AI was all over the Umbraco US Festival in Chicago — but the people are what made it work. Notes from Blend on Umbraco AI, Automate, and the community.
It’s not an original observation anymore — nearly every conversation in tech circles back to AI. Whatever the stated subject, the real subject is AI. It can feel like we’ve pried open Pandora’s box — we’ve talked with a lot of technologists (and not just developers) who aren’t sure what their job is anymore, and no one really knows what’s next. That was the backdrop walking into the Umbraco US Festival in Chicago.
For any one of us, the scope of this feels new and unprecedented, but as a species, we’ve been here before. Economics scholar Carlota Perez studied five similar technological turning points — the British Industrial Revolution, steam and railways, the age of steel and heavy engineering, automobiles and mass production, and the telecom and internet revolution — and her rough arc for each looks a bit familiar. There’s an installation phase that runs a few years, followed by a stretch of upheaval, with a final golden age as the technology matures.
AI compresses that timeline. Standing up a data center is work, but it’s nothing like laying rail to everywhere, so the infrastructure arrives fast. We’re still early in the installation phase, sorting out together how AI reshapes the CMS space, which means we all need to work together to figure out the new normal. I imagine there were a lot of railway experts in the early 1900s that were sick of hearing how cars were going to change everything.
Community and openness.
The great thing about Umbraco is that any get-together is never just about the technology. The community brings a culture that’s welcoming, a little off-beat, and fun. The people are what make it. Given the downtown Chicago setting, maybe the whole thing should have been called “Humans in the Loop.”
Yes, it’s a tech conference. Yes, we talked about AI. And yes, Umbraco is serious, enterprise-ready software that solves real problems and is positioned well for the next stage of the AI boom. But just because it’s serious software doesn’t mean we need to endure a boring conference.
Lotte Pitcher and Emma Potter kicked things off with a Community Keynote from Umbraco HQ. The keynote highlighted how Umbraco keeps leaning into a unique approach to AI; while most vendors are racing to build a walled garden — Umbraco builds its AI integrations on top of standard libraries, so you bring your own AI provider into your Umbraco environment and manage it centrally. One AI across all your software, rather than a different AI wired into every system you run. CIOs, privacy officers, and CFOs tend to like the sound of that.
The promise (and hope) behind AI.
With this promise of AI vendor flexibility at the heart of this new era of Umbraco, a lot of the sessions focused on what makes that approach possible. For example, Umbraco AI puts AI agents in the Backoffice to help manage a site and its content. Think of it as a chat window to the experts you’d normally need — SEO, editors, translators — with the added bonus that they can reach in and edit your content when you ask.
Meanwhile, Umbraco Automate extends that into an event-driven workflow tool, something like IFTTT or Zapier built into the Backoffice. Paired with AI, it’s one of the more interesting shifts in the CMS in the last decade. We’re heading into a stretch where gluing systems together to automate a workflow is about to get a lot easier.
Finally, Blend’s own Joe Kepley closed the conference with a reminder that the last thing left in Pandora’s box was hope. We’re in the middle of a real shift as an industry — but we get a say in what it becomes. We don’t know what’s next, and we don’t entirely know what our jobs are anymore.
As technologists, we get to help decide both. Like the people standing at the start of the automobile age, we’re in the driver’s seat with a new frontier ahead. Time to take the wheel.
More from the team.
Blend was well-represented at Umbraco US Festival, so here are some more insights from attendees.
Chase Burandt, lead developer
“The focus was AI, which is par for the course these days, aimed squarely at Umbraco’s new packages — Umbraco AI and Umbraco Automate. They let developers set up AI agents so editors can hand off tasks when content gets updated.”
“Day one, I did the workshop: a hands-on setup that runs Umbraco AI when an editor creates a new podcast on a page. We wired up three tasks — transcribe the audio file, write a summary, and build show notes as a structured HTML layout listing the guests with links to their sites. It was very good at producing a rough draft. All of it still needs a human to check that the content is right.”
“The talk I enjoyed most wasn’t about AI at all — it covered HTMX and where it’s useful in applications. And Joe’s talk extended what we’d built in the workshop, showing how entry-level AI integration can be pushed to handle complex, very specific tasks. That was the part that stuck: concrete scenarios where AI helps editors with real jobs, rather than AI sitting in the Backoffice because it’s available.”
Karla Santi, CEO
“If you only read the agenda, you’d assume the Umbraco US Festival was an AI conference. Umbraco AI and Umbraco Automate got plenty of stage time, and Chase and Joe have covered that side well. As the host, I missed a lot of the sessions — but I had a front-row seat to everything that happened between them.”
“The community has always been one of the platform’s strengths. People share code, answer each other’s questions, and show up for each other’s talks. In Chicago, that looked like developers comparing notes on what worked and what didn’t, and partners swapping the kind of stories that never make it into a case study. Plus a whole lot of laughter — a little Codegarden magic made it across the Atlantic.”
“More of our work runs through agents and prompts every year, and I’m convinced that makes the human parts matter more. Our team came home with new ideas, and I came home reminded why we chose this platform and this community. That’s worth a trip to Chicago — or Denmark — every time.”
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