The fourth feature release of Drupal 11 is another performance breakthrough. Using only a third of the database and cache lookups compared to Drupal 11.0 and 10.6 for the same requests. It also comes with 15-25% better compression of JS and CSS, much faster translation file handling, a new native command line interface, improved password hashing and a lot more.

New in Drupal 11.4

Biggest performance improvement of the decade (again!)

With Drupal 11.3, we announced that it was the biggest performance improvement of the decade. Drupal 11.4 is arguably the biggest performance improvement of the decade again!

Drupal 11.4 reduces database queries by half compared to 11.3 across a wide range of requests due to optimizations in how entity fields are loaded.

Now, on a completely cold cache, Drupal 11.4 will execute just over 1/3rd of the database and cache lookups compared to Drupal 11.0 or 10.6, representing hundreds of milliseconds saved.

As well as entity loading, entity listing queries have also been significantly improved via reducing the number of table joins, leading to fewer slow queries. This should particularly benefit sites using JSON:API.

To reduce the cost of rendering menus and improve render cache hit rates, menu blocks now have a configuration option to not generate CSS classes for ancestor menu links.

Applying recipes, such as setting up Drupal CMS is twice as fast

We have made recipe-based site installation twice as fast. This significantly improves the UX of installing Drupal CMS and other site recipes. Installing individual recipes is also markedly faster.

Translation file handling: dramatically faster with a modern API

Importing translations during the installer or during site operation is now much faster. On a test site with 66 projects and 38 languages, checking for translation updates was 87% faster on Drupal 11.4 compared to 11.3.

The APIs handling translation files and import have undergone an extensive modernization effort. All .inc files and several important APIs in locale.module have been deprecated and updated to OOP with special attention paid to performance and organization.

15-25% better compression of JS and CSS

Drupal now supports Brotli compression for aggregated CSS and JavaScript files in addition to the existing gzip compression. Brotli typically provides 15-25% better compression ratios than gzip, resulting in faster page loads for browsers that support it. The feature relies on the PHP Brotli extension: ext-brotli.

Immediate security updates of key dependencies allowed in core-recommended

The drupal/core-recommended package no longer pins minor versions for dependencies like Guzzle, Twig, and Symfony Polyfills. In the past, stricter version rules and Composer 2.9's blocking behaviour forced sites to wait for a new Drupal release to get important security fixes. Now, you can install these security fixes immediately. Since the updated dependencies at that time may not have been tested with Drupal core yet, site owners should ensure adequate quality assurance occurs before deploying to production.

New experimental extensible native command line interface

A new extensible ./vendor/bin/dr command line interface was added. While Drupal already includes a CLI script with hardcoded commands, it is not extensible. This new interface was built by a team which included the maintainers of the Drush utility. Drush has been a mainstay for people using Drupal with the command line. Now a transitional period starts as Drush is gradually replaced with the core dr CLI over time. Learn how to make your existing Drush commands compatible.

Simplified and updated default experience

The default installation, the Standard profile, is now leaner. It no longer includes the Article and Page content types, and commenting is disabled by default. Further core startup simplifications are planned for upcoming releases.
The Navigation module is now enabled in the standard administrative interface. The legacy Toolbar module remains available but is scheduled for removal in Drupal 12.

Better entity display management for display builders such as Drupal Canvas

A new overview page has been added under the "Manage display" tab for content entity bundles. Previously, this tab led to the form editing the default view mode. Now, it lists all display modes for the bundle with their label and description and allows one to toggle the enabled/disabled status. The listing makes it easier to integrate tools such as Drupal Canvas.

Distraction-free editing available with CKEditor

Text formats using CKEditor can now be configured to include the FullScreen plugin. This plugin lets users expand the editor to the whole browser viewport, giving more space to comfortably edit content in a distraction-free environment.

Improved password hashing available

The password hashing algorithm is now configurable. The new argon2id option provides much stronger hashing compared to the old bcrypt method. Drupal 12 will default to argon2id, but your site can already start to adopt it. If you update the setting, users' passwords will be rehashed on their next login.

Do more with PHP attributes

You can now use attributes on your controllers to specify the routes the controller is used for. Any class in a module's Controller namespace (for example, Drupal\example\Controller) that have the Symfony\Component\Routing\Attribute\Route attribute will be picked up as route definitions. Even multiple routes can be defined on one class. This supplements the existing .routing.yml based declarations.

