For most of the web’s history, we have designed digital experiences around a simple assumption: a person will visit our website. That person might arrive through a search engine, follow a campaign link, scan a QR code, or maybe even type the URL into their browser.

AI is changing that... dramatically and rapidly!

People are now asking AI assistants to research products, compare services, explain policies, recommend suppliers and complete tasks on their behalf. Sometimes, they might not even consciously choose AI and are simply guided by seemingly familiar tools like Google 'AI Overviews'. Either way, instead of visiting ten websites, a customer may ask one assistant to gather the relevant information and present a recommendation. 

In the near future, that AI assistant could be doing more than reading a web page: checking product availability, requesting information, preparing an application, arranging an appointment or even completing a transaction.

Your next website visitor may not be a person at all, but an AI agent acting on their behalf, which raises a serious question:

Can AI systems understand our organisation, trust our information and interact with our services safely?

Getting to know your new audience

To be useful, AI assistants need to find the right information, understand its meaning and decide whether it is current and trustworthy.

A prospective student asking an assistant to compare courses across several universities, a buyer requesting a shortlist of products that meet detailed technical, ethical and budget requirements - both are now part of your website’s audience.

While human visitors use navigation, page layouts, graphic cues and calls to action, AI systems depend more heavily on structured information, descriptive metadata, clear relationships and reliable access to data.

Your web pages may look perfectly clear to a person but remain ambiguous to a machine. For example, a human might understand from the design that one contact address is intended for media enquiries, and another is for customer enquiries, but an AI assistant may not interpret it correctly unless it’s represented clearly in the underlying content structure.

The content management decisions you make today will shape how accurately they are represented by AI tomorrow.

Being visible is not the same as being understood

Many organisations are currently focused on whether their content appears in AI-generated answers. That is important, but visibility is only one part of the problem.

An AI system also needs to understand:

• What the organisation offers
• Which information is authoritative
• When the information was last reviewed
• Which products, services or locations it relates to
• Whether regional or language differences apply
• What actions can be taken
• Which information is public and which is restricted

Without this context, AI assistants may rely on outdated pages, confuse similar services or combine information that was never intended to be used together.

Preparing for AI visitors therefore requires more than content. It requires a well-structured and reliably governed source of truth.

Drupal gives content meaning

Drupal treats content as structured information rather than a collection of web pages. A university course, for example, could have defined fields for qualification, fees and application route, rather than burying them in a block of text. That structure is what makes the same content usable well beyond a single page.

For a human visitor, Drupal assembles that information into an attractive and accessible page. For an AI visitor, the same structure makes the information easier to identify, compare and reuse.

You don't need to maintain one version of content for people and another for machines because Drupal allows the same governed content to serve websites, applications, search services and AI agents.

Drupal can become the trusted source behind AI answers

AI systems are powerful, but they are only as dependable as the information and context available to them. The idea of autonomous agents can quickly become uncomfortable when governance is treated as an afterthought: what happens if an agent uses sensitive information, makes an unsuitable change, or you simply can't tell why an action occurred?

Drupal can provide a controlled source of organisational knowledge. Its content model, taxonomy and relationship system describe what information means, not simply where it appears on a page, helping an AI assistant distinguish a current policy from an archived one, or a general contact address from a specialist enquiry route.

The Drupal AI ecosystem is developing capabilities to support this level of governance, including guardrails for requests and responses, observability and activity logging, controlled access to organisational context, provider-independent integrations, and human review and approval workflows.

This is especially valuable for large or complex digital estates, where information is created by multiple departments across different languages and regions.Drupal's advanced AI implementation and integration does not negate all risk from AI usage, but it does give you a stronger foundation for identifying and managing it

Put simply, AI makes content governance essential to digital communication.

Hi, I'm a machine, please can I come in?

Making content understandable is the first step. The next is enabling controlled action

Giving an AI agent access to your digital platform creates an obvious concern: what will it be allowed to see and do?

Drupal has long supported detailed roles and permissions, allowing different users to view, edit, approve or publish specific types of content.

The same principle can be applied to AI visitors. A useful agent may need to inspect content, search records, or carry out an action, but it should never gain unrestricted access to your systems, or expose private content simply because that content exists in the same system. It should only be able to access the information and tools permitted for the person, service or task it represents.

 The Drupal AI Initiative organises this work through two connected areas:

• Inside AI, which brings AI assistance into Drupal for editors, marketers and site builders
• Outside AI, which enables external AI agents and tools to connect to and act on Drupal

This changes the role of the content management system from being a 'human experience engine' to being a governed platform through which people, applications and AI agents can understand and interact with your organisation.

Design for people, prepare for agents

Human visitors are not disappearing. People will continue to value clear information, strong design, accessible services and experiences that feel relevant and trustworthy. However, they will increasingly use AI to navigate and make sense of the vast amount of information available to them.

AI readiness can look like a technology challenge, but an AI system cannot reliably represent your brand if the underlying content is fragmented, duplicated or poorly structured.

The organisations that adapt successfully will not choose between human-centred design and machine-readable content. They will build digital platforms that support both by creating information people can understand, data machines can interpret and processes agents can interact with safely.

Your next website visitor might not be human - will your digital platform know exactly how to help them?

Try Drupal today!

For most of the web’s history, we have designed digital experiences around a simple assumption: a person will visit our website. That person might arrive through a search engine, follow a campaign link, scan a QR code, or maybe even type the URL into their browser.

AI is changing that... dramatically and rapidly!

People are now asking AI assistants to research products, compare services, explain policies, recommend suppliers and complete tasks on their behalf. Sometimes, they might not even consciously choose AI and are simply guided by seemingly familiar tools like Google 'AI Overviews'. Either way, instead of visiting ten websites, a customer may ask one assistant to gather the relevant information and present a recommendation. 

In the near future, that AI assistant could be doing more than reading a web page: checking product availability, requesting information, preparing an application, arranging an appointment or even completing a transaction.

Your next website visitor may not be a person at all, but an AI agent acting on their behalf, which raises a serious question:

Can AI systems understand our organisation, trust our information and interact with our services safely?

Getting to know your new audience

To be useful, AI assistants need to find the right information, understand its meaning and decide whether it is current and trustworthy.

A prospective student asking an assistant to compare courses across several universities, a buyer requesting a shortlist of products that meet detailed technical, ethical and budget requirements - both are now part of your website’s audience.

While human visitors use navigation, page layouts, graphic cues and calls to action, AI systems depend more heavily on structured information, descriptive metadata, clear relationships and reliable access to data.

Your web pages may look perfectly clear to a person but remain ambiguous to a machine. For example, a human might understand from the design that one contact address is intended for media enquiries, and another is for customer enquiries, but an AI assistant may not interpret it correctly unless it’s represented clearly in the underlying content structure.

The content management decisions you make today will shape how accurately they are represented by AI tomorrow.

Being visible is not the same as being understood

Many organisations are currently focused on whether their content appears in AI-generated answers. That is important, but visibility is only one part of the problem.

An AI system also needs to understand:

• What the organisation offers
• Which information is authoritative
• When the information was last reviewed
• Which products, services or locations it relates to
• Whether regional or language differences apply
• What actions can be taken
• Which information is public and which is restricted

Without this context, AI assistants may rely on outdated pages, confuse similar services or combine information that was never intended to be used together.

Preparing for AI visitors therefore requires more than content. It requires a well-structured and reliably governed source of truth.

Drupal gives content meaning

Drupal treats content as structured information rather than a collection of web pages. A university course, for example, could have defined fields for qualification, fees and application route, rather than burying them in a block of text. That structure is what makes the same content usable well beyond a single page.

For a human visitor, Drupal assembles that information into an attractive and accessible page. For an AI visitor, the same structure makes the information easier to identify, compare and reuse.

You don't need to maintain one version of content for people and another for machines because Drupal allows the same governed content to serve websites, applications, search services and AI agents.

Drupal can become the trusted source behind AI answers

AI systems are powerful, but they are only as dependable as the information and context available to them. The idea of autonomous agents can quickly become uncomfortable when governance is treated as an afterthought: what happens if an agent uses sensitive information, makes an unsuitable change, or you simply can't tell why an action occurred?

Drupal can provide a controlled source of organisational knowledge. Its content model, taxonomy and relationship system describe what information means, not simply where it appears on a page, helping an AI assistant distinguish a current policy from an archived one, or a general contact address from a specialist enquiry route.

The Drupal AI ecosystem is developing capabilities to support this level of governance, including guardrails for requests and responses, observability and activity logging, controlled access to organisational context, provider-independent integrations, and human review and approval workflows.

This is especially valuable for large or complex digital estates, where information is created by multiple departments across different languages and regions.Drupal's advanced AI implementation and integration does not negate all risk from AI usage, but it does give you a stronger foundation for identifying and managing it

Put simply, AI makes content governance essential to digital communication.

Hi, I'm a machine, please can I come in?

Making content understandable is the first step. The next is enabling controlled action

Giving an AI agent access to your digital platform creates an obvious concern: what will it be allowed to see and do?

Drupal has long supported detailed roles and permissions, allowing different users to view, edit, approve or publish specific types of content.

The same principle can be applied to AI visitors. A useful agent may need to inspect content, search records, or carry out an action, but it should never gain unrestricted access to your systems, or expose private content simply because that content exists in the same system. It should only be able to access the information and tools permitted for the person, service or task it represents.

