost – are striking.
Read moreLet me share something fascinating: The Web is experiencing its most significant transformation since its beginning in the 1990s, shifting from human-centric design to a "robot-first" approach where AI systems are becoming primary consumers of web content.
While early web protocols helped manage human access across devices and restrict access by robots like search engine crawlers, today's websites actively court robot engagement for improved user experiences, automation and to feed the algorithm and language models. However, this shift brings challenges – from AI manipulation concerns to questions about data privacy and algorithmic bias.
Remember when "mobile-first" was the hot trend in web development? Well, get ready for "AI-first," or with all the confusion around AI as a term, let’s just call it what it really is: Robots-first.
New standards and protocols are emerging to help website owners manage AI interactions while preserving the web's core mission of democratized knowledge sharing. This article will explore how these changes impact web development strategies impacting how one approaches web development.
Read moreOnce again the big stories this year covered AI (surprise!), but also articles on designing sustainable systems and digital equity made it to the top 5 alongside a piece on universal CMS.
It’s that time of year, where we look back at another year of learning and networking. We really like to have a good conversation and meet in person, but sharing openly as much as possible is also an important part of what we do. Sharing is caring!
Keeping with tradition, here are the five posts, which seemed to resonate the most based on readership and engagement numbers.
Read moreAt this year’s annual end-of-year collab meeting in Hamburg, we took a closer look at what we have learned in 2024 by bringing together our local groups with an open invite to other community members, a few selected speakers and created a curated packed afternoon with a dozen lightning talks.
Attending this year was a bigger crowd than past years — a diverse set of digital leaders from large, complex and global organisations like Canyon, Jungheinrich, Lufthansa, OTTO alongside agencies such as Diconium and Thoughtworks as well as software firms like CoreMedia, Magnolia, Staffbase and a few other friends from near and far.
Employee communication platform software firm Haiilo hosted us in their charming offices, which was a fitting scene for learning and networking.
Read moreAs someone who has witnessed the evolution of programming languages over five decades, I've noticed an interesting parallel:
Writing prompts for AI is remarkably similar to traditional programming. The only real difference is the syntax we use to express our intentions.
Let me take you on a journey through time.
Read moreWhen we make decisions our thinking is informed by societal norms, “guardrails”, that guide our decisions like the laws and rules that govern us. But what are good guardrails in today’s world of overwhelming information flows and increasingly powerful technologies, such as artificial intelligence?
Based on the latest insights from the cognitive sciences, economics, and public policy, the new book "Guardrails" offers a novel approach to shaping decisions by embracing human agency in its social context. In brief: The book explores the importance of establishing guardrails to manage the power dynamics in the digital age.
Written by Urs Gasser (Professor of Public Policy, Governance and Innovative Technology at TU Munich) and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford), the book shows how the quick embrace of technological solutions can lead to results we don’t always want.
The two authors explain how society itself can provide guardrails more suited to the digital age, ones that empower individual choice while accounting for the social good, encourage flexibility in the face of changing circumstances, and ultimately help us to make better decisions as we tackle the most daunting problems of our times, such as global injustice and climate change.
In a recent member’s call we were joined by Viktor who took us through the thinking behind the book, how human decisions are flawed and also how just looking at AI through the lens of misinformation, bias or privacy is short-sighted. The problem is bigger. The book is about principles for good decisions, and Viktor shared quite a few memorable examples.
Read moreI recently attended the annual CMS Experts meeting in New York, where artificial intelligence (AI) emerged as a recurring theme despite not being the event's primary focus. Influential speakers such as Sree Sreenivasan and Alan Pelz-Sharpe offered insightful viewpoints that inspired me to share my thoughts on this technology.
Sree’s talk was provocatively and timely titled: “We have no idea what we are doing with AI, but we are clearly going to do it.”. He argued that using the term "hallucinations" to describe issues with AI technology lets developers off the hook for addressing these problems. Sreenivasan also points out that in the AI industry, users are both the product and the lab, creating a more dangerous situation than social media.
