From CMS to Agentic DXP: What Digital Leaders Need to Know
How Contentful and Contentstack are leading the shift to AI-native personalization, co-pilots, and answer engine readiness
Headless CMS promised a simpler, more flexible way to deliver content across channels— and for a while, it delivered. By decoupling content from the presentation layer, teams gained the freedom to build experiences faster, with fewer constraints.
But the digital experience game has changed again. And fast.
Today, customers don’t just visit websites or open apps. They ask questions in ChatGPT, get recommendations in Gemini, and transact through voice, messaging, or AI-powered search. These channels don’t just route users to your brand. They represent your brand. In this environment, a CMS that publishes to screens isn’t enough. You need systems that can observe, reason, and act, safely and at scale.
That’s the premise behind the emerging agentic DXP: keep the composable foundation, but layer in intelligent automation and context-aware agents. These new capabilities personalize at the point of interaction, generate and evaluate variants, and assist both customers and practitioners, all while respecting governance and speed-to-value.
AI-powered platforms are already proving the impact of this evolution, accelerating content creation by up to 80% and enabling hyper-personalization that’s been shown to lift revenues by 5–15%. The opportunity is measurable—and immediate. Platforms like Contentful and Contentstack are already building toward this future. The headless CMS is evolving, and the next DXP has arrived.
The Limits of Headless
Headless CMS platforms changed the game by separating content from presentation, making it easier to deliver to multiple channels. Composable DXPs extended that innovation, allowing enterprises to stitch together best-for-need services, but even they weren’t built for today’s generative and AI-first landscape.
Content must now be tailored not just for devices, but for models that answer questions, compose messages, and generate summaries. Personalization, real-time testing, and authoring intelligence have become baseline expectations. Without these, even the most modular CMS becomes a bottleneck— especially when teams are being told to “just go use AI” without the infrastructure or strategy to support it.
What Is an Agentic DXP?
The agentic DXP builds on the same modular, API-first principles championed by composable DXPs, but adds an intelligent orchestration layer: agents that reason, act, and adapt across systems. These agents don’t replace humans, they co-pilot them.
They draft content, test variants, adapt experiences based on real-time signals, and support teams behind the scenes. Crucially, these capabilities are governed by policy, auditable by design, and integrated with the broader experience architecture— not bolted on. In short: an agentic DXP doesn’t wait for human input. It learns, decides, and adapts automatically to serve the right content at the right moment.
Composable DXPs laid the groundwork by making platforms modular, API-first, and extensible. Agentic DXPs now layer intelligence atop those foundations.
Real Proof: Contentful and Contentstack in Action
Just as composable DXPs set the bar for modular architecture and vendor flexibility, today Contentful and Contentstack are raising it further by weaving agentic capabilities into that modular backbone. These platforms aren't merely adding AI features on top; they are rethinking how content, data, and automation work together in practice.
Contentful Personalize and AI Assistant together bring intelligence directly into the CMS authoring and delivery experience. Personalize enables dynamic content variations driven by real-time context, segmentation, and behavioral logic, eliminating the need for standalone personalization tools. Meanwhile, the AI Assistant supports content teams by drafting variants, suggesting SEO metadata, and flagging tone or accessibility issues, accelerating editorial workflows while enforcing brand and governance standards.
Contentstack’s Data Engine takes a more data-native approach. It embeds profile data, event triggers, and audience segmentation directly into the CMS, allowing for real-time decisioning and contextual content delivery without routing through external CDPs or personalization platforms. Teams can create experiences that respond to customer behavior, location, or product interest, all from within the core content workflow.
Real-world implementations are already proving the model. At IPSY, a move to a composable DXP built on Contentful cut publishing time by 45 hours per month and improved asset upload speeds by nearly 80%, freeing teams to focus on strategy rather than process.
Together, these capabilities reflect a decisive break from static publishing. Instead of treating the CMS as a content repository, Contentful and Contentstack are evolving it into an intelligent experience system—one that adapts, personalizes, and responds in real time.
This is what it means to operationalize the agentic DXP: not just integrating AI, but embedding intelligence into every layer of the content and delivery stack.