 The Drupal AI Initiative organises this work through two connected areas:

• Inside AI, which brings AI assistance into Drupal for editors, marketers and site builders
• Outside AI, which enables external AI agents and tools to connect to and act on Drupal

This changes the role of the content management system from being a 'human experience engine' to being a governed platform through which people, applications and AI agents can understand and interact with your organisation.

Design for people, prepare for agents

Human visitors are not disappearing. People will continue to value clear information, strong design, accessible services and experiences that feel relevant and trustworthy. However, they will increasingly use AI to navigate and make sense of the vast amount of information available to them.

AI readiness can look like a technology challenge, but an AI system cannot reliably represent your brand if the underlying content is fragmented, duplicated or poorly structured.

The organisations that adapt successfully will not choose between human-centred design and machine-readable content. They will build digital platforms that support both by creating information people can understand, data machines can interpret and processes agents can interact with safely.

Your next website visitor might not be human - will your digital platform know exactly how to help them?

Try Drupal today!

Article by:  Martin Anderson-Clutz. Originally posted on the Acquia blog.

Drupal turns decoupled architecture into a governed AI harness, combining live visual editing with agent-ready content schemas.

Back in March, at EvolveDigital in Toronto, I ran into Preston So. He mentioned that the team behind Decoupled Days was looking for speakers, and that this year the event would be in Montréal. I was interested right away. Drupal Canvas is the most compelling answer I have seen to a problem that has followed decoupled architectures for years, and I wanted that message to reach beyond the Drupal faithful — out to the practitioners who live and breathe headless every day.

The talk I ended up giving was not really about a content management system at all. It was about how Drupal has quietly become something else: a governed harness for artificial intelligence. Here is the argument I made, the demo that seemed to land hardest with the room, and why I think 2026 is the year the trade-offs of going headless finally stop being trade-offs.

Drupal Was Decoupled Before Decoupled Was Cool

Drupal did not arrive late to the headless conversation. Far from it. The community committed to an API-first architecture roughly a decade ago, and a vibrant subcommunity has been refining decoupled patterns ever since. That work produced a spectrum of delivery models rather than a single one: traditional, where Drupal renders everything; progressively decoupled, where a JavaScript front end takes over the parts of the page that benefit from it while editorial preview stays intact; and fully decoupled, where Drupal is a pure API feeding any number of channels.

That range matters, because it means Drupal has never been only a content API. It owns content, delivery, and governance at the same time. The headless-native platforms compete on one of those axes. Drupal competes on all three.

The Headless Bargain, and Why 2026 Voids It

When organizations adopted front-end frameworks like Next.js and Astro, most of them accepted what I think of as the headless bargain. They gained fast front ends and their choice of framework, and in exchange they gave up live visual editing, layout control, and real-time editorial preview. Editors went from composing pages to filling in form fields blind and filing tickets for changes they used to make themselves.

The industry tried to patch around this — bespoke preview services, visual editors bolted onto the front end, what amounted to Storybook pressed into service as a content tool. None of it fully closed the gap.

Drupal Canvas, which shipped as the default editing experience in Drupal CMS 2.0, closes it a different way. It delivers a true-to-life editing workspace where content creators edit layouts live in the browser, and the site still ships as a high-performance decoupled front end. The CMS stopped being the bottleneck and became the conductor. You keep Next.js or Astro, and you get the editorial experience back.

The Bigger Shift: The CMS Became a Harness

Something larger is happening underneath all of this. For most of the last two decades, the job of a CMS was to model content and publish it to channels. Through 2024 and 2025, artificial intelligence showed up inside these platforms as a feature — an assist button in a text box that summarized a paragraph or suggested tags when a human clicked it.

By 2026, that framing is obsolete. Artificial intelligence has become infrastructure rather than an accessory: autonomous agents that run scheduled jobs, batch operations, and real-time triggers. Analysts have adopted new vocabulary to match, from agentic experience platforms to AI-ready content management. Three capabilities now separate a platform that is serious about this from one that is not: the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which lets external agents query and update content through one standard interface; autonomous agents that behave like digital teammates; and answer engine optimization, which structures content so it surfaces accurately inside tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

And the whole category is converging on the same destination. Headless-native platforms like Sanity, Contentstack, and Storyblok others are all racing to add agents, automation, and AI-assisted authoring. When everyone is heading for the same place, the differentiator is no longer whether a platform has AI. It is how that AI is governed and orchestrated.

So What Is an AI Harness?

Even the most capable models today are prone to hallucination, blind to context they are not explicitly given, and easy to push outside the bounds of what an organization would allow. That is why almost no one uses a raw model directly. They use a harness: the code around the model that improves the quality, safety, and reliability of what comes back. A harness augments the query, enforces guardrails on input and output, and adds tools that give the model real capabilities.

Think of your AI model as the engine: the part that makes your reasoning system go. The harness is the vehicle built around it: the controls that point it in the right direction, change gears when the situation calls for it, and bring it to a stop when needed.

If you list what a good AI harness needs — structured content the model can reason over, access control, deterministic workflows, versioned and reviewable configuration, and centralized governance — Drupal has shipped every one of those for years, for reasons that had nothing to do with AI. The model at the center is a commodity. It is swappable, replaceable, and never the true value driver. Everything Drupal wraps around it is the durable part.

Which leads to the line I kept coming back to: what drives the value of intelligent systems is your schema, not your prompt. Prompts are transient. Typed fields, entity relationships, and taxonomy give a model unambiguous ground truth instead of prose it has to guess at. And the same JSON:API structure that feeds your decoupled front end is exactly what an external agent inspects and reasons over. Drupal orchestrates the content and context; the external model supplies the intelligence. That division of labor ages far better than trying to build models in-house.

Where You Actually See It Work

Everything above is architecture. The demo is where it becomes visible, and it is the part of the talk the audience responded to most.

I had set up a demo environment for a fictional company called Inspace. Ahead of time, I populated the Context Control Center with the things a real brand would have on hand: a brand guide, a tone of voice, documentation for a component library I had programmatically migrated from Drupal's Mercury design system into Code Components and synced into Astro, and a set of context items describing a new "Executive Suites" offering that Inspace was preparing to launch.

Then, live, I created a new page in Canvas, opened Canvas AI, and gave it one sentence: generate a landing page for the new Executive Suites offering. It went to work, and while it did, I took questions from the audience. A couple of minutes later it had assembled a full landing page out of real components, populated with relevant, on-brand content. To make the point that a human stays in the loop, I dropped an image from the media library into the hero component and published. Then I switched to the Astro app, navigated to the same path, and there was the identical page — every decision the human and the model had made, rendered by the decoupled front end. A complete landing page, start to finish, in a couple of minutes.

The second beat pushed further. The marketing team wants a brand-new component: a call to action for a waitlist. I asked Canvas AI to build a full-width announcement banner with an announcement pill, a headline, a supporting line, and a primary call to action. After a short pause, the component appeared in the Canvas interface — colors on brand, formatting consistent with the rest of the library — with its code fully visible and editable and a live preview I could resize to check different breakpoints. I noted that in the real world you might refine the code yourself or ask Canvas AI to iterate, then saved it to the library, dragged it into the Executive Suites page, and published.

When I reloaded the Astro app, it threw a fatal error, exactly as I had planned. The layout now referenced a component the front end did not know about. One npx canvas push from the command line synced the components, a refresh brought the page back, and the new banner rendered cleanly in the Astro layout. That deliberate stumble made the architecture legible: content edits flow to the front end instantly, but new component code is a real, versioned artifact that moves through a real workflow.

I closed the demo by going back to the Context Control Center, because that is the intelligence that made the rest possible. This is what AI prompt grounding looks like in practice: before a single token is generated, each request is automatically supplied with the brand voice, domain knowledge, and guardrails relevant to the task at hand. Some context items are global and travel with every request. Others are scoped specifically to working in Canvas. Others still apply only to content about the Executive Suites program. All of them were assembled automatically behind those short prompts — which is why one sentence was enough to get on-brand, relevant output. I finished on the form for managing a single context item, showing the range of ways its use can be scoped and restricted. Compliance before generation, not review after.

Why Enterprises Can Trust It

For regulated and enterprise teams, governance is where this stops being a demo and starts being a decision. Drupal is model-agnostic by design: dozens of providers sit behind one abstraction layer, spanning cloud services like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini as well as self-hosted options like Ollama and Mistral for data sovereignty. Swapping providers is a configuration change, not a rewrite of your schemas or your logic.

Agents act inside Drupal's existing permission model which includes the Access Policy API, so the access logic that already governs your people governs your agents too — no separate guardrail layer to maintain. Deterministic orchestration through the Event-Condition-Action (ECA) or FlowDrop frameworks handle rules-based logic that costs no tokens and never hallucinates, which is a useful reminder that the cheapest, most reliable AI call is often the one you do not make. And because that orchestration lives inside the platform as native state machines — ECA for event-driven rules, Maestro for durable, multi-step approvals — stateful business logic runs where the content lives, rather than being stitched together from external webhooks, serverless functions, and third-party glue code. Guardrails filter sensitive data before it leaves the server, and metering tracks token spend by user and role so finance can see what AI actually costs.

An Honest Read

It doesn't serve anyone to pretend one side wins everything, and I said so in Montréal. The headless-native platforms lead on real things: faster time to value, a cleaner developer experience, and more polished agentic tooling in market today. If those are your priorities right now, they are genuine strengths.

