CMS vendors handle AI in two ways: built-in orchestration or bring-your-own tools. Learn how each approach works and which fits your AI strategy.
It was hard to miss: in 2025, “AI” was the predominant buzzword. Nearly every vendor worked to integrate AI into their offerings, whether it made sense or not.
In the marketing space, though, there are many places where AI does make a lot of sense. Microsoft Research produced a report examining the tasks and roles most likely to be impacted by AI, and many of those tasks are highly relevant to content creation, marketing, governance, and optimization.
Naturally, CMS vendors see this and capitalize on value with AI-driven products and features. And while it’s exciting to see the incredible new capabilities that this brings, it’s also important to understand their background — and where it fits into your organization’s existing AI strategy.
Two Approaches to AI in Your CMS
This starts with actual ownership of AI. Across the CMS and DXP landscape, vendors are taking two different approaches to AI integration — vendor-led, where AI is integrated into the main product, and “bring-your-own,” in which the product is open for external tools.
Here’s what those two approaches mean for you.
How Vendor-Led AI Works in a CMS
Most major vendors tackle AI by providing their own custom orchestration environment. You subscribe to this orchestration, and in return AI works seamlessly within their product suite. Optimizely’s Opal, Contentstack’s Polaris, and Kentico’s AIRA are examples of this strategy. (A hint: if the vendor’s AI has a personified name, they’re probably taking this approach).
This provides an early advantage: the AI already works with and is integrated into the product suite, so it’s tuned for the types of jobs already present in the product, meaning time-to-value is reduced.
The downside, of course, is that the vendor has total control over the product. You will pay the vendor for AI usage, and will usually need added integration work to add any external tools to the AI — which then allows the vendor access to your data as well.
How Bring-Your-Own AI Works in a CMS
Some CMS vendors take the opposite approach, giving you the flexibility to connect your own AI tools. Umbraco and a number of other open-source vendors have taken this approach.
A good indicator of this “bring-your-own” AI approach is if your vendor provides official support for AI skills and an MCP server (effectively a USB port to plug an AI into), or if they have configuration options to let you select your own AI tools and models.
Tradeoffs of Managing Your Own AI Stack
This has the advantage of control; instead of figuring out how to get all of your software to talk to a vendor’s AI, the vendor’s software can talk to your AI. Of course, that means that you’re responsible for owning and managing your AI systems, using either desktop tools or automation platforms like Nodemation, Zapier, or Openclaw.
You’ll also need to integrate new software into your AI stack, and make selections based on that — vendors that are pushing for their AI to be the center of your workflow might not always be open to providing your AI with the same capabilities.
Understand Your Options
Beyond any of the marketing hype, it’s important to understand that the tools you choose should reflect your organization’s AI approach and strategy, which means you’ll need a defined AI approach and strategy. If you haven’t, it’s time to sit down and think about how AI automation ties into the bigger picture.
At Blend, we’ve worked to stay on top of how the industry is adapting to AI and cutting through the hype to identify use cases where AI can enable teams and truly provide value. If that sounds interesting to you, reach out — we’d love to talk.