CRAFTED LABS – THE RISE OF THE AI-NATIVE CMS

How the modern CMS is integrating AI.

The CMS is the bedrock of most web estates, and it’s only becoming more effective. We explore how platforms are embedding AI functionality into the website admin experience.

Screenshot showing Umbraco's UI with different AI tool options such as Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT.

team insight

Sam, Head of Marketing

A key benefit here is that it can support your marketing efforts regardless of how sophisticated your setup is. At a foundational level, it can help with tasks like proofing or basic SEO health checks, and can scale up to advanced segmentation, user analysis, and personalisation.

Similar functionality, varied implementation.

While there are similarities across what the platforms allow you to do with AI, there are very different approaches to how they’re are integrating it. We highlight some different examples across a range of platforms we work closely with.

Umbraco

Kentico

Contentful

Webflow

Umbraco - AI, the Umbraco Way.

Umbraco has taken a deliberately thoughtful approach to AI. Rather than rushing out a suite of proprietary AI features, it's focused on making the platform accessible to AI. Effectively embracing being able to connect the best tech (in this case AI) into the platform rather than building it themselves.

The headline is the Umbraco MCP Server (Model Context Protocol), launched in June 2025. In plain terms, it allows you to integrate your preferred platform (whether that’s Claude, Gemini or Copilot) directly within your Umbraco CMS.

In addition, Umbraco's open marketplace includes ready-made packages for AI writing assistance, image analysis, metadata enrichment, and translation.

What we love about Umbraco's AI.

You choose the AI tools that fit your brand and workflow, rather than being locked into one vendor's model. It’s worth ensuring the correct permissions and boundaries are set to avoid data security issues. The good news is, Umbraco.AI is built in the backoffice to help provide full control over models, behaviour, tone and governance.

Kentico – Meet AIRA, your new Agentic Teammate.

Kentico’s AIRA (Artificial Intelligence Recommendations and Assistance) is built directly into the Xperience by Kentico interface which means no separate login, no tab-switching.

It’s pitched as an integrated Agentic Marketing Suite: a set of specialised AI agents that can support the full marketing lifecycle. Think campaign planning, content creation, testing, and optimisation all within Kentico’s Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

For day-to-day editors, it means things like automatic translation, content tagging, campaign ideation and email personalisation are accessible straight from an in-product chat interface. There's also a customer journey optimisation agent that shows you where visitors are dropping off and what to do next. For marketers that don’t have third-party providers for this type of functionality, it can unlock powerful capabilities all within Kentico’s subscription.

What we love about Kentico’s AIRA.

AIRA is built on secure Azure infrastructure with access control and enterprise-grade encryption which keeps data, prompts and information locked down and avoids the need to share it with external AI platforms.

Contentful – From draft to done, quality content at scale.

As a DXP built for achieving impact and scale with content, it’s no surprise that Contentful’s native AI follows suit.

Contentful’s AI Actions feature is a framework for embedding generative AI directly into content workflows. And unlike bolted-on integrations, this is designed with governance in mind: approvals, permissions, and quality checks are built into every action.

With scale in mind, AI Actions help marketers set up automations and run bulk actions such as translation and meta tag creation across multiple pieces of content. Contentful has also introduced AI Suggestions for personalisation. This helps to identify the right audience segments and generates relevant content variations.

Webflow AI – from idea to impact.

Webflow’s native AI is integrated across its build process through to site optimisation via sitewide SEO audits, translations, and copy generation.

Worth noting that features incorporating AI are mostly add-ons; Optimise, Analyse and Localisation all come with an additional monthly fee to consider.

What we love about Webflow’s AI.

In addition (and like Umbraco), Webflow has an extensive marketplace of AI-powered apps you can integrate with and a MCP server for connecting to your own LLM or AI platform of choice.

Conclusion.

There’s no perfect approach here. Understanding the priorities for your team and the tools/platforms they are already getting value from can determine where the value lies.

Kentico's deeply native AI might suit teams that want everything in one place. Umbraco's open, flexible approach suits those who want control and choice. Contentful works well for teams managing high volumes of structured content across markets. And Webflow is a strong option if speed and visual control matter most.

While AI‑generated content and campaigns at the click of a button are hugely efficient, these tools are still evolving. Providing accurate guardrails, data, and content for them to learn from is crucial to achieving meaningful engagement with your audience.

AI is no longer something you layer on top of your CMS. It's part of it.

It’s an exciting time for brands undertaking new website projects. We're here to help build the foundations for a more effective marketing future.

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