Where Drupal leads is open source with no lock-in and dozens of documented APIs, model-agnostic freedom, deep governance and orchestration, and fit for enterprise, multi-brand, and regulated environments. It is also worth remembering the shape of the thing behind it: an open ecosystem moves at the speed of everyone who needs it to, while a single-vendor roadmap moves at the speed of one company's priorities.

The Takeaway

The way I put it at the end of the talk: we gave up the editorial experience to go headless, and in 2026 we stopped having to. The original headless win is now additive with the editorial win, not traded against it. One structured content model can serve four consumers at once — a decoupled front end, editors in Canvas, internal AI agents, and the wider martech stack over MCP.

Drupal is not a CMS with AI features bolted on. It is a governed AI harness that happens to have been building the right foundations for 20 years. If you want to see it for yourself, start with Drupal CMS 2.0 and Canvas, then explore the AI, context, and MCP modules. For teams that would rather not set up and host Drupal themselves, Acquia Source CMS offers a fully managed on-ramp to the same platform. And if you are ready to help shape where this goes, the Drupal AI Initiative is where the work is happening.

Making that case in Montréal was a highlight of my year. If you were in the room, thank you — the questions were sharp, and a few of them changed how I will explain this next time. If you were not, come find me, and we can pick up where the talk left off.

Article by:  Martin Anderson-Clutz. Originally posted on the Acquia blog.

Drupal turns decoupled architecture into a governed AI harness, combining live visual editing with agent-ready content schemas.

Back in March, at EvolveDigital in Toronto, I ran into Preston So. He mentioned that the team behind Decoupled Days was looking for speakers, and that this year the event would be in Montréal. I was interested right away. Drupal Canvas is the most compelling answer I have seen to a problem that has followed decoupled architectures for years, and I wanted that message to reach beyond the Drupal faithful — out to the practitioners who live and breathe headless every day.

The talk I ended up giving was not really about a content management system at all. It was about how Drupal has quietly become something else: a governed harness for artificial intelligence. Here is the argument I made, the demo that seemed to land hardest with the room, and why I think 2026 is the year the trade-offs of going headless finally stop being trade-offs.

Drupal Was Decoupled Before Decoupled Was Cool

Drupal did not arrive late to the headless conversation. Far from it. The community committed to an API-first architecture roughly a decade ago, and a vibrant subcommunity has been refining decoupled patterns ever since. That work produced a spectrum of delivery models rather than a single one: traditional, where Drupal renders everything; progressively decoupled, where a JavaScript front end takes over the parts of the page that benefit from it while editorial preview stays intact; and fully decoupled, where Drupal is a pure API feeding any number of channels.

That range matters, because it means Drupal has never been only a content API. It owns content, delivery, and governance at the same time. The headless-native platforms compete on one of those axes. Drupal competes on all three.

The Headless Bargain, and Why 2026 Voids It

When organizations adopted front-end frameworks like Next.js and Astro, most of them accepted what I think of as the headless bargain. They gained fast front ends and their choice of framework, and in exchange they gave up live visual editing, layout control, and real-time editorial preview. Editors went from composing pages to filling in form fields blind and filing tickets for changes they used to make themselves.

The industry tried to patch around this — bespoke preview services, visual editors bolted onto the front end, what amounted to Storybook pressed into service as a content tool. None of it fully closed the gap.

Drupal Canvas, which shipped as the default editing experience in Drupal CMS 2.0, closes it a different way. It delivers a true-to-life editing workspace where content creators edit layouts live in the browser, and the site still ships as a high-performance decoupled front end. The CMS stopped being the bottleneck and became the conductor. You keep Next.js or Astro, and you get the editorial experience back.

The Bigger Shift: The CMS Became a Harness

Something larger is happening underneath all of this. For most of the last two decades, the job of a CMS was to model content and publish it to channels. Through 2024 and 2025, artificial intelligence showed up inside these platforms as a feature — an assist button in a text box that summarized a paragraph or suggested tags when a human clicked it.

By 2026, that framing is obsolete. Artificial intelligence has become infrastructure rather than an accessory: autonomous agents that run scheduled jobs, batch operations, and real-time triggers. Analysts have adopted new vocabulary to match, from agentic experience platforms to AI-ready content management. Three capabilities now separate a platform that is serious about this from one that is not: the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which lets external agents query and update content through one standard interface; autonomous agents that behave like digital teammates; and answer engine optimization, which structures content so it surfaces accurately inside tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

And the whole category is converging on the same destination. Headless-native platforms like Sanity, Contentstack, and Storyblok others are all racing to add agents, automation, and AI-assisted authoring. When everyone is heading for the same place, the differentiator is no longer whether a platform has AI. It is how that AI is governed and orchestrated.

So What Is an AI Harness?

Even the most capable models today are prone to hallucination, blind to context they are not explicitly given, and easy to push outside the bounds of what an organization would allow. That is why almost no one uses a raw model directly. They use a harness: the code around the model that improves the quality, safety, and reliability of what comes back. A harness augments the query, enforces guardrails on input and output, and adds tools that give the model real capabilities.

Think of your AI model as the engine: the part that makes your reasoning system go. The harness is the vehicle built around it: the controls that point it in the right direction, change gears when the situation calls for it, and bring it to a stop when needed.

If you list what a good AI harness needs — structured content the model can reason over, access control, deterministic workflows, versioned and reviewable configuration, and centralized governance — Drupal has shipped every one of those for years, for reasons that had nothing to do with AI. The model at the center is a commodity. It is swappable, replaceable, and never the true value driver. Everything Drupal wraps around it is the durable part.

Which leads to the line I kept coming back to: what drives the value of intelligent systems is your schema, not your prompt. Prompts are transient. Typed fields, entity relationships, and taxonomy give a model unambiguous ground truth instead of prose it has to guess at. And the same JSON:API structure that feeds your decoupled front end is exactly what an external agent inspects and reasons over. Drupal orchestrates the content and context; the external model supplies the intelligence. That division of labor ages far better than trying to build models in-house.

Where You Actually See It Work

Everything above is architecture. The demo is where it becomes visible, and it is the part of the talk the audience responded to most.

I had set up a demo environment for a fictional company called Inspace. Ahead of time, I populated the Context Control Center with the things a real brand would have on hand: a brand guide, a tone of voice, documentation for a component library I had programmatically migrated from Drupal's Mercury design system into Code Components and synced into Astro, and a set of context items describing a new "Executive Suites" offering that Inspace was preparing to launch.

Then, live, I created a new page in Canvas, opened Canvas AI, and gave it one sentence: generate a landing page for the new Executive Suites offering. It went to work, and while it did, I took questions from the audience. A couple of minutes later it had assembled a full landing page out of real components, populated with relevant, on-brand content. To make the point that a human stays in the loop, I dropped an image from the media library into the hero component and published. Then I switched to the Astro app, navigated to the same path, and there was the identical page — every decision the human and the model had made, rendered by the decoupled front end. A complete landing page, start to finish, in a couple of minutes.

The second beat pushed further. The marketing team wants a brand-new component: a call to action for a waitlist. I asked Canvas AI to build a full-width announcement banner with an announcement pill, a headline, a supporting line, and a primary call to action. After a short pause, the component appeared in the Canvas interface — colors on brand, formatting consistent with the rest of the library — with its code fully visible and editable and a live preview I could resize to check different breakpoints. I noted that in the real world you might refine the code yourself or ask Canvas AI to iterate, then saved it to the library, dragged it into the Executive Suites page, and published.

When I reloaded the Astro app, it threw a fatal error, exactly as I had planned. The layout now referenced a component the front end did not know about. One npx canvas push from the command line synced the components, a refresh brought the page back, and the new banner rendered cleanly in the Astro layout. That deliberate stumble made the architecture legible: content edits flow to the front end instantly, but new component code is a real, versioned artifact that moves through a real workflow.

I closed the demo by going back to the Context Control Center, because that is the intelligence that made the rest possible. This is what AI prompt grounding looks like in practice: before a single token is generated, each request is automatically supplied with the brand voice, domain knowledge, and guardrails relevant to the task at hand. Some context items are global and travel with every request. Others are scoped specifically to working in Canvas. Others still apply only to content about the Executive Suites program. All of them were assembled automatically behind those short prompts — which is why one sentence was enough to get on-brand, relevant output. I finished on the form for managing a single context item, showing the range of ways its use can be scoped and restricted. Compliance before generation, not review after.

Why Enterprises Can Trust It

For regulated and enterprise teams, governance is where this stops being a demo and starts being a decision. Drupal is model-agnostic by design: dozens of providers sit behind one abstraction layer, spanning cloud services like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini as well as self-hosted options like Ollama and Mistral for data sovereignty. Swapping providers is a configuration change, not a rewrite of your schemas or your logic.

Agents act inside Drupal's existing permission model which includes the Access Policy API, so the access logic that already governs your people governs your agents too — no separate guardrail layer to maintain. Deterministic orchestration through the Event-Condition-Action (ECA) or FlowDrop frameworks handle rules-based logic that costs no tokens and never hallucinates, which is a useful reminder that the cheapest, most reliable AI call is often the one you do not make. And because that orchestration lives inside the platform as native state machines — ECA for event-driven rules, Maestro for durable, multi-step approvals — stateful business logic runs where the content lives, rather than being stitched together from external webhooks, serverless functions, and third-party glue code. Guardrails filter sensitive data before it leaves the server, and metering tracks token spend by user and role so finance can see what AI actually costs.

