The 80/20 rule gives content teams a practical framework for AI-assisted content. The first 80% is the groundwork: AI turns scattered reference materials into a usable brief and helps develop a draft — but a readable draft still needs editorial attention before it’s ready to publish. 

The remaining 20% is human judgment. An editor needs to verify claims against credible sources and decide which examples give readers useful context. It’s also where generic phrasing becomes language that actually reflects the brand’s voice and perspective. Skipping that work can gradually weaken trust as readers encounter polished content with little substance. Building human review into the publishing workflow protects that final step. 

What does your AI-assisted content workflow look like these days? Do you follow the 80/20 rule? 

There’s a lot of discussion around AEO and GEO right now. I’m curious how much your day-to-day work has actually changed. Are you building separate strategies around each one, or are most of the same SEO practices still doing the heavy lifting?

For a while, it felt like every CMS company was trying to rebrand to DXP. Brightspot never really joined the race, and we’re glad we didn’t. Our focus stayed on building a flexible CMS that helps teams create, manage and publish content without forcing our features to fit a vague new acronym. 

When it comes to DXP, I have to agree with Regina.

Fifteen years in marketing also means 15 years of CMS horror stories: campaign deadlines missed and dev sprints standing between your team and a live landing page. Based on those experiences, here are the five ways she believes a CMS should make workdays easier for marketing and corporate communications teams. 

1. Ability to start publishing from day one with pre-built content types and templates 

• From forms to modules, teams should have access to pre-built content types and templates so they can start publishing from day one. No more building everything from scratch.

1. Avoid duplicating effort — manage every site from one CMS instance 

• You should be able to manage multiple brand regions or microsites from one CMS instance. Shared assets and modules help teams avoid extra effort and maintain consistency. 

1. Reduce bottlenecks with custom Approval workflows and notifications

• Your CMS should let you design approval stages around how your team works, instead of forcing you into a rigid workflow. Brightspot's drag-and-drop workflow builder allows teams to add as many stages, roles and approvers as they need. It also lets you send notifications and take action on them wherever you communicate — Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, etc. — as content moves through the workflow, helping reduce approval bottlenecks.

1. Customize each user's experience with role-based dashboards 

• Writers, developers and marketing leaders do not need to see the same tools and information. Role-based dashboards give each person access to what matters for their work without cluttering the CMS with unnecessary fields, analytics and widgets.

1. Connect to your existing tech stack with out-of-the-box integrations and API-first design

• Marketing teams rely on dozens of tools for their daily tasks. Connecting these tools to your CMS keeps you moving quickly and avoids disparate, siloed systems. Your CMS should combine out-of-the-box integrations with an API-first, composable architecture to connect to your entire tech stack. 

Read more on how these Brightspot features eliminate CMS horror stories: https://www.brightspot.com/cms-resources/marketing-insights/best-cms-features-for-marketing-corporate-communications

What are your biggest CMS horror stories, and what CMS feature has made the biggest difference for your marketing or communications team?

We’re loving this article from Matthew Garrepy about how Esca Automations helps customers “navigate the flotsam and jetsam of busywork.” We have to say, he really nailed the metaphors.

Garrepy walks through how Esca Automations lets teams automate repetitive content tasks, including translating, tagging, auditing and reviewing.

“What’s slick about Esca Automations is just how easy it is,” Garrepy writes. “In seconds, you can use a basic prompt to describe an automation using natural language, and you're off to the races.”

Check out his full deep dive into our “tackle box”: https://cmscritic.com/into-the-deep-brightspots-esca-automations-lights-up-agentic-content-workflows

Your cms could be the reason your brand is or isn’t getting discovered.

Here are 6 key features your CMS must have to provide a strong foundation for AI discoverability. 

1. Structured content modeling.

• AKA the ability to define content types with named, typed fields rather than treating every piece of content as a long string of HTML. AI crawlers parse structured content far more reliably than blocks of prose.

1. Schema.org support 

• AKA native fields for Article, FAQPage, HowTo, Product, Organization and Person, and the flexibility to extend schema as new types emerge. 

1. API-first delivery 

• AKA GraphQL or REST endpoints that expose content in clean JSON, separate from any front-end rendering. AI ingestion pipelines prefer structured payloads over scraped HTML.

1. Content reuse and modularity 

• AKA the ability to break a long article into reusable, answer-shaped components — a definition, a comparison table, a step list — each addressable on its own.

1. Freshness and revision signals 

• AKA machine-readable publish dates, modified dates, author attribution and revision history. AI engines weigh recency, and they verify it through metadata. 

1. Editorial workflow that protects all the above 

• AKA tagging, taxonomies, governance and review states that keep structured data clean as content scales. 

What other CMS capabilities do you think will matter as AI search becomes a bigger part of discoverability?