It is now possible to use the Drupal\Core\Entity\Attribute\Bundle attribute to define bundle classes, when in need of specific logic for an entity subtype. This previously required an entity_type_info or entity_type_info_alter implementation.

No more .theme files, only a few .module files left

All .theme and .theme-settings.php files in core have moved to PHP classes. Support for .theme files is still planned to be retained in Drupal 12 to ease the transition, but will be removed in Drupal 13.

Most .module files have been converted too: 32 modules are fully converted to PHP classes, with 11 modules remaining (4 of which are deprecated for removal in Drupal 12).

A team of 26 key contributors worked on 57 issues since January 2026 to get here, making Drupal's code more consistent. Also thanks to the dozens of users that worked on the many decades old issues that this initiative built upon.

Front controllers now utilize symfony/runtime

Drupal now integrates the Symfony Runtime component to separate bootstrapping logic from request handling. This provides a clear separation of concerns between preparing the environment (runtime) and handling a request, which will also later enable better integration with FrankenPHP.

Write faster tests with new helper method

A new trait for kernel tests, HttpKernelUiHelperTrait, allows kernel tests to make HTTP requests to the test site and make assertions against the returned content. This has the potential for many browser tests to be converted to kernel tests, which are much faster to run because unlike browser tests, they don't fully set up a test site by running the Drupal installer.

New experimental administrative theme

The Gin administrative theme has been added to Drupal core as the "Default Admin" experimental theme. The theme includes a new dark mode option.

While it is not yet actually the default admin theme, when it becomes stable it will replace Claro as the look of Drupal's backend. We encourage module maintainers to test their module's UIs and provide feedback!

Core maintainer team updates

Since Drupal 11.3 Andrei Mateescu was appointed as a provisional general core committer and is now a Content Moderation and the Workflows module maintainer too. Also Edward Wu was appointed as provisional release manager.

Various wonderful contributors also took our call for subsystem maintainership:

• Moshe Weitzman is now a maintainer of the core CLI
• Derek Wright stepped up to be a Content Moderation and core CLI maintainer
• Kent Richards is a new accessibility maintainer
• Max Pogonowski was added as a maintainer for Menu UI and the token system
• Jürgen Haas and Sascha Eggenberger are maintainers of the new Default Admin theme
• Chris Weber was added as a maintainer for Settings Tray
• Stephen Mustgrave stepped up to maintain the Options module and Menu UI
• Lucas Hedding is now a maintainer for the Image module and the Authentication and Authorization subsystem
• Christian López Espínola is a new maintainer to the Language and Content Translation modules

We also thank maintainers that stepped down in this period:

• Heather Brooke Drummond stepped down from their maintainer role on Breakpoint and Responsive Image modules
• Brian Gilbert stepped down from his core mentoring role
• Wim Leers stepped down from being maintainer of Drupal's CKEditor integration, Editor module, JSON:API module and REST module
• Gareth Goodwin stepped down from maintaining the Umami demo

Want to get involved?

If you are looking to make the leap from Drupal user to Drupal contributor, or you want to share resources with your team as part of their professional development, there are many opportunities to deepen your Drupal skill set and give back to the community. Check out the Drupal contributor guide.

You would be more than welcome to join us at DrupalCon Rotterdam in September 2026 to attend sessions, network, and enjoy mentorship for your first contributions.

Drupal 12 is coming the week of December 7, 2026

Drupal 12 will be released with the upcoming Drupal 11.5 at the beginning of December this year. Drupal 11.5 will be a Long Term Support release with version 11 support expected until the end of 2028.

I spent last week at the UN in New York for Open Source Week. The AI sessions were sharp, well-attended, and full of people who have been thinking seriously about where this is all going. Ministers, engineers, researchers, cybersecurity practitioners.

And across four days of sessions, a picture kept assembling itself — not one anyone drew deliberately, but one that emerged from enough different people making enough adjacent points. By the end of the week I was fairly convinced that what the AI world is urgently trying to build, Drupal already is.

Read on and let me make the case.

The model is not the thing

Brian Behlendorf said it plainly: people talk about AI as if it's the model. It isn't. The model is one layer. What matters is the harness. How you orchestrate models, constrain them, route information, log outputs, build verification in. That's where the work happens. That's where the risk lives and where we create value.

Sara Hooker from Adaptation Labs made the same point from a different angle. We used to work in code and design. Interfaces were understood and boundaries were mostly clear. AI has moved us into unknown interfaces. The next step, she said, is dynamic, adaptable interfaces that allow humans to remain at the centre. Not interfaces that hand control to the model, but ones that keep the human in the loop while the model does the work.