An Honest Read

It doesn't serve anyone to pretend one side wins everything, and I said so in Montréal. The headless-native platforms lead on real things: faster time to value, a cleaner developer experience, and more polished agentic tooling in market today. If those are your priorities right now, they are genuine strengths.

Where Drupal leads is open source with no lock-in and dozens of documented APIs, model-agnostic freedom, deep governance and orchestration, and fit for enterprise, multi-brand, and regulated environments. It is also worth remembering the shape of the thing behind it: an open ecosystem moves at the speed of everyone who needs it to, while a single-vendor roadmap moves at the speed of one company's priorities.

The Takeaway

The way I put it at the end of the talk: we gave up the editorial experience to go headless, and in 2026 we stopped having to. The original headless win is now additive with the editorial win, not traded against it. One structured content model can serve four consumers at once — a decoupled front end, editors in Canvas, internal AI agents, and the wider martech stack over MCP.

Drupal is not a CMS with AI features bolted on. It is a governed AI harness that happens to have been building the right foundations for 20 years. If you want to see it for yourself, start with Drupal CMS 2.0 and Canvas, then explore the AI, context, and MCP modules. For teams that would rather not set up and host Drupal themselves, Acquia Source CMS offers a fully managed on-ramp to the same platform. And if you are ready to help shape where this goes, the Drupal AI Initiative is where the work is happening.

Making that case in Montréal was a highlight of my year. If you were in the room, thank you — the questions were sharp, and a few of them changed how I will explain this next time. If you were not, come find me, and we can pick up where the talk left off.

This is cross-posted from Mike Herchel's blog

A few weeks ago, I met up with some of the DrupalCon Orlando local planning committee at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress Resort to check out the venue and finalize a bunch of plans.

We toured the resort, planned events, sampled food and drinks (strictly for quality assurance, of course), floated around the pools, and spent way too much time talking about all the fun stuff we're putting together.

After seeing everything in person, I'm convinced this is going to be the best DrupalCon ever!

This DrupalCon is going to feel different (and I think that's a good thing)

If you've been to previous DrupalCons, one thing you'll notice right away is that this one is going to have a different vibe. Normally we're in a downtown convention center where you can walk to bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and whatever else you stumble across.

This isn't that. The Grand Cypress sits in the middle of Orlando's resort area near Disney. If you want to leave the property, you'll probably grab an Uber or Lyft. Disney Springs is only about 10 minutes away, and the parks are just beyond that.

But honestly... I don't think most people are going to want to leave. This resort is awesome.

Instead of everyone scattering around downtown after the sessions end, I think we're going to end up hanging out together around the resort having poolside cocktails, or smores by the fire pits. And after spending the weekend there, I think that's going to make for an even better conference.

The pools are ridiculous

Seriously. The pool area is unlike anything we've ever had at a DrupalCon.

The pools wind around faux limestone cliffs with waterfalls pouring down into them. There's a cave that connects two sections of the pool, a grotto, a waterslide, two hot tubs, and tons of places to spread out.

Then you've got a poolside bar serving frozen drinks, beer, and food just a few steps away. I can already picture dozens of Drupal people hanging out there after sessions.

Florida in March is basically cheating

If you're coming from somewhere that's still cold in late March... congratulations. This is probably the nicest time of year to be in Florida.

Expect highs around 80°F (27°C), cool evenings, blue skies, and weather that's pretty much perfect for sitting outside all day. It's warm enough to swim without feeling like you're melting.

One of the nicest surprises is the hotel rate that we have. The Drupal Association was able to lock in an incredible rate of just $259/night, and that includes no resort fee. Considering this is one of the best times of year to visit Florida (and a resort like this!) it's an amazing deal. If you're planning to attend, book sooner rather than later:https://www.hyatt.com/events/en-US/group-booking/VISTA/G-DC27.

Everything is actually close together

This might sound boring compared to waterfalls and waterslides, but trust me, it matters. One thing I loved about the venue is how compact the conference space is. No hiking across giant hotel lobbies or speed-walking half a mile to your next session. No wondering which section your talk is actually in.

Everything is clustered together, which means less walking and more time talking to people in the hallways, which is the best part of every DrupalCon anyway.

Drupal's Got Talent is finally happening!

I've been trying to make this happen for years. Every DrupalCon I’d pitch the idea of a talent show, and every year something got in the way. Well... this is the year! It’s happening!

We'll be looking for pretty much anything entertaining:

• Musicians
• Bands
• Stand-up comedy
• Magic
• Singing
• Dancing
• Juggling
• Puppet shows
• Weird talents you didn't think anyone wanted to see (we do)

We’re not taking sign-ups just yet, but keep an eye out!

What should you pack?

Besides your laptop?

• 👙 A swimsuit (trust me)
• 🩴 Flip-flops or sandals
• 😎 Sunglasses
• 🧴 Sunscreen
• 👕 Clothes for warm afternoons and cooler evenings
• 🎤 Your hidden talent

This venue is a little different than what we're used to, but after spending the weekend there, I know it's going to create a totally different kind, and super memorable, DrupalCon.

Instead of everyone disappearing into the city after the sessions end, I think people are going to stick around. Hanging out by the pool. Sitting around the fire pits. Grabbing a drink. Talking Drupal late into the night.

And honestly? I can't wait!

As Drupal agencies, we're fortunate to benefit from a vibrant ecosystem that generates awareness, interest, and opportunities for all of us. At Zoocha we receive inbound enquiries from a variety of sources. Whether they arrive via Drupal AI, Drupal CMS, a community recommendation, a Drupal event, or direct through our site, every enquiry often represents something important: a person taking their first step towards our community.

Not every lead is a project. 
Not every lead has a budget. 
Not every lead is ready to buy. 

But they always deserve a meaningful response. 

The First Impression of Drupal 

When someone reaches out to a Drupal agency, they're rarely just evaluating that agency, they’re more often than not seeking to engage with Drupal itself. For many prospective clients, they may not know the difference between Drupal, the Drupal Association, Drupal CMS, an implementation partner, a hosting provider, or the wider open source community. They simply know they've heard about Drupal and are looking for guidance. 

The response they receive helps shape their perception of the entire ecosystem. If their first interaction feels dismissive, transactional, or overly focused on qualification, they may walk away believing that's what the Drupal community is like. If their first interaction is friendly and genuine, they leave with a very different impression. 

Resist the Urge to Qualify Too Early 

Most agencies have some form of qualification process. It's sensible, and so do we. Time is valuable, and we know not every conversation will become a project.

However, there is a difference between understanding someone's needs and interrogating them. We've all seen responses that immediately ask:

• What's your budget?
• What's your timeline?
• Have you secured funding?
• How many pages does the site need?
• Can you complete this requirements questionnaire?

While those questions have their place, they are rarely the most important thing during an initial conversation. Many prospects simply don't know the answers yet.

Some are conducting research. Some are exploring options. Some are trying to understand whether Drupal is even the right fit. At this stage, what they often need most is guidance.

Be Helpful Without Expectation 

One of the most effective approaches we've found at Zoocha is to assume that the first conversation may never lead to a sale. That does sound counterintuitive for a commercial organisation, but it changes the nature of the interaction. Instead of trying to move the conversation towards a proposal as quickly as possible, we focus on being useful. That might mean:

• Answering questions about Drupal CMS
• Explaining how Drupal compares to other platforms
• Pointing someone towards community resources
• Offering advice on procurement approaches
• Helping clarify requirements
• Suggesting next steps, even if they don't directly involve us

Sometimes that conversation ends there, and that's ok. The contact doesn't leave empty handed. They leave with a positive impression of who we are in the Drupal community.

The Long-Term Value of Community-First Thinking 

Interestingly, some of our most successful client relationships started with conversations that had no immediate commercial outcome. We've had early exchanges that were little more than an idea, with individuals facing a specific challenge and just looking to find out if they're even in the right place with Drupal. After a person-first conversation, they disappeared. But a few months, or even a year, later, they came back, and what began as a casual enquiry became a long-term client partnership.

This didn't happen because we had the best sales team or process. It happened because we prioritised human connection over a fast sale.

Open Source Values Apply to Business Development Too 

Drupal has always been built around principles of collaboration, openness, and knowledge sharing, these values really shouldn't stop at code contributions. They can also shape how we engage with prospective users of the platform. When we answer questions generously, share expertise freely, and help organisations make informed decisions, we're strengthening confidence in Drupal itself. 

Even if a particular opportunity never becomes a client engagement, the person on the other end of that conversation is left with a positive impression of the community. That's good for all of us! 

Conclusion 

The next time a speculative Drupal enquiry lands in your inbox, try viewing it differently. Consider simply asking, "How can we actually help this person?" The answer might only require a short email, a useful link, or a brief conversation, and yes, the immediate commercial return is likely to be zero. But the long-term return, for your agency and for the Drupal ecosystem, can be significant.

Every first interaction is an opportunity to demonstrate what makes the Drupal community different. Let's make sure it's a positive one.

This post is adapted from the DA Insider, the Drupal Association's monthly newsletter. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox each month.