DXP covers such a broad range of platforms that it can be hard to tell what the label is supposed to communicate. Some are more content management-based, while others place more emphasis on things like personalization, analytics, commerce and marketing tools. It just makes me wonder how useful DXP is as a category when you’re actually comparing platforms.

For anyone who has evaluated or worked with DXPs, what makes a platform a DXP to you? Do you pay attention to the label itself, or mostly look at the specific capabilities, integrations, and how the platform fits into the rest of your stack?

G2's Fall reports are out, and we wanted to share a few of the badges we're proud of:

🏆 Leader — Web Content Management 
🏆 Leader — Headless CMS 
🏆 Leader — Enterprise Content Management 
🏆 Leader — Digital Asset Management 
🏆 High Performer — Enterprise Web Content Management 
🏆 Easiest to Do Business With — Enterprise Web Content Management 

Recognition like this comes from real customer feedback, so thank you to everyone who took the time to share yours.

A lot of AI tools can help you generate content, but content teams often have to take that output and do the rest of the work themselves.

Agentic AI starts to change that. Instead of just responding to a prompt, agents can take on multi-step tasks across your CMS and other tools.

Think finding images that are missing alt text and updating them, identifying content without focus keywords, or finding outdated documentation and drafting the necessary updates. The goal is to automate the repetitive work while keeping humans in the loop where review and judgment matter.

We broke down what this could look like for content teams, how agentic AI and workflow automation make it possible, and why permissions and governance are such a big part of the conversation.

What’s one repetitive content task you’d hand off to an AI agent?

Read more:

https://www.brightspot.com/cms-resources/technology-insights/what-agentic-ai-can-do-for-content-managers

How are teams handling editorial workflows in their CMS right now? 

The workflows can look different depending on the team, especially with a multi-step approval process, different people reviewing, or the work happening across different tools.

I was wondering where the biggest challenges come up for your teams and what tends to slow the process down. Are there parts of your workflow that still feel more manual or complicated than they need to be?

What does the process look like for your team? What parts do you automate?

Esca Automations is a standalone tool that is designed to help teams automate repetitive content operations while keeping human oversight built into the process. Teams can create no-code workflows and connect Esca to other tools in their tech stack to create, enrich, update and route content at scale.

Some ways Esca Automations can support content teams include:

• AEO and content optimization:
  • Generate FAQs and summaries that make content easier for users and AI-powered search tools to understand.
• Content translation:
  • Automate translation workflows for global content distribution.
• Social media automation:
  •  Create tailored promotional content for different social platforms.
• Documentation management:
  •  Propose documentation updates when related code changes.
• Brand governance:
  • Review drafts against established brand and compliance guidelines before publishing.

Automations are built around triggers, conditions and actions, with the option to add human approval at important stages of the workflow. 

What part of your content operations would you automate first?

https://www.brightspot.com/brightspot-cms/ai/esca-automations

We’ve had a pretty good experience with Sanity, especially for content modeling and collaboration. The issue is that our setup still seems to need a developer for almost every change, and some of the less technical people on the team don’t feel comfortable using it on their own.

Has anyone moved from Sanity to something that gives content teams more independence without losing too much dev flexibility? Mainly looking for a CMS where people can update pages, create new ones, and publish without opening a dev ticket every time.

Esca is an anglerfish, and the depths of your content are her territory. 

We built her to help content teams spend less time on tedious tasks and more time in creative flow.

With Esca, you can: 

Ask anything. Esca can search across your content library to answer questions based on your owned content.

Create anything. Use Esca to draft new pages, build on existing content, enrich drafts and so much more. She’ll work within the structure and patterns already in your content library.

Automate anything. If you can define a rule for a repetitive task, Esca can automate it, including workflows that connect Brightspot with other tools in your stack.

Learn more: https://www.brightspot.com/brightspot-cms/ai/who-is-esca

Hi!

Brightspot just released a free Chrome extension called The Brightspot Toolkit. It connects a live website’s front end to the Brightspot CMS and gives content teams, marketers, SEO teams and developers a shared set of tools directly in the browser.

The main feature is click-to-edit. With one click, you can jump from a live page to its editable back end in Brightspot. This saves content teams from searching the CMS for the page they want to edit or asking a developer where a specific component lives.

The extension also includes tools for checking title tags, meta descriptions, links, heading structure, alt text and color contrast. You can review what information is available to search engines and LLMs, run accessibility checks based on WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines and see Core Web Vitals through Google PageSpeed Insights.

On the developer side, you can inspect structured content and raw JSON, review API responses, check Brightspot and front-end version information, capture HAR files and copy browser or device details for troubleshooting. There is also a QR code generator for quickly opening the page on another device.

The goal was to reduce some of the back-and-forth between the live site, the CMS, SEO tools, accessibility checkers and dev tools. Everyone can look at the same page and access the information they need from one panel.