I've been saying that Drupal has quietly become the most flexible and powerful AI harness available. This week gave me a room full of smart people explaining which helped bring that conviction into focus.

What a harness needs to do

Let me pull a few threads from the week.

It needs to constrain the model to known truth. One of the most interesting presentations came from a team that deployed a chatbot for Pittsburgh's Public Works department. The very first question from city officials was: "How do we know the answer is correct?" Their solution was a Data Concierge model — the AI is only permitted to answer questions against a defined dataset. If it can't answer from the data, it doesn't answer; the question goes into a queue. This makes the AI responses reproducible, traceable, and auditable.

That is what Drupal can do when you integrate AI into a content management workflow. The model doesn't get to hallucinate about your organisation's policies. It answers from what you've published, structured, and governed. The content model is the constraint.

It needs to aggregate intelligence, not just query a single model. Mostafa Elkordy from UNICC put this as clearly as anyone: every agent in isolation only has its own memory. The most critical and least understood capability in enterprise AI is intelligence harnessing. We need to pull all intelligence sources into a single coherent system. The organisations that figure this out will have a structural advantage. The ones that treat AI as a chat widget bolted onto a webpage will not.

Drupal's architecture is built for this. You have multiple data sources, multiple content types, relationships between entities, and views that aggregate and filter. This is what structured content management systems do best. Adding AI to that foundation is a multiplier. Adding AI to an unstructured system makes a mess.

It needs to keep humans in control, not in the dark.

Rodrigo Rodríguez, an AI & Quantum Architect at Microsoft made a point early in the week that I keep coming back to: AI is clustered around organised confidence. It rarely says "I don't know." Confidence is not evidence. The harness is the mechanism by which you decide what the AI is allowed to be confident about, and when it should surface uncertainty rather than paper over it.

Drupal's editorial workflows, content moderation, and publishing controls are part of a governance layer that sits between AI output and public consumption. A model can draft. A human approves. That's not a limitation. In fact, that's the architecture working as intended.

The verification problem

Tricia Wang made the argument I found most compelling across the entire week. We live in a claims-based AI world. A model asserts something is true. You have no mechanism to verify it independently. She called for a move to a verification-based world — ideally cryptographic — where claims can be checked against sources without exposing the underlying data.

She also made an observation that seemed obvious once she said it: we trust agents all the time. Every time you board a plane, you're trusting an agentic system — pilots, air traffic controllers, flight management software. We know how to govern this. We have liability frameworks, certification requirements, black boxes, independent investigation bodies. We just haven't built any of that for AI yet.

What Drupal offers in this space is structural transparency. Content has provenance. You can see who created it, when, what revision it's on, what workflow state it passed through. When AI is integrated into that system, the AI's contributions can be logged, reviewed, and attributed in the same way. That's the beginning of a verifiable AI layer — not cryptographic yet, but architecturally honest in a way that most AI deployments are not.

The zero-day exploit window is now down to seven days, according to Jim Zemlin from the Linux Foundation. In 2020 it was sixty. The security argument for keeping AI tightly integrated with auditable, open-source infrastructure isn't a theory. It is a requirement.

The sovereignty argument

David Shrier from Imperial College described intelligence as the next sovereign battlefield. The concentration of AI capability inside roughly eight companies is a structural problem. Hyperscalers are, in effect, concentrations of intelligence. Open source is the mechanism for distributing that intelligence more broadly.

Tanzania's Minister of Technology put it in terms I found more useful: her government is no longer a passive consumer of technology. It's an active creator. 90% of government systems are on open source. The savings from licence elimination have been reinvested in people. The workforce now owns the systems it builds.

The Drupal parallel is direct. When you run AI on Drupal, you're running it on infrastructure no single vendor controls. The model can be swapped. The hosting can be changed. The data stays yours. This is not a minor point — the lock-in risk in AI is real, and it's coming fast. The organisations building AI on proprietary stacks are creating dependencies they will spend years trying to unwind.

Morocco is building a 1 GW data centre and training 100,000 people a year in digital skills, specifically so it can run sovereign AI infrastructure with local values embedded. That's "open source as an instrument of sovereignty" at national scale. The same logic can apply at the organisational level.

The governance argument

The DPI sessions drove home a point that applies directly to AI: the technical system is rarely the problem. The governance is. Ethiopia has 98% ID coverage and 92% payment wallet adoption — and yet fewer than 5% of people can actually access the protections those systems are supposed to provide. The technology works but the governance doesn't.