A note from our interim CEO

Dear Drupal community,

Open source hums along on the work that just gets done. As I step into the interim CEO seat, I'm making a point to notice the sheer volume of work powering this ecosystem, from the DA and beyond. Here's some of what has come together in the past month:

• Our engineering team migrated hundreds of projects to GitLab, security issues included, and kicked off an RFP to make launching a Drupal site dead simple.
• DrupalCon Rotterdam is ready and in the homestretch.
• The DrupalCon Orlando call for speakers opened August 4. If the event converts even half the enthusiasm of the local team (or the cuteness of Bytes the Gator), it's going to be one to remember.
• We're building a new front door to introduce Drupal to new audiences and evaluators, and we're looking for help.
• The community has 14 global events dropping this August and partnership groundwork under way in Burkina Faso.
• Nominations are open for the Women in Drupal Award, an honor I was humbled to receive back in 2023.

My goal as interim CEO is straightforward: make sure the Association's foundation is resilient enough to support all this energy. The first step is helping all of us notice and appreciate the work that already "just happens."

I hope you enjoy this month's newsletter and everything everyone's been building. And one final note: board elections are open. Please vote.

Tiffany Farriss Interim CEO

Vote in the 2026 At-Large Board Election — closes 14 August

If you're a Ripple Maker, your ballot arrived by email from Helios Voting on 22 July. Voting closes 14 August 2026 at 23:59 UTC, so there's still time to get to know the candidates: read their profiles and leave questions on the election details page, catch the Open Community Forum recording on our YouTube channel, or revisit the async conversation in #drupal-association on Drupal Slack. Every vote counts — make yours matter.

DrupalCon Rotterdam is in the homestretch

DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026 is ready. Join the global Drupal community for four days of learning, collaboration, and connection — explore the program, meet the speakers, and start planning your experience. Secure your ticket now.

DrupalCon Orlando 2027: Call for Speakers is open

The DrupalCon Orlando 2027 Call for Speakers opened 4 August and closes 20 October 2026, with some notable changes this year:

A more focused program with fewer concurrent sessions and an emphasis on high-quality, impactful content. Updated session tracks reflecting the evolving Drupal ecosystem. And a new pathway for first-time speakers: if you've never spoken at a DrupalCon, DrupalCamp, or other Drupal event, you can submit to the new Poster Session — selected presenters showcase their work at the Monday Welcome Reception and present a 10-minute session on the Lightning Stage.

And keep an eye out for Bytes the Gator, the DrupalCon Orlando mascot, who'll be visiting Drupal events around the world between now and March 2027 — with a chance to win a free registration to DrupalCon Orlando 2027 along the way.

Celebrate the women shaping Drupal's future

Nominations are open for the Women in Drupal Award, sponsored by Jakala, recognising women whose work strengthens the Drupal community — in the projects they build, the teams they support, the ideas they bring forward, and the space they create for others to grow. Know someone whose contribution deserves recognition? Submit a nomination.

Drupal Steward: extra time when it matters most

When highly critical vulnerabilities emerge — like SA-CORE-2026-004, a SQL injection in Drupal core that anonymous users can trigger — every minute matters. Drupal Steward is a security service from the Drupal Association that gives you extra time to respond before vulnerabilities can be widely exploited: early notification of highly critical issues, recommended WAF mitigation rules, and access to security expertise, in coordinated collaboration with the Drupal Security Team. It's available in a Community Tier for smaller site portfolios, plus Small, Mid-Size & Enterprise tiers for organisations that want full control. Referral incentives are available for Drupal Certified Partners.

Behind the scenes with the engineering team

The migration of projects to GitLab issues continues — including security issues and hundreds of Ripple Maker projects — with GitLab soon to be enabled by default for all new projects, alongside updated contribution docs and a new custom commands reference. The team has also kicked off a collaboration with Alpha-Omega through their Security Engineer in Residence program to triage and respond to the growing wave of AI-generated security reports. And an RFP is under way for the Drupal Site Template Marketplace, focused on closing the last mile from template selection to live hosted site.

Help build Drupal's new front door

We're building a dedicated product marketing site for Drupal — a purpose-built, marketing-led site designed to reach the people who haven't heard of Drupal yet: marketers, IT directors, and enterprise decision-makers evaluating CMS platforms.

High-priority tasks are being added to the promote_drupal project on GitLab — real, scoped pieces of design, content, video, and strategy work with significant contribution credits attached, with more added on a rolling basis. If something catches your eye, reach out to Ryan Witcombe at ryan.witcombe@association.drupal.org or @RyanWitcombe on Drupal Slack.

A milestone for open source in West Africa

On 15 July, the Drupal Burkina Faso Association, led by its president Seferiba Salif Soulama, met with Burkina Faso's Minister of Digital Transition, Dr. Aminata Zerbo/Sabane, to explore how Drupal can support the country's digital future. The meeting marks a significant step toward a formal partnership between the Ministry and the Drupal Burkina Faso Association, with Drupal at the heart of Burkina Faso's digital modernisation agenda.

This is what open source looks like in action: communities, governments, and technology coming together to build something that belongs to everyone. Read the full story.

One more thing: The AI Byte

The Drupal AI Initiative team has launched The AI Byte, a monthly LinkedIn newsletter curating the best content across the web about Drupal AI — new capabilities, case studies, events, and webinars. Subscribe on LinkedIn.

This roundup is adapted from the DA Insider, the Drupal Association's monthly newsletter. Want it in your inbox? Subscribe to email communications and browse previous editions.

AI was used to help adapt this newsletter into a blog post. It was reviewed and edited by Drupal Association staff before publishing.

When I took on the role of Interim CEO, I committed to being direct about our finances and noted that our earlier audits already told much of the story. The board has now released our 2025 audit report, which was provided to the Board of Directors of the Drupal Association on 8 July 2026 and approved on 25 July 2026. It provides additional context and detail, but does not change the overall picture or our path forward. 

To be clear, nothing in this audit means any of the services the project depends on are at risk. What this audit does is help us to understand the status quo so that we can take appropriate action moving forward.

The DA Has Been Operating With a Structural Deficit 

The DA spent about $451,000 more on operations than we brought in last year (2025), and that followed a larger shortfall the year before ($923,000). 

Those two years are not cleanly comparable, because the 2025 audit also restates our previously audited 2024 results. Our auditors determined that about $353,000 of membership revenue had been recognized in 2024 that should instead have been allocated to 2025, when it was actually earned. This was a non-cash correction to our books: no money changed hands, and nothing was lost or misspent.

Together, 2024 and 2025 produced a combined shortfall of about $1.15M, which averages roughly $573,000 a year. Our current forecast puts 2026 on the same path.

Our cash reserves (the unrestricted funds we can actually spend on operations) have decreased by about 60% since the end of 2022, to roughly $960,000, which represents 2.3 months of operating expenses. Board policy sets a six-month target and a three-month reserve minimum. 2025 is the first year since 2019 that the DA has failed to meet the minimum. The DA remains a going concern and is not in danger of becoming insolvent, but it is time for action.

Revenue Growth Has Not Covered the Costs of our  Strategic Investments

Coming out of 2022 with strong reserves, the board approved a three-year strategic plan on 6 June 2023 and chose to put some of its surplus toward ambitious, community-requested investments in marketing and project support. Funding strategic growth is how excess reserves are best leveraged.

These investments have had a measurable impact:

• Contributions to Drupal strategic product innovation tripled, reaching 211,037 organizational credits in 2025, a 54% increase over 2024.

• We reached 106 Drupal Certified Partners under enhanced "maker" requirements, roughly double the 2022 figure.

• 43 people were brought  into Drupal leadership roles for the first time, against a goal of 38.

• We adopted and executed a go-to-market plan for the launch of Drupal CMS, and built marketing capacity inside the DA for the first time. 

However, the sustainability of these efforts long-term was tied to a goal which we did not meet: 

• Increase Drupal Association total revenues by 3X, from $3.49M in  2022 to $10.5M in 2026 to better support mission-driven activities. 

Our reported revenue did grow about 25% between 2022 and 2025. While 2025 is one of our largest revenue years on record, this figure is misleading, because most of the growth is in non-monetary services provided in trade (described in more detail below). Putting that aside, the Association’s cash revenue grew 5% over three years while out-of-pocket costs grew 27%. 

The gap is paid for out of our reserves. Reserves are the right instrument for starting something and the wrong instrument for running it. Funding our strategic initiatives from reserves was the right decision for the duration of the strategic plan, but while that plan ended last year, the work has continued without a viable funding plan. 

Marketing and project support are precisely the kind of mission-aligned work the DA should be doing. So the task in front of us is to fund it properly: each program examined discretely, with its own revenue plan, and held to revenue neutrality now that it has moved out of pilot and into operations.

Infrastructure Costs are Rising (and Invisible)

In 2022 we spent $1.3M running Drupal.org (the Web site, composer endpoints, GitLab, CI, authentication, and the global CDN), and in 2025 we spent $2.1M. That is up 61% in three years. It is the Drupal Association's single largest cost, and it has no direct funding mechanism. Every organization that uses Drupal relies on this infrastructure, but none of them are asked to pay for it, because we have never built a way for them to.

For most of Drupal's history that did not matter, because the surplus revenue from DrupalCon covered the costs of Drupal.org.  However, since 2022 the DrupalCon surplus has fallen from about $994,000 to about $227,000. While event costs have continued to increase since we resumed in-person events, event revenue has gone down.

