Drupal AI Initiative: Yesterday's CMS published pages. Tomorrow's CMS publishes capabilities

The useful part

Will Huggins Imagine asking an AI assistant: " Show me waterproof jackets under £150, in size M, available for delivery tomorrow ". Today, the assistant might search the web, read several retail websites and summarise what it finds. What if, instead of reading pages, the agent could ask retailers directly which products matched those requirements?

How it works

• AI agents are now changing that equation, introducing a different type of interaction that moves beyond pages altogether, in search of capabilities that solve a problem rather than pages to read.
• A traditional website can tell an AI agent what products it has and provide the details.
• Over time, CMS capabilities developed around improved findability of content and the experience humans have when they land on a page.
• Its website contains thousands of pages describing products, categories, delivery and returns information, promotions, and offers.

What to take from it

Ever since the early days of the internet, content management systems have had a fairly straightforward job: someone creates a piece of content, the CMS publishes it as a page, a person finds that page, and then reads it and decides what to do next.

Details worth keeping

Tomorrow's website will give the agent a controlled way to buy it. It fundamentally changes what we expect a CMS to do. A page tells you what an organisation can do.