Armando Manzueta from the Dominican Republic put it cleanly: treat AI with the same governance rigour as your core infrastructure. Without proper guardrails and oversight, you shouldn't do it at all. Human oversight must be embedded so mistakes can be corrected in real time.

This is an argument Drupal has been making implicitly for twenty-five years. Content governance — who can publish what, when, through what process — is the foundational problem that Drupal was built to solve. The workflows, roles, permissions, and moderation tools are a governance system for information. Extending that to AI output is not a conceptual leap. It just extends what Drupal already does.

The Premise

Here is the argument in full: the AI conversation at the UN kept arriving at the same destination from different directions. You need a harness, not just models. The harness needs to constrain the model to verified data. It needs to aggregate intelligence across sources. It needs human oversight and editorial control. It needs to be open source so it can be audited, forked, and owned. It needs governance built into the architecture, not bolted on afterwards.

What does that remind you of? Drupal with AI integration.

The Drupal work isn't finished. The AI modules aren't mature yet. The work won't be easy. I'm suggesting that the architectural foundation is right, and the architectural foundation is the hardest part. Most organisations are trying to build AI workflows on systems that weren't designed for governance, structured content, or auditability. They're going to spend a lot of time and money discovering what the DPI world learned the hard way: the technology problem is tractable. The governance problem is where things break. Our community even has a Road Map that describes many of these challenges.

Drupal solved the governance problem for content a long time ago. That foundation is now worth something more than it was worth two years ago.

Matthew Saunders works in AI and open-source infrastructure at amazee.io and has been building on Drupal since 2006.

I spent last week at the UN in New York for Open Source Week. The AI sessions were sharp, well-attended, and full of people who have been thinking seriously about where this is all going. Ministers, engineers, researchers, cybersecurity practitioners.

And across four days of sessions, a picture kept assembling itself — not one anyone drew deliberately, but one that emerged from enough different people making enough adjacent points. By the end of the week I was fairly convinced that what the AI world is urgently trying to build, Drupal already is.

Read on and let me make the case.

The model is not the thing

Brian Behlendorf said it plainly: people talk about AI as if it's the model. It isn't. The model is one layer. What matters is the harness. How you orchestrate models, constrain them, route information, log outputs, build verification in. That's where the work happens. That's where the risk lives and where we create value.

Sara Hooker from Adaptation Labs made the same point from a different angle. We used to work in code and design. Interfaces were understood and boundaries were mostly clear. AI has moved us into unknown interfaces. The next step, she said, is dynamic, adaptable interfaces that allow humans to remain at the centre. Not interfaces that hand control to the model, but ones that keep the human in the loop while the model does the work.

I've been saying that Drupal has quietly become the most flexible and powerful AI harness available. This week gave me a room full of smart people explaining which helped bring that conviction into focus.

What a harness needs to do

Let me pull a few threads from the week.

It needs to constrain the model to known truth. One of the most interesting presentations came from a team that deployed a chatbot for Pittsburgh's Public Works department. The very first question from city officials was: "How do we know the answer is correct?" Their solution was a Data Concierge model — the AI is only permitted to answer questions against a defined dataset. If it can't answer from the data, it doesn't answer; the question goes into a queue. This makes the AI responses reproducible, traceable, and auditable.

That is what Drupal can do when you integrate AI into a content management workflow. The model doesn't get to hallucinate about your organisation's policies. It answers from what you've published, structured, and governed. The content model is the constraint.

It needs to aggregate intelligence, not just query a single model. Mostafa Elkordy from UNICC put this as clearly as anyone: every agent in isolation only has its own memory. The most critical and least understood capability in enterprise AI is intelligence harnessing. We need to pull all intelligence sources into a single coherent system. The organisations that figure this out will have a structural advantage. The ones that treat AI as a chat widget bolted onto a webpage will not.

Drupal's architecture is built for this. You have multiple data sources, multiple content types, relationships between entities, and views that aggregate and filter. This is what structured content management systems do best. Adding AI to that foundation is a multiplier. Adding AI to an unstructured system makes a mess.

It needs to keep humans in control, not in the dark.

Rodrigo Rodríguez, an AI & Quantum Architect at Microsoft made a point early in the week that I keep coming back to: AI is clustered around organised confidence. It rarely says "I don't know." Confidence is not evidence. The harness is the mechanism by which you decide what the AI is allowed to be confident about, and when it should surface uncertainty rather than paper over it.