This means that we are increasingly relying on the generosity of a handful of vendors and partners who provide services for free or in trade for sponsorship placements. That generosity has grown from $249,249 in 2022 to $1,011,995 in 2025 and now covers nearly half of what we spend on Drupal.org. These services in trade and donated services have not reported in our monthly reports because they were “non-cash”; they appeared only at audit.

The remainder of the infrastructure spending gap must be paid for out of general operating revenue, and failing that, out of reserves. These costs increased from $56,825 in 2022 to $859,384 in 2025. 

It is also important to note that these numbers do not account for work that is deferred because the funding is not there to pay for it. This technical debt does not appear on any of our financial statements, but is a growing liability that will need to be paid for at some point. 

The bottom line is that while our cash spending on infrastructure has remained steady, we have a rising essential cost that currently has no funding model attached to it yet. 

Unpacking the Timeline

The fiscal year 2024 closed 31 December 2024. The initial audit for 2024 was released in July 2025 showing $570,000 of deficit. Then in July 2026, it was restated downward to a $923,000 deficit as part of the 2025 audit.

While the Drupal Association CEO is accountable for the organization’s day-to-day operations, the board provides oversight over the organization’s budget and finances. This oversight requires timely, accurate, and consistent financial reporting.  

The monthly reports that the board’s Finance Committee reviewed and the audited statements published 6 months after the year close were prepared on different bases, with nothing reconciling the two. The Finance Committee struggled to get consistent answers or clarity about what individual figures included. In April 2026, Finance Committee asked our auditors to examine the reporting revenue recognition practices directly. That request is what produced the restatement of 2024 as part of the 2025 audit. This also explains how long it took to know where we stood in 2024. 

The Path Forward

The responsible approach is to act now, while we can still make changes on our own terms rather than in a crisis. Some of this is already underway and the rest has dates attached to it.

As Interim CEO, I am operationally accountable to make sure that the board has access to an annual budget that is actively managed with variances mitigated; receives consistent, contextualized and timely financial reports; and that robust internal controls and workflows are in place. This clarity will give the Finance Committee and the board what they need to exercise proper oversight within the policy guardrails they have set.

Our internal reporting will be reconciled to audit-basis accounting, so that the figures the board governs against during the year are as close as possible to the ones we publish after it; non-cash arrangements will be recorded as they occur rather than at year end; and our reserve position will be reported on a single defined basis, against both policy thresholds, every period. 

Drupal.org will be presented as a program with a cost that the Drupal Association is accountable for funding. The Association needs a durable way to fund Drupal.org rather than the patchwork indirect one we have now. These issues are not unique to Drupal, and I am looking forward to hearing others' thoughts, but be assured that I do not intend to solve a funding problem by reducing the services the community relies on.

Within the coming months, I will publish:

• What each part of our work actually costs and how it is funded

• The full costs of Drupal.org as a measurable figure, which will be the first time anyone, including the board, will have seen that number 

• An updated 2026 forecast and preliminary mitigation plan 

This fall, I will prepare a two-year 2027-2028 Operating Budget with the Finance Committee that the board will be able to review and approve before the end of the year. 

Nothing about the 2025 audit changes our commitment, our mission or the direction we need to go. It just adds a little urgency. I am focused on co-creating a financial model where the work sustaining Drupal rests on a foundation that is resilient and sustainable for the next long-term CEO.

Author: Will Huggins

In our previous blog posts, we’ve talked about how our growing ecosystem — now backed by 32 global partner organisations and a dedicated delivery team — is structured to build a secure, stable, and highly integrable AI-native digital experience platform.

So what does this mean for your day-to-day digital communications and marketing operations? How do you translate this into improved experiences for your audience, higher conversion rates, and reduced cost?

To win in the age of AI, digital leaders don’t just need faster ways to generate content or build great digital experiences. They need a platform that helps them move at maximum speed, while still maintaining the highest quality and content standards.

Here is an inside look at the key features on the Drupal AI 2026 roadmap, focused on the outcomes that matter most to digital communications and marketing teams: speed, brand safety, and measurable ROI.

"Prompt-to-Published" Page Building (Using Your Real Design System)

Many AI-powered page builders on the market suffer from what digital leaders call "AI Slop": random, messy, raw HTML blocks based on generic AI models. These pages can break your site's layout, look wildly off-brand, fail accessibility standards, and create the dreaded ‘technical debt’ for your developers to clean up.

Drupal AI’s upcoming Canvas AI Page Builder operates under a completely different paradigm. It is natively component-aware.

• You can feed Canvas AI a marketing brief, a PDF, or even a screenshot. Instead of writing custom code, the AI inspects your design system, selects the most relevant, pre-approved, accessible brand components, places them in a logical conversion layout, and drafts campaign-specific copy directly within them. Your marketing team can go from a brief to a beautifully structured, accessible landing page in minutes. You get complete visual design freedom without ever breaking brand guidelines or waiting in a developer’s queue.

The Brand Guardrail: Localised Nuance & Centralised Brand Voice

A major anxiety for marketing teams is brand dilution. If your team is using disconnected AI tools, your brand voice can quickly fragment, sounding professional on one page and generic on another.

Drupal AI solves this by embedding a centralised Context Control Centre directly into the CMS. This serves as the single source of truth for your brand's identity and governance rules.

• Authored Context: You define your style guides, brand vocabulary, audience personas, and strict regulatory boundaries (such as HIPAA, GDPR, or accessibility standards) once. Every AI-assisted content generation task automatically adheres to these guardrails.
• Hyper-Local Translation: For global marketing departments, translation is rarely word-for-word. Under the 2026 roadmap, Drupal AI's translation workflows don't just translate text; they analyse local nuance and adapt your localised content to fit regional cultural contexts while strictly preserving your core brand voice.

You can scale your global content footprint across multiple regions and channels, confident that every single piece of copy, everywhere, sounds exactly like you.

Closed-Loop Performance: Self-Optimizing Digital Experiences

Today, your content lives in the CMS, but your performance data is trapped inside a web analytics dashboard (like Google Analytics or Matomo), and the two systems rarely talk to each other. As a result, marketing teams often miss trends, fail to optimise low-performing pages, and struggle to scale what actually works.

Drupal AI is built to close this loop by bringing performance intelligence directly into the content creation interface.

• Intelligent Website Improvements: Drupal AI integrates directly with your analytics platform. Instead of merely showing you a static traffic report, background AI agents analyse user journeys and conversion drops.
• Actionable Optimisations: If a high-value landing page is underperforming, the AI agent automatically flags it and proposes concrete layout or copy optimisations — such as a more compelling call-to-action or a tighter, clearer headline — based on what is historically proven to convert.

No more digging through dashboards to find what's not working. Your website becomes a living, self-optimising engine, learning what works best for your audience and handing ready-to-publish optimisations directly to your content editors, bridging the gap between data and action.

Built-In Governance: Keeping Humans (and IT) Firmly in the Loop

Speed is meaningless if your IT department or compliance team vetoes your tools due to security risks. To build an AI platform organisations can trust, Drupal AI treats security and governance as structural priorities, not afterthought add-ons.

Unlike lightweight SaaS tools that operate outside of your corporate governance, Drupal AI operates entirely within your existing approval workflows and editorial permissions.

• Human-in-the-Loop Safeguards: AI agents can propose layouts, drafts, and SEO metadata, but they cannot publish them autonomously. Every change is staged in a revision branch, allowing your marketing managers to review, edit, or reject changes before they ever go live.
• Data Sovereignty and Security: Advanced security filters automatically sanitise and strip sensitive customer or corporate data before it is ever sent to an external Large Language Model (LLM). This shields your organisation from data leaks and compliance breaches.

This means you get the agility of generative AI backed by enterprise-grade, auditable, secure workflows: the kind of governance IT teams look for.

Own Your Digital Destination

The future of digital experience is being built on open-source, model-agnostic foundations. By giving your marketing team visual page building, centralised brand context, and performance-driven optimisation within an enterprise-grade secure environment, Drupal AI is paving the way for digital teams to operate at maximum velocity with zero brand risk.

The future of open-source digital experience is being built right now. If your digital product or content marketing teams are ready to experience what is possible today, explore our progress and try the live demo.
 

Author: Will Huggins

In 2025, the Drupal AI Initiative launched with a clear vision: to establish Drupal as the premier open-source AI platform for digital experiences.

One year later, the market momentum is clear. What began as a highly focused working group has grown into a powerful ecosystem supported by 32 global partner organisations, over 50 active contributors, and over $2.3 million in committed funding. Most importantly, with the core AI technology now clocking up over 18,000 installs, organisations are actively building their next-generation marketing engines on Drupal.

For digital teams, AI presents a host of opportunities. The power to increase speed of production on one hand, while maintaining quality, consistency and governance on the other. Drupal is addressing this head-on by creating two dedicated product workstreams: Inside AI and Outside AI.

This blog post outlines what this means for your digital roadmap and how Drupal can help your digital marketing operations win in the age of AI.

"Inside AI" vs. "Outside AI"

As AI has evolved from chat boxes into autonomous, multi-step agents, digital leaders need a platform that does two things simultaneously: empowers human creators inside the browser and securely integrates with external marketing systems.