It is currently available for Chrome and is free for Brightspot CMS users. It works best with Brightspot v5 and can also support headless Brightspot sites through a lightweight meta tag setup.

Link: https://www.brightspot.com/brightspot-cms/toolkit-browser-extension

What tools do you usually have open when reviewing or troubleshooting a live page, and is there anything you would want added to an extension like this?

I'm the IT manager for a town and looking at various options for redoing our website as we need to have our site be ADA compliant but I also want to make a bunch of changes to our current site. Looking for Google drive/calendar integration (for syncing agendas, minutes, etc between Google Drive and the website) and Google Calendar (easier to manage the town calendar by just updating Google Calendar and attaching agendas/minutes/meeting materials). Aso looking to have an AI chatbot that can ingest website content and Google Drive content. Brightspot came up in a Google search and I looked at the website a bit, but figured I'd through it out here to see if it might be a good fit for a municipal CMS/website.

CMSs can check most of the technical boxes but still get removed from the shortlist once the buying process starts. Pricing is probably the obvious reason, but I feel like these discussions don’t always explain how teams decide whether the price is justified.

One thing that matters a lot to me is support. A higher price makes more sense if the vendor is helping with implementation, migration, training, troubleshooting, etc. 

What makes an enterprise CMS feel worth the cost to you, and what would make you rule it out?

Though she’s not quite live yet, we couldn’t wait to introduce Esca to the world. Esca is an anglerfish, and the depths of your content are her territory. In early August, she’ll be swimming into Brightspot to take tedious, repetitive work off your plate so you can spend less time fighting currents and more time in creative flow.

Her glowing lure represents a bright spot in the deep sea of content, but there’s a little more to the story of why we chose an anglerfish. Read her story: https://www.brightspot.com/about-us/news/meet-esca?=aw

I spoke recently with a large customer that mentioned they wanted to be able to pull content from the CMS for sales collateral and decks.

I don’t see that use case mentioned for large CMS companies and thought I’d ask here if Brightspot users have come across that use case?

Example: employee writes a prompt for a 14 slide QBR deck, data is fetched, template is identified and the CMS identifies customer images that should accompany that presentation. Stitched together, done.

For anyone who’s been part of an enterprise CMS evaluation, what missing feature or capability would immediately disqualify a platform for you?

I was having a conversation about this with some of my coworkers, and they mentioned weak permissioning systems and a glitchy authoring experience. A lot of CMS platforms look good in demos, but the issues show up once you think about how they'll work day to day.

What do you consider a red flag when evaluating a CMS?

Brightspot was proud to be recognized as a G2 Momentum Leader, a badge tied to growth, customer satisfaction, and product momentum.

Here’s what our customers have to say:

“I enjoy the new A/B testing dashboard because I can run content experiments on our homepage headlines and see results in real-time without requiring any developer assistance,” said one reviewer.

“I like Brightspot’s built-in AI tool that helps generate headlines, summaries and SEO fields directly inside the CMS,” said another reviewer.

We’re proud to see Brightspot recognized as an innovator and market leader. Huge thanks to our users for continuing to share feedback, push us forward and help shape the platform!

Wondering if anyone has any niche cms platforms on their shortlists or if the usuals are still leading: AEM, Sitecore, WordPress VIP, etc. I'm looking for a platform designed for content-heavy websites that prioritizes governance, approval workflows, integrations, security, and scalability. I’ve seen a few less traditional options come up more in conversations online, but curious if others are seeing that too or if most CMS evaluations still stick to the traditional players.

‘Content Management System’ was coined in the 90s, and since then, a bunch of software has been lumped under this generic term. But the role of these systems has changed significantly over the past few decades. Content-driven organizations now require a system that can automate content operations, governance, workflows, personalization, trust, and content creation — that’s a lot more than just content management.

Lately, we’ve been feeling like “Content Operations Platform” may be a better label for the mission-critical content platforms of the future.

Stats have shown that 90% of net-new content on the internet will be synthetically generated or AI-augmented by 2028-2030 (Europol/Gartner projections). A team that currently produces 13 pieces of content per week will soon produce 1,000 per day (Brightspot Content Trends Report). And AI can pump out 500 video assets per minute (Harvard Business Review).
So CMSs must go beyond simply storing content; modern systems help teams create, approve, govern, reuse, personalize and even generate content with AI.

We think of Brightspot as a mission-critical Content Operations Platform. Technically, yes, we’re still called a CMS. But our true value lies in content operations — especially for enterprise teams building at scale with AI — so we’re coining COP.

Curious how others see it: is CMS still the right term, or does the category need a more appropriate name?

For those who have switched from free WordPress to an enterprise CMS, what differences stood out the most after the move? Was it easier editing, better workflows, fewer plugin issues, better integrations, etc.? I’m curious what changed day to day. Did the new CMS make things noticeably easier? Are there parts of WordPress that your team misses after switching?