Drupal's editorial workflows, content moderation, and publishing controls are part of a governance layer that sits between AI output and public consumption. A model can draft. A human approves. That's not a limitation. In fact, that's the architecture working as intended.

The verification problem

Tricia Wang made the argument I found most compelling across the entire week. We live in a claims-based AI world. A model asserts something is true. You have no mechanism to verify it independently. She called for a move to a verification-based world — ideally cryptographic — where claims can be checked against sources without exposing the underlying data.

She also made an observation that seemed obvious once she said it: we trust agents all the time. Every time you board a plane, you're trusting an agentic system — pilots, air traffic controllers, flight management software. We know how to govern this. We have liability frameworks, certification requirements, black boxes, independent investigation bodies. We just haven't built any of that for AI yet.

What Drupal offers in this space is structural transparency. Content has provenance. You can see who created it, when, what revision it's on, what workflow state it passed through. When AI is integrated into that system, the AI's contributions can be logged, reviewed, and attributed in the same way. That's the beginning of a verifiable AI layer — not cryptographic yet, but architecturally honest in a way that most AI deployments are not.

The zero-day exploit window is now down to seven days, according to Jim Zemlin from the Linux Foundation. In 2020 it was sixty. The security argument for keeping AI tightly integrated with auditable, open-source infrastructure isn't a theory. It is a requirement.

The sovereignty argument

David Shrier from Imperial College described intelligence as the next sovereign battlefield. The concentration of AI capability inside roughly eight companies is a structural problem. Hyperscalers are, in effect, concentrations of intelligence. Open source is the mechanism for distributing that intelligence more broadly.

Tanzania's Minister of Technology put it in terms I found more useful: her government is no longer a passive consumer of technology. It's an active creator. 90% of government systems are on open source. The savings from licence elimination have been reinvested in people. The workforce now owns the systems it builds.

The Drupal parallel is direct. When you run AI on Drupal, you're running it on infrastructure no single vendor controls. The model can be swapped. The hosting can be changed. The data stays yours. This is not a minor point — the lock-in risk in AI is real, and it's coming fast. The organisations building AI on proprietary stacks are creating dependencies they will spend years trying to unwind.

Morocco is building a 1 GW data centre and training 100,000 people a year in digital skills, specifically so it can run sovereign AI infrastructure with local values embedded. That's "open source as an instrument of sovereignty" at national scale. The same logic can apply at the organisational level.

The governance argument

The DPI sessions drove home a point that applies directly to AI: the technical system is rarely the problem. The governance is. Ethiopia has 98% ID coverage and 92% payment wallet adoption — and yet fewer than 5% of people can actually access the protections those systems are supposed to provide. The technology works but the governance doesn't.

Armando Manzueta from the Dominican Republic put it cleanly: treat AI with the same governance rigour as your core infrastructure. Without proper guardrails and oversight, you shouldn't do it at all. Human oversight must be embedded so mistakes can be corrected in real time.

This is an argument Drupal has been making implicitly for twenty-five years. Content governance — who can publish what, when, through what process — is the foundational problem that Drupal was built to solve. The workflows, roles, permissions, and moderation tools are a governance system for information. Extending that to AI output is not a conceptual leap. It just extends what Drupal already does.

The Premise

Here is the argument in full: the AI conversation at the UN kept arriving at the same destination from different directions. You need a harness, not just models. The harness needs to constrain the model to verified data. It needs to aggregate intelligence across sources. It needs human oversight and editorial control. It needs to be open source so it can be audited, forked, and owned. It needs governance built into the architecture, not bolted on afterwards.

What does that remind you of? Drupal with AI integration.

The Drupal work isn't finished. The AI modules aren't mature yet. The work won't be easy. I'm suggesting that the architectural foundation is right, and the architectural foundation is the hardest part. Most organisations are trying to build AI workflows on systems that weren't designed for governance, structured content, or auditability. They're going to spend a lot of time and money discovering what the DPI world learned the hard way: the technology problem is tractable. The governance problem is where things break. Our community even has a Road Map that describes many of these challenges.

Drupal solved the governance problem for content a long time ago. That foundation is now worth something more than it was worth two years ago.

Matthew Saunders works in AI and open-source infrastructure at amazee.io and has been building on Drupal since 2006.