To accelerate our product roadmap, we have divided our day-to-day development into two specialised, business-focused tracks:

1. Inside AI

• The Core Value: Empowering your marketing and content teams.
• The Focus: This stream focuses on the tools built directly into the editorial interface to supercharge you digital experiences and campaign execution. It drives our visual page-building tools, in-product copy editors, translation modules, and the Context Control Center (CCC).
• The Goal: To eliminate the repetitive tasks and developer bottlenecks that slow down your marketing queue. Your team can take a campaign brief, generate a brand-consistent landing page, optimise it for SEO, and localise it for global audiences in seconds, all while keeping humans firmly in the loop to make the final publishing decisions.

2. Outside AI

• The Core Value: Make it easy for site builders and developers to use coding agents to build, interact with and migrate to Drupal.
• The Focus: This stream ensures that Drupal serves as a highly governed, secure production platform for websites, marketing systems, automation platforms (such as n8n or Activepieces), and external AI agents.
• The Goal: To position Drupal as the most reliable, secure, and structured backend for your wider digital stack. We are making it incredibly easy for external systems and autonomous agents to build and deploy using Drupal without introducing security, compliance, or governance risks.

Through this dual focus, we aim to make Drupal the most advanced, intuitive workspace for your marketing teams and content creators, as well as the most secure and connectable platform to build on.

What is Ready Now?

As you plan your digital product roadmaps and marketing strategies, here is a summary of exactly what is production-ready, what is ready for pilot testing, and what is on the horizon:

Live and Ready

These capabilities are fully stable, secure, and ready to drive immediate ROI in your production environments:

• Freedom of AI Choice: Drupal connects seamlessly with over 87 AI providers (including OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Azure and Amazee.ai). You can swap models behind the scenes to optimise for cost, performance, or geographic data residency rules without rewriting any code.
• Creative & Editorial Assistants: Bounded, human-in-the-loop features like automated image alt-text generation, metadata auto-tagging, and initial copy drafting are ready to go. They act as immediate, built-in time savers for your editorial teams.
• AI Automators: Automate time consuming content management tasks like re-tagging all your content or turning PDF or word documents into accessible HTML pages - AI Automators are your CMS superpower!
• Brand & Data Guardrails: Advanced security filters that automatically sanitise sensitive customer data before it ever leaves for an external LLM, while validating incoming AI responses to ensure compliance and prevent "hallucinations" on your live site.

Ready for Beta Testing

These features are highly advanced and close to general availability. They are perfect for controlled pilot programs to gain a competitive edge:

• The Context Control Center (CCC): The brain of your brand. The CCC is a centralised space where you can define your brand voice, editorial style guides, target audience personas, and domain knowledge. This ensures that any AI-generated layout or copy sounds like your brand, rather than generic web text.
• Automated Translation & Multi-Step Campaigns: Workflows that automatically translate entire content libraries or combine multiple AI steps to generate structured assets while capturing local nuances and brand tone.
• Conversational Site Building: Tools that allow digital product owners and site builders to configure and lay out basic Drupal structures using natural language, drastically reducing initial setup times.
• Cost & Performance Tracking: Fully integrated with standard enterprise monitoring tools. You can track exact token usage, model costs, and AI activity in real time, protecting your marketing budget from unexpected bills.

Coming Soon 

One of the cutting-edge, experimental capabilities currently being refined in sandbox environments is Fully Autonomous Agents. These background agents are designed to analyse website performance, automatically propose layout optimisations to boost conversions, or build complex database queries entirely on their own.

Control and Governance

As a mature open-source platform, Drupal AI is structurally sovereign, model-agnostic, and transparently governed.
Whether you need to host open-source models locally to comply with strict regional privacy regulations or plug into the latest commercial LLMs for maximum speed, Drupal AI ensures you always own your data, your models, and your digital roadmap. We build trust directly into the architecture through branch-based content versioning, strict governance workflows, and deep audit trails.

Accelerate Your Roadmap

The Drupal AI Initiative is driving the future of open-source digital experience. If your marketing or digital product teams are ready to leverage the power of collaborative AI, try Drupal today.

When the Drupal Association announced that 1xINTERNET had become one of the world's Top-Tier Drupal Contributors, it was a proud moment for the company. Reaching the highest level of contribution recognition places 1xINTERNET among a select group of organisations helping shape the future of one of the world's leading open-source content management systems.

Yet, ask anyone inside the company about the achievement, and you'll hear the same response: becoming a Top-Tier Contributor was never the ultimate goal. Instead, it is the natural outcome of more than a decade of believing that if you build your business on open source, you should help build open source itself.

For over thirteen years, 1xINTERNET has invested in the Drupal ecosystem, not only by delivering digital platforms for clients, but by contributing code, maintaining projects, sponsoring community events, supporting governance, leading strategic initiatives and encouraging employees to actively participate in the community.

Today, the company sponsors more than 500 hours of Drupal contribution every month, actively supports more than 85 Drupal projects, has sponsored over 50 Drupal events, and has contributed to hundreds of issues across the Drupal ecosystem. Those numbers tell one story. The people behind them tell another.

Contribution isn't only about strengthening Drupal, it creates real value for the organisations that choose Drupal as the foundation for their digital platforms. We spoke with Baddý Breidert, Christoph Breidert and James Tillotson about why contributing matters, how it benefits clients, and why they believe giving back is essential to building better digital experiences.

James Tillotson, Christoph Breidert, and Baddý Breidert (Composite visual created with generative AI tools)

Building the future instead of following it

For 1xINTERNET CEO Baddý Breidert, contributing to Drupal has always been part of the company's identity.

"It represents over a decade of dedication to the Drupal project," she says. "I've worked with Drupal since 2006 and been actively involved in the community since 2013. Being recognised as one of the top three Drupal companies globally validates the expertise and sustained effort our team has invested over the years."

But the motivation goes much deeper than recognition. Instead of simply following the direction of Drupal, 1xINTERNET believes in helping shape it. Since Drupal is the technological foundation behind many of the company's digital platforms, contributing to its future isn't viewed as optional, it's viewed as a responsibility.

That philosophy influences almost every decision the company makes. Rather than waiting for new features, improvements or innovations to arrive, the team actively participates in creating them.

Managing Director Christoph Breidert describes it simply.

"We don't just build with Drupal; we help influence where the platform is going next."

It's an approach that benefits not only the Drupal community, but every organisation that chooses Drupal as the foundation for its digital future.

Open source is built on collaboration

Although contribution often means writing code, the three leaders agree that it's ultimately about something much bigger.

Open source succeeds because thousands of people collaborate, share knowledge and solve problems together. Every contribution, whether it's code, documentation, testing, mentoring, event organisation or strategic leadership, helps strengthen the ecosystem for everyone.

For Christoph, this spirit of reciprocity sits at the heart of open source.

"If you build digital solutions using an open-source project but choose to remain on the sidelines, you miss the opportunity to influence the tools you rely on," he explains. "Open source is built on shared knowledge, and contributing back is simply part of how we work."

That collaborative mindset is equally visible throughout 1xINTERNET's culture. 1xINTERNET’s UK Growth Manager James Tillotson sees open source as an extension of how the company works internally.

"We don't hoard knowledge," he says. "We share it to raise the baseline for everyone, which in turn allows us to keep innovating."

Rather than viewing contribution as something separate from day-to-day work, it's embedded in the way teams learn, collaborate and continuously improve.

Contribution isn't separate from client work

One of the biggest misconceptions surrounding open source is that contribution somehow competes with client work. The reality, according to the team, is exactly the opposite.

James puts it bluntly: ""Contribution is client work."

When developers fix a bug in Drupal core or improve functionality that thousands of websites rely on, every client benefits, not just today, but for years to come.

Christoph agrees: "If you're not involved in building the technology, you're always reacting instead of leading."

Technology evolves quickly. Artificial intelligence, digital experience platforms, accessibility, security and content management continue to change at an unprecedented pace. Agencies that simply consume technology are forced to wait for innovation. Agencies that contribute help create it.

Baddý believes that's one of the company's greatest strengths.

"Contribution allows us to lead initiatives like Drupal AI, ensuring we aren't just consumers of the technology but creators of it."

Instead of adapting after the market changes, 1xINTERNET helps shape those changes from within.

Driving innovation through Drupal AI

Perhaps nowhere is that philosophy more visible than in Drupal AI. As Product Lead for Drupal AI, Christoph has been deeply involved in defining its roadmap, working alongside developers from around the world to build practical AI capabilities directly into Drupal.

For him, watching Drupal AI evolve from an ambitious idea into one of the platform's most exciting capabilities has been one of the defining milestones of the company's contribution journey.

"It's been incredible to collaborate with a global community to build something that will help shape the future of the web."

The significance goes beyond technical innovation. Because 1xINTERNET helps build Drupal AI, its teams understand the technology long before it becomes mainstream. They know what's coming, how it works and how organisations can use it responsibly.

James, who contributes to the Drupal AI Marketing Initiative, believes this creates a significant advantage for clients.

"Our clients have access to the latest innovations because we're involved in creating them."

Innovation isn't something clients wait for. It's something they experience alongside the people helping build it.

Better contributions create better client solutions

Although many clients may never see the code being contributed to Drupal, they experience its impact every day. Active contributors develop a much deeper understanding of the platform than those who simply implement it. Because the team understands Drupal's architecture, roadmap and future direction, they can make better long-term decisions for every project.

"Our clients receive stable and modern solutions without having to manage the underlying complexity," Christoph explains. "By maintaining our contribution status, we act as a direct pathway to web innovation."

That means fewer surprises, more sustainable architectures and platforms designed to evolve instead of becoming outdated. James believes clients increasingly recognise that value.

