It’s not every day you get to pick the left and right brains of a Forrester Research principal analyst who closely watches the content management system landscape, separating the “hope from the hype” when it comes to 2024 CMS trends. 

VIP CEO Nick Gernert did just that, sitting down with Chuck Gahun, a noted authority on digital experience technology and vendors that “deliver the next generation of content, digital media, and product information capabilities.”

During their recent session CMS: Separating What’s Real From the Hype, the pair explored CMS tech worth watching (hybrid systems, low-code tools, VR), how AI is going to give us back more hours in our days, and why no one should ever take away Chuck’s CMS.  

Let’s get to our favorite takeaways.

CMS: more important than ever

Despite being a mature technology, CMS continues to evolve to meet changing business needs and ‌evergreen trends like building captivating digital experiences for audiences. 

“CMS is still the hub for digital experiences,” said Gernert. “Every technology evolution creates more opportunity for folks to engage and‌ work on something that’s more fulfilling ultimately. It’s all about finding better ways to do our work.”

“The CMS is my backbone for my digital experience. I need my vendor—whomever the vendor is—to accelerate their roadmap. I need them to do more and more and more.”

— Chuck Gahun, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research 

Yes, the core capabilities of a CMS—content authoring, aggregation, access control, workflow, search orchestration, analytics, and data management—remain largely unchanged over the years.

But a new generation of emerging features like low-code tools, content hubs, live experience preview, and content planning tools are making waves, said Gahun.

And that means ‌more CMS choice than ever before for business leaders and development teams looking for a competitive edge.

“CMS is going to continue to deliver experiences, now in a new realm,” said Gahun. “Front-end framework leaders I connect with are really excited about the VR frontier.”

Different CMS architectures for different folks

Better yet, modern CMSes now offer the hybrid flexibility to support both traditional capabilities—such as server-side rendering and templating—as well as pure headless front-end capabilities, said Gahun.

“When I want to launch a jazzy marketing campaign for my new product, I do want a front-end framework based on my brand standards,” added Gahun. “Because I want to [break] out of the mold and create something compelling.”

“When I want to launch a jazzy marketing campaign for my new product, I want to [break] out of the mold and create something compelling.”

—Chuck Gahun

Organizations can prefer to maintain their corporate websites using a set of predefined templates, while also having the freedom to create compelling, customized front-end designs for one-off marketing campaigns or product launches.

“When I want to launch a jazzy marketing campaign for my new product, I do want a front-end framework based on my brand standards,” added Gahun. “Because I want to [break] out of the mold and create something compelling.”

That desire can be intoxicating, even voracious. 

“The CMS is my backbone for my digital experience,” said Gahun. “I need my vendor—whomever the vendor is—to accelerate their roadmap. I need them to do more and more and more. But please don’t take my CMS away in any way.” 

That said, the decades-long transition from traditional to headless and now to hybrid systems does present challenges in terms of content management and scalability.

Businesses need to consider their risk appetite, the business context, and the (potential) complexity of maintaining a so-called composable stack.

“In a traditional CMS, you had an all-in-one system: the authoring engine, the rendering engine, and the templates all connected,” said Gernert. 

Now, before implementing a hybrid CMS model, with the front and back ends of a CMS decoupled from one another, “a certain amount of corporate communication needs to happen,” added Gahun. 

AI + CMS = adding “value to our days”

Not surprisingly, Generative AI is increasingly being used in CMS platforms for tasks like content generation, translation, and personalization. 

Not only is AI helping businesses automate those routine needs and enhancing operational efficiency, but it’s also helping lead them toward the twin holy grails of content personalization and customer engagement. 

“[AI is] going to… give us time back time to do the things that we do want to do. ”

—Chuck Gahun

As elsewhere, though, businesses need to be mindful of the regulatory implications of blindly using AI in their CMS toolbox and workflows, especially regarding data privacy and intellectual property rights.

Despite that concern, “I continue to be optimistic about generative AI,” said Gahun. “It’s going to add a lot of value to our days—doing tasks we didn’t really want to do [in the first place]. It will give us time back time to do the things that we do want to do. Which will help us raise the bar for society.”

Explore more 2024 CMS trends

Watch the full CMS: Separating What’s Real From the Hype session here.