Alan’s talk was “Is your Organization ready for AI?” and the brief answer is no. He explained that organisations must identify the processes that they think AI will improve, the tasks that will power those processes, have the inputs have been quality controlled, does the organisation which people and skills are required to build and operate the solution, and have decision-makers agreed on the metrics for success.
AI has become a buzzword, promising dramatic advances in various areas, including healthcare and transportation. However, it is crucial to maintain a balanced perspective and be aware of AI's advantages and disadvantages.
Read moreAcross all industries, organizations are exploring how to leverage the power of Generative AI. Everyone is talking about AI today, but how can you take advantage of this in the content management world? How can you leverage all the content you’ve created and combine that with AI to provide a great experience for your customers?
In a recent members’ call we heard from Nicole Rogers from "Generative AI Copilots" - startup ai12z. Nicole shared how Generative AI can be combined with your content and your CMS to enhance your site visitors’ web experiences. Examples of how you can incorporate this technology right on your website includes:
A chatbot in the corner of your website to answer your site visitors’ questions about your products and services.
Digital assistants (aka “copilots”) to help them along their journey, providing personalized recommendations and assisting in completing tasks like making a purchase.
AI-powered search to respond to your users’ search queries with detailed summaries.
Read moreIt's now been two months since CMS Kickoff 24 in January in Florida and for a recent member's call we heard reflections on the impact of AI from seasoned CMS consultant Tom Cranstoun who joined us from the UK.
While CMS Kickoff 24 wasn't all about AI, the speakers made Tom rethink AI's role in content management. Given the translation, bias, regulation challenges and lack of trust in AI, one needs to employ reviewers and editors to correct the content; AI is better suited for consuming content.
Let’s think that the current state of AI creating content is a beta experiment, best left to the tech guys; we have a business to think of.
In this call, Tom shared how AI Simplicity affects your business, the need for better content modelling and also the key responsibility of an emerging team role: The AI evangelist.
Read moreThe hype around that thing called AI can be deafening and it’s quite overwhelming to try to stay on top of all the seemingly relevant AI developments.
To help us untangle what’s really happening and the impact it is having, we recently invited digital platform product lead Seb Barre from TELUS in Toronto to walk us through how he sees the big picture and notable changes.
Seb made the interesting point that we are entering a new do-it-yourself era for generative AI. While the first wave (last year) was dominated by large, proprietary offerings, including OpenAI, today other options have arrived on the scene, which allows organisations to seize new use cases and also approach it with more flexibility and lower cost attached.
As expected, it became a 30-minute packed member’s call on large language models, action models, new devices, privacy, how search is failing us, open source and much more. Seb shared plenty of interesting tools and also shared how to get your organisation to embrace AI.
Read more2023 was quite a year with many big milestones. Also a confusing year with massive changes. Massive tech layoffs were a huge topic at the beginning of the year and in a memorable ask me anything with design leader Peter Merholz, he explained why he referred to it as a social contagion.
Also, at the beginning of the year, AI was more of a research thing and then just a few months into 2023, tools like Chat GPT was a big theme at pretty much every group meeting. We heard how it acts as a kind of assistant, how it was used officially and often also unofficially and terms like hallucination changed meaning. At the end of the year, Dutch Internet pioneer Steven Pemberton provided us a helpful reminder that there's no I in AI (yet).
In this long overdue community update, I’ll share a bit more behind the scenes and provide an update on our plans for 2024.
Read moreIt’s that time of year, where we look back at another year of learning and networking. We really like to have a good conversation and meet in person, but sharing openly as much as possible is also an important part of what we do.
The big stories this year covered AI (surprise!), intranets (an oldie, but goodie) and also a book launch on delivering services.
Keeping with tradition, here are the five posts, which seemed to resonate the most based on readership and engagement numbers.
Read more