"They know we're not simply using Drupal, we're helping steer where it's going."

Trust has become a competitive advantage

Contribution also creates something that's difficult to measure but incredibly valuable: trust.

When organisations invest in large scale digital platforms, they aren't simply buying technology. They're choosing partners who will help them navigate years of future development.

Being recognised as one of the world's leading Drupal contributors provides confidence that 1xINTERNET isn't standing on the outside of the ecosystem, it's helping lead it. Baddý has seen this become increasingly important during procurement processes.

More organisations now actively look for suppliers who contribute back to the technologies they depend on. Public sector organisations and enterprise businesses increasingly view contribution as evidence of technical excellence, long-term commitment and sustainability.

James has experienced this while expanding 1xINTERNET's presence in the United Kingdom. "When entering a new market where people don't yet know your brand, your contribution footprint becomes a global passport. The Drupal community already knows who you are."

That credibility opens doors long before a first meeting takes place.

Supporting digital sovereignty

For Christoph, contribution is also connected to a much broader movement taking place across Europe and beyond. As organisations become increasingly concerned about vendor lock-in, proprietary platforms and ownership of their data, open-source software is becoming strategically more important than ever. By contributing to Drupal, companies don't simply improve software, they strengthen an independent digital ecosystem that organisations can trust.

"Businesses increasingly want digital sovereignty," Christoph says. "By actively contributing to Drupal, we're helping build a secure and independent IT landscape that organisations can rely on."

It's a perspective that positions contribution not only as technical work, but as an investment in the future of open digital infrastructure.

A culture that attracts exceptional people

Contribution doesn't only benefit clients. It also shapes the people who choose to work at 1xINTERNET. The company actively encourages employees to contribute code, maintain projects, organise events, mentor others and share knowledge across the community. For many developers, that's exactly the environment they're looking for.

"Top developers want to work on things that matter," James says. "We offer them a stage, not just a desk."

Christoph agrees. Many developers are motivated by solving meaningful problems that have an impact far beyond a single client project.

For Baddý, contribution creates something equally valuable: a culture of continuous learning. By collaborating with some of the best Drupal developers in the world, the entire team continually raises its own standards, creating an environment where innovation and professional growth go hand in hand.

Looking ahead

Becoming a Top-Tier Drupal Contributor isn't viewed as a finish line. Instead, it's another milestone in a much longer journey. The company plans to continue investing heavily in Drupal AI, supporting the wider community, encouraging employees to contribute and helping organisations embrace open-source innovation with confidence.

Christoph hopes to make Drupal AI even more accessible through practical demonstration environments that allow organisations to experience its capabilities with a single click.

James wants to strengthen the connection between enterprise organisations and the open-source community, demonstrating that open source can successfully support even the most ambitious digital transformation projects.

Baddý remains focused on investing in people, community leadership and the long-term health of the Drupal ecosystem.

More than contribution

Ultimately, becoming a Top-Tier Drupal Contributor isn't really about rankings, badges or recognition. Those are simply the visible results of years of consistent investment.

The real achievement is building a company where contribution is part of everyday work, where sharing knowledge is expected, collaboration is celebrated, and innovation is something created together rather than consumed.

For 1xINTERNET, contributing to Drupal has never been about giving something away. It's about helping build a stronger platform, a stronger community and better digital experiences for everyone who depends on Drupal.

Because when the platform grows stronger, so do the organisations, developers and communities that build upon it.

Drupal's volunteer Security Team has protected millions of sites for more than 20 years and its process is world-class. Bandwidth among the security engineers has always been the limiting constraint. This spring that constraint met a new kind of pressure: AI-assisted analysis is finding latent vulnerabilities at an accelerating pace.

The Drupal AI Security Initiative adds funded security capacity in response. It is funded through Alpha-Omega's Security-Engineer-in-Residence (SEIR) program, coordinated by the Drupal Association, and works alongside the volunteer Security Team, which continues its normal process throughout.

This post introduces the initiative and reports on our first six weeks. The short version: the funded fractional team model is working and has already evolved our understanding of where we want to focus next.

What changed: the economics of discovery

Drupal's attack surface is what it has always been. What has changed is the cost of finding bugs. AI-assisted analysis makes discovery dramatically cheaper. AI can produce security issue reports at a volume and can discover exploit details at a speed that any volunteer effort struggles to absorb. Our advisory data shows the rate of discovery accelerating (our next post will work through what the data suggests in detail).

Meet the Drupal AI Security Initiative Team

The initiative builds on the lessons of the Drupal 8 Accelerate Initiative, which showed that throughput efficiency depends on funding the whole contribution workflow, not just one part of it.

The Drupal security team needs fixes, not just findings of potential issues. As fixes are developed, they are collaboratively reviewed. An engineer cannot mark their own fix complete. Funding one full-time engineer would likely produce findings faster than volunteers could review them, and they would queue. So we’re using the grant to fund a fractional team that covers the full path from discovery to merge on both the project and infrastructure side for Drupal: 

• Drew Webber (@mcdruid) is the Fixer. He applies AI-security expertise directly to Drupal's code: scanning, writing patches, building experimental tooling, and then submitting contribution-ready work across Drupal core and the contributed-project ecosystem.

• Greg Knaddison (@greggles) and Michael Hess (@mlhess) are Reviewers: They triage submissions, review patches, advance issues, and provide the RTBC status a fixer cannot grant themselves. Both come from the existing Security Team, and the grant helps subsidize the work they would otherwise do on volunteer time.

• Neil Drumm (@drumm) handles infrastructure, focusing on Drupal.org itself. The package distribution, build pipelines, and update mechanisms are a high-consequence, specialized surface on their own.

• Tiffany Farriss (@farriss) and Tim Lehnen (@hestenet) provide program support and coordination for the Drupal Association.

Our current grant has two three-month phases: Clarity (understand the problem) and Attention (fix issues and harden the process). 

Six weeks in: what we've done

We're using the funding and AI tooling to find, validate, triage, and resolve vulnerabilities faster than before, including proactively, across core, contrib, and our own infrastructure. In six weeks, the team has made contributions to more than 10 published advisories and CVEs and filed more than 30 issues. This work includes SA-CORE-2026-005, a critical PHP object-injection issue reachable via JSON:API that arrived as an external report and was coordinated to a fast release, alongside triage and remediation across dozens of findings and hundreds of inbound requests. The team also worked on rapid response/urgent issues off-hours; in one case, AI-assisted review helped find and fix a significant issue in Drupal.org code. 

We're also building reusable tooling and automation prototypes that increase throughput and make our security archive searchable and actionable. That includes five skills and a set of opengrep static-analysis rules, each targeting a vulnerability class, and local, open-weight tooling that processes about 40,000 historical security-mailbox emails to assign metadata like CWE mapping and flag duplicates (keeping sensitive data local). One key project outcome will be delivery of working tools the Security Team can continue to use after the initiative ends.

Drupal’s grant is one of several parallel Alpha-Omega grants across open source ecosystems. Being part of this cohort has allowed us to compare notes and share tooling, successes and failures with other open source projects.  So far we’ve collaborated most directly with Volker Dusch, who leads the equivalent effort at the PHP Foundation, and with colleagues at the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF), who shared their report-validator protocol for separating real findings from noise. That protocol feeds straight into our intake, and into the report standard we want to co-create next.

The counts are perhaps not the most interesting part. We've resolved more security issues (10) than the minimum number (8) our proposal had committed to over the entire six-month project. We had assumed the meat of the task would be finding and fixing vulnerabilities. It turns out that the more interesting challenge will be adapting Drupal's security process to the volume and nature of higher-quality-than-expected AI-generated and AI-assisted reports.

So far that adaptation has happened downstream, after an issue has been reported. Shepherding issues to a fix, filing CVEs, automating that filing, and automating the analysis of published advisories are important and help scale the response process. But it is all at the bottom of the funnel. The opportunity we would like to explore is higher up, at intake, where issues arrive.

We've started exploring what that might look like. In discussions with core maintainers, some design principles emerged: AI stays limited to a single triage activity per issue and no bot noise on every commit and merge request. Ideally, early intake tooling would pre-filter inbound security issue reports and run a gated check that confirms whether they include enough context and reproduction detail before they reach a human.

What’s next

The next six weeks will build on what is working and push the intake question in two directions. The first is triage. The volume of incoming security issues is expected to keep growing and AI-assisted triage of that queue is an area to explore. We are interested in looking at how modern tooling can sort and deduplicate incoming issues so human attention can be focused where it's actually needed.

The second is the report itself. A clear issue report helps the Security Team and maintainer community move faster; a vague or bloated one slows everyone down. We want to explore and define what a useful AI-generated or AI-assisted security report should contain and draft a working standard, co-created with the Security Team and maintainers. If you are a maintainer or security reporter and have examples of good (or bad) AI-generated reports, please share them in Drupal Slack #security-discussion.

Six weeks of supplemental funding has already made a couple things clear. The roles the Drupal ecosystem depends on (security work as well as release management) need a durable, community-owned funding model, not one-time support. And we need to keep talking and collaborating across ecosystems like this.

Thanks

Huge thank you to Alpha-Omega for the support, funding and for access to AI tooling from Anthropic that enabled several of the findings above; to the Linux Foundation; and to the Drupal Association for coordination. And of course, none of this works without the two decades of effort from Drupal’s amazing Security Team.