Artificial intelligence is changing how we build, manage, and deliver digital experiences. But AI isn’t just a developer conversation. It’s also a conversation for architects, product owners, marketers, digital strategists, executives, and organisational leaders.

That’s why DrupalCon Rotterdam is introducing two dedicated AI summits on Monday, 28th September. Each has a different focus, but together they provide a complete picture of what AI means for the future of Drupal.

The AI Dev Summit

The AI Dev Summit is built for the people creating the next generation of Drupal experiences.

If you enjoy building, experimenting, and solving technical challenges, this summit is for you. Sessions focus on practical implementation, emerging AI capabilities, and the tools developers need to begin building AI-powered Drupal solutions today.

Topics include:

• AI-assisted development
• Drupal AI and Drupal CMS
• Canvas and modern AI workflows
• Building with AI frameworks and services
• Real-world technical demonstrations
• Best practices from experienced contributors

Whether you’re already working with AI or just beginning to explore what’s possible, the AI Dev Summit offers practical knowledge you can apply immediately.

The Enterprise AI Summit

Technology alone doesn’t create transformation. Organisations also need leadership, governance, strategy, and clear business objectives.

The Enterprise AI Summit focuses on those conversations.

Designed for digital leaders, executives, product managers, architects, and decision-makers, this summit explores how organisations can responsibly adopt AI while delivering measurable value.

Sessions examine questions such as:

• How should organisations develop an AI strategy?
• What governance models are needed?
• Where can AI deliver measurable business value?
• How do security, privacy, and compliance influence adoption?
• What organisational changes are required for successful AI implementation?
• What projects have leading global organisations deployed?

Rather than concentrating on implementation details, this summit focuses on helping organisations make informed decisions about AI.

Different audiences. Shared goals.

While each summit has its own emphasis, they are closely connected.

Successful AI initiatives require both technical expertise and organisational leadership.

Developers need leaders who understand the opportunities and challenges AI presents. Leaders need developers who can turn strategy into working solutions.

By offering both summits, DrupalCon recognises that AI adoption succeeds when technical innovation and business strategy move together.

Which summit should you attend?

Choose the AI Dev Summit if you:

• Build Drupal websites and applications
• Want hands-on technical sessions
• Are interested in Drupal AI, Canvas, and AI development tools
• Enjoy learning by seeing practical demonstrations
• Meet the makers of Drupal AI and expert practioners

Choose the Enterprise AI Summit if you:

• Lead digital strategy or technology initiatives
• Make technology investment decisions
• Manage products, teams, or digital transformation
• Want to understand how AI fits into organisational goals
• Meet leading practitioners and peers who have delivered successful solutions within their organizations

Of course, if your role bridges both worlds, you’ll likely find value in either summit.

Join us in Rotterdam

Whether you’re writing code, defining strategy, or helping your organisation navigate the future of AI, DrupalCon Rotterdam has a summit designed for you.

Whichever path you choose, you’ll leave with practical insights, new connections, and a deeper understanding of how AI is shaping the Drupal ecosystem.

We look forward to seeing you in Rotterdam.

Artificial intelligence is changing how we build, manage, and deliver digital experiences. But AI isn’t just a developer conversation. It’s also a conversation for architects, product owners, marketers, digital strategists, executives, and organisational leaders.

That’s why DrupalCon Rotterdam is introducing two dedicated AI summits on Monday, 28th September. Each has a different focus, but together they provide a complete picture of what AI means for the future of Drupal.

The AI Dev Summit

The AI Dev Summit is built for the people creating the next generation of Drupal experiences.

If you enjoy building, experimenting, and solving technical challenges, this summit is for you. Sessions focus on practical implementation, emerging AI capabilities, and the tools developers need to begin building AI-powered Drupal solutions today.

Topics include:

• AI-assisted development
• Drupal AI and Drupal CMS
• Canvas and modern AI workflows
• Building with AI frameworks and services
• Real-world technical demonstrations
• Best practices from experienced contributors

Whether you’re already working with AI or just beginning to explore what’s possible, the AI Dev Summit offers practical knowledge you can apply immediately.

The Enterprise AI Summit

Technology alone doesn’t create transformation. Organisations also need leadership, governance, strategy, and clear business objectives.

The Enterprise AI Summit focuses on those conversations.

Designed for digital leaders, executives, product managers, architects, and decision-makers, this summit explores how organisations can responsibly adopt AI while delivering measurable value.

