User interfaces and workflows built with agentic AI are emerging as the next frontier of digital experience tech’s evolution. For two decades, digital teams accelerated business results by implementing better software. Monolithic digital experience and content management solutions gave way to composable architectures that allowed digital teams to assemble specialized capabilities faster and create better customer experiences. But composability didn’t eliminate workflow friction. Content teams still had to navigate the user interfaces in each system or rely on developers to build custom interfaces on top of them.

Now, practitioners responsible for digital experiences can express their intent in an agentic interface and allow AI to orchestrate the workflow by connecting to existing SaaS solutions and deliver the intended outcome for a digital practitioner. AI has already made content more abundant through generative AI. It is beginning to change how digital experience teams work in these systems to generate business value. In response, AI CMOs are rebalancing technology and talent investments:

  • 39% of B2C marketing decision-makers are increasing tech spending by 5% or more
  • 63% of C-level B2B marketing decision-makers are slowing hiring until they understand AI’s organizational impact.

Although software vendor investment in agentic solutions is accelerating, enterprise adoption is still in its early days. Many organizations are first evaluating governance requirements, organizational readiness, and the maturity of agentic AI before expanding production use. As a result, most organizations should view agentic AI solutions in digital experience tech as an emerging capability, rather than core functionality of in their digital tech stacks.

Agentic AI Solutions Promise to Accelerate the Pace and Creativity of Digital Teams

With the tools available today, practitioners can express their intent conversationally. That’s the promise we’re monitoring. Agentic AI solutions retrieve the content, assets, and data from the systems of record and complete the work across the underlying stack. Instead of waiting for developers to build a custom workflow, practitioners receive a dynamically assembled one for their intended goal. The promise? Accelerate the pace of work in digital teams.

Composable architectures gave digital teams more flexibility, but they did not always give practitioners more creativity. Too often, the creative promise got trapped behind technical assembly of a composable tech stack. Practitioners could imagine richer experiences, but turning those ideas into reality required developers to integrate digital and content tech, templates, and design systems and then tie them together with workflows. Agentic AI solutions offer conversational interfaces that help digital leaders creatively design and iterate across multiple software systems.

Many Digital Experience Platform and Content Management System vendors are now introducing agent orchestration capabilities that allow campaign designers to dream up a great idea, express it in words, and have different ideas, content, and data come together without requiring developers. Adobe, Optimizely, Sitecore, Acquia, and several other software vendors are already laying the foundations. And, if you have a bespoke multi-vendor digital experience tech stack, commercial solutions like Gradial or custom solutions built on Claude can layer on top without a re-platforming project.

Rethink Your Digital Experience and Content Technologies For An Agentic AI Future

AI is walking into businesses through four doors, but it doesn’t change a digital team’s objective: growth through digital channels. If agentic interfaces become the primary way digital practitioners interact with technology, then you must rethink the role of your digital experience and content tech solutions. The question for you is: How effectively can agentic systems access, orchestrate, and act on the applications your teams use today? To make deliberate choices about your digital experience solutions:

  • Treat your existing SaaS solutions as strategic systems of record. As digital teams spend less time inside individual applications, the value of those applications increasingly comes from the content, assets, data, permissions, and workflow history they contain, not their user interfaces. Agentic systems can only be as effective as the context they derive for your on-brand content and data. As a result, you should evaluate platforms not only by their user experience but also by the quality, accessibility, and governance of the information that powers them.
  • Reserve custom software composition for competitive differentiation. Composability remains valuable because agentic systems depend on the APIs, integrations, and services that composable architectures expose. But you should be very selective about what you custom build. If a capability can be assembled through orchestrating agentic workflows, building a business case for a bespoke implementation becomes more challenging. Custom composition should focus on capabilities that your competitors cannot easily acquire, replicate, or generate.
  • Reassess the economics of new digital and content tech modernizations.  For years, you justified platform replacements because productivity improvements or tech agility required new software and the associated new user experiences (e.g., visual builders). Agentic solutions introduce another path. You may increasingly improve how practitioners work without replacing the systems beneath them. You must now ask whether the desired outcome requires a new platform or simply a better orchestration layer.

If agentic interfaces and workflows begin demonstrating business impact at scale, the future of digital experience and content management solutions will be shaped by systems of record and systems of action that utilize context. If this trend continues, the most important architectural decisions of the next decade may not be about which applications you implement, but which systems of action you trust as the interface for your digital teams – and the context layer upon which they act.

If you are a Forrester client interested in discussing the evolution of your digital experience and content management solutions for humans and agents, book an inquiry or guidance session with my colleague Chuck Gahun or myself. We are available to discuss topics such as content management and digital experience platform provider selection.

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