New Capabilities to Expect (and Demand)
In the era of agentic DXPs, digital leaders must raise their expectations for what their experience stack can deliver. The bar has moved beyond modularity and multichannel delivery. Today, winning teams require intelligence, agility, and accountability built in.
An agentic DXP coordinates intelligence across the full experience ecosystem, enabling seven key capabilities:
- Discovery in new channels: Support for visibility in answer engines and AI interfaces like ChatGPT through Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
- Data orchestration: Activate and unify profiles, events, and context for dynamic experiences.
- Hyper-personalization: Automate delivery of content that’s contextually relevant, transparent, and explainable.
- Customer co-pilots: Power guided, conversational experiences that understand user intent.
- Business user efficiency: Empower non-technical teams with AI-assisted authoring, QA, and optimization.
- Agentic execution: Governed, cross-system workflows that balance autonomy with control.
- Design and delivery: Faster prototyping, testing, and iteration cycles that reduce risk.
It’s an “outside-in” architecture that uses real-time feedback to adapt experiences across channels and contexts.
This also means personalization with explainability— not just tailoring content, but transparently showing why users see it, based on consent-aware data and contextual signals. It requires retrieval-grounded design, where content is structured for discovery and citation in generative engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
And underpinning it all are copilot experiences that assist practitioners inside the workflow— drafting, enriching, and QA’ing content while enforcing compliance and surfacing opportunities. None of this works at scale without closed-loop learning, where every interaction feeds future optimization.
Avoiding the New Silo
As with any shift, there's a risk of turning the agentic DXP into just another stack layer. To avoid this, digital leaders should focus on three foundational pillars: orchestration, evaluation, and governance.
Orchestration ensures that agents are connected to the full experience architecture, not just the CMS, so their actions reflect broader strategic intent. Evaluation introduces observability tools to track agent performance, cost, and output quality in real time. Governance provides essential controls such as role-based access, PII redaction, and human-in-the-loop review for sensitive decisions.
Emerging standards like the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)—co-developed by Stripe and OpenAI—show where this is heading. ACP enables merchants to connect product catalogs, payment systems, and commerce logic directly with AI agents, enabling discovery-to-purchase flows inside AI interfaces. It’s a glimpse at how agentic DXPs will soon transact, not just communicate.
The most effective organizations will move deliberately through maturity stages: from assistive copilots, to optimization loops, to selective automation with guardrails.
Where to Start
The entry point to an agentic DXP doesn’t require a rip-and-replace. In fact, the most effective transformations often begin with focused, incremental moves that improve outcomes and build internal momentum.
Start with content visibility. Implement structured Q&A and answer-card formats optimized for retrieval in generative engines. This increases your brand’s authority and discoverability in AI-driven interfaces.
Then deploy authoring copilots to support content teams. These agents can suggest metadata, propose localized or personalized variants, and flag issues like accessibility or SEO gaps—accelerating publication without compromising quality.
Next, connect your CMS to profile and event data sources—like a CDP or behavioral pipeline—to enable real-time personalization. This closes the loop between content decisions and user context.
Finally, instrument agentic features with observability layers. Track agent performance across cost, latency, quality, and output integrity. This creates safe experimentation pathways and improves accountability over time.
As one Orium principle reminds us: in a world where you can do anything, focus on doing the right next thing. Start small, prove value fast, and scale intelligently.
Each of these steps is measurable, governed, and designed to integrate with your existing composable stack. Together, they lay the foundation for more advanced capabilities without requiring wholesale change.
The Bottom Line
The DXP isn’t dead. It’s evolving. The headless CMS was a step forward, but it’s no longer enough.
The platforms that win the next wave of digital experience will show up in generative platforms, personalize with integrity, and empower their teams with intelligent automation. And Contentful and Contentstack aren’t just supporting this shift— they’re leading it.
The bottom line is, if your CMS isn’t helping you adapt, personalize, and act intelligently, it’s holding you back.
Leigh Bryant
Editorial Director, Composable.com
Leigh Bryant is a seasoned content and brand strategist with over a decade of experience in digital storytelling. Starting in retail before shifting to the technology space, she has spent the past ten years crafting compelling narratives as a writer, editor, and strategist.