Sessions examine questions such as:

• How should organisations develop an AI strategy?
• What governance models are needed?
• Where can AI deliver measurable business value?
• How do security, privacy, and compliance influence adoption?
• What organisational changes are required for successful AI implementation?
• What projects have leading global organisations deployed?

Rather than concentrating on implementation details, this summit focuses on helping organisations make informed decisions about AI.

Different audiences. Shared goals.

While each summit has its own emphasis, they are closely connected.

Successful AI initiatives require both technical expertise and organisational leadership.

Developers need leaders who understand the opportunities and challenges AI presents. Leaders need developers who can turn strategy into working solutions.

By offering both summits, DrupalCon recognises that AI adoption succeeds when technical innovation and business strategy move together.

Which summit should you attend?

Choose the AI Dev Summit if you:

• Build Drupal websites and applications
• Want hands-on technical sessions
• Are interested in Drupal AI, Canvas, and AI development tools
• Enjoy learning by seeing practical demonstrations
• Meet the makers of Drupal AI and expert practioners

Choose the Enterprise AI Summit if you:

• Lead digital strategy or technology initiatives
• Make technology investment decisions
• Manage products, teams, or digital transformation
• Want to understand how AI fits into organisational goals
• Meet leading practitioners and peers who have delivered successful solutions within their organizations

Of course, if your role bridges both worlds, you’ll likely find value in either summit.

Join us in Rotterdam

Whether you’re writing code, defining strategy, or helping your organisation navigate the future of AI, DrupalCon Rotterdam has a summit designed for you.

Whichever path you choose, you’ll leave with practical insights, new connections, and a deeper understanding of how AI is shaping the Drupal ecosystem.

We look forward to seeing you in Rotterdam.

By the Drupal AI Initiative

A year ago, we launched the Drupal AI Initiative with a published strategy and a bet that AI would matter enormously to Drupal's future. Today the initiative spans 32 organizations and more than 50 contributors, shipping against a public 2026 roadmap.

As the work has grown, it's become clear that our AI strategy needs to cover two distinct areas. While innovation and product development remain core goals across everything we do, we are organizing our day-to-day execution into two workstreams: Inside AI, led by Christoph Breidert, and Outside AI, a new stream led by Scott Falconer. 

The unified AI initiative leadership team - made up of the existing initiative members - will continue to shape our overarching roadmap, while Christoph and Scott ensure that vision is executed. We will outline this leadership team and other key supporting roles in an upcoming post.

The core difference: Inside AI brings AI tools into the Drupal interface to assist the people using it. Outside AI makes Drupal the platform external AI agents reach for and act on. Dries Buytaert recently published an article on Launching Drupal's Outside AI workstream.

Inside AI

Inside AI is AI inside Drupal, for the people using it: assistants, in-product workflows, page-building, and the rest of the user-facing surface. This is the work the initiative has been driving for the past year, and it continues against the 2026 roadmap already in flight.

Outside AI

Outside AI is AI outside Drupal, acting on Drupal. A person, agency, host, or developer is using an external agent or builder tool, and that agent needs to start with Drupal, connect to Drupal, inspect Drupal, change Drupal, verify Drupal, migrate into Drupal, or launch Drupal. 

What's next

You'll see public roadmaps from both streams. Inside AI continues against its existing 2026 roadmap; Outside AI will publish its own outcomes and milestones, with a first proof of direction targeted for DrupalCon Rotterdam. Where both streams need the same capability, the answer is usually one shared Drupal contribution, not two parallel builds.

Get involved

The initiative is open, and both streams need contributors  -  whether you write code, test against real agent workflows, work on documentation, or bring a use case from your own agency or organization.

• Read the strategy and the public 2026 roadmap to see where each stream is headed.
• Collaborate with our partners to deliver the latest AI features to your users.
• Become an AI Partner.
• Join the conversation in the #ai-initiative channel on Drupal Slack.
• Check the issue queues for Inside AI and Outside AI work, and pick something up.

Not sure where to start? Come say hello in Slack and we'll help you find a first contribution.
 

By the Drupal AI Initiative

A year ago, we launched the Drupal AI Initiative with a published strategy and a bet that AI would matter enormously to Drupal's future. Today the initiative spans 32 organizations and more than 50 contributors, shipping against a public 2026 roadmap.

As the work has grown, it's become clear that our AI strategy needs to cover two distinct areas. While innovation and product development remain core goals across everything we do, we are organizing our day-to-day execution into two workstreams: Inside AI, led by Christoph Breidert, and Outside AI, a new stream led by Scott Falconer. 

The unified AI initiative leadership team - made up of the existing initiative members - will continue to shape our overarching roadmap, while Christoph and Scott ensure that vision is executed. We will outline this leadership team and other key supporting roles in an upcoming post.

The core difference: Inside AI brings AI tools into the Drupal interface to assist the people using it. Outside AI makes Drupal the platform external AI agents reach for and act on.

Inside AI

Inside AI is AI inside Drupal, for the people using it: assistants, in-product workflows, page-building, and the rest of the user-facing surface. This is the work the initiative has been driving for the past year, and it continues against the 2026 roadmap already in flight.

Outside AI

Outside AI is AI outside Drupal, acting on Drupal. A person, agency, host, or developer is using an external agent or builder tool, and that agent needs to start with Drupal, connect to Drupal, inspect Drupal, change Drupal, verify Drupal, migrate into Drupal, or launch Drupal. 

What's next

You'll see public roadmaps from both streams. Inside AI continues against its existing 2026 roadmap; Outside AI will publish its own outcomes and milestones, with a first proof of direction targeted for DrupalCon Rotterdam. Where both streams need the same capability, the answer is usually one shared Drupal contribution, not two parallel builds.

Get involved

The initiative is open, and both streams need contributors  -  whether you write code, test against real agent workflows, work on documentation, or bring a use case from your own agency or organization.

• Read the strategy and the public 2026 roadmap to see where each stream is headed.
• Collaborate with our partners to deliver the latest AI features to your users.
• Become an AI Partner.
• Join the conversation in the #ai-initiative channel on Drupal Slack.
• Check the issue queues for Inside AI and Outside AI work, and pick something up.

Not sure where to start? Come say hello in Slack and we'll help you find a first contribution.
 

At Tag1, we believe in proving AI within our own work before recommending it to clients. This post is part of our AI Applied content series, where team members share real stories of how they're using Artificial Intelligence and the insights and lessons they learn along the way. Here, Dénes Szabó (Drupal Developer) built LinkStash, a production-ready Drupal 11 bookmarking module, in one weekend using Claude Sonnet 4.5.

Just two months after the milestone release of Drupal AI 1.3.0, we are thrilled to announce that Drupal AI 1.4.0 is officially here!

With the 1.x branch reaching a high level of maturity and stability, we are excited to transition into a more predictable, bi-monthly minor release cadence. Moving forward, the Drupal community can look forward to a steady, reliable stream of improvements, new integrations, and expanded platform capabilities.

Drupal AI 1.4.0 represents a major evolutionary step, focusing heavily on extensibility, scalability, normalization, and preparing the broader ecosystem for the next generation of AI-powered digital experiences.

Let's dive into what's new in this release.

1. A Highly Extensible AI Ecosystem for Developers

One of our primary themes for 1.4.0 is giving contributed module developers the tools they need to extend and enrich Drupal AI. We want to make extending this module as seamless as writing a simple prompt.

Markdown Editor Extensibility

Contrib modules can now extend the markdown editor experience directly. The newly available Document Loader integration, for example, allows content creators to load content from virtually any document type directly into their editor workflow.

This architectural improvement opens the door for the community to build richer editor experiences and provider-specific tooling without requiring any modifications to Drupal AI core.

New "Skills" and Drush Generate Commands

To radically accelerate development speed and reduce boilerplate code, we are introducing both AI "skills" and drush generate commands that allow developers to rapidly generate:

• AI Providers
• AI Automator Types and Rules
• AI Guardrails
• Field Widget Actions
• Operation Types
• AI API Explorers
• Function Calls
• Function Groups

For teams utilizing coding agents or AI-assisted development workflows, these new skills can automatically generate integrations that strictly follow Drupal AI best practices—saving hours of development time.

2. Chat Normalization Across Processors

Image showcasing Slack Chat Processor together with the Webform Agent.

One of the most significant architectural milestones in 1.4.0 is the introduction of normalization for chat systems - an abstraction layer that decouples chat interfaces from their underlying AI processors, so integrations are no longer tightly bound to specific implementations.

This opens the door to immediate, practical use cases: the newly introduced Slack Chat processor lets team members communicate with Drupal AI agents directly through Slack.

More broadly, it lays the groundwork for the upcoming AI Agents processor release and makes it significantly easier to build, package, and reuse conversational, multi-channel AI experiences across providers and platforms.

3. AI Automators + Views Bulk Operations

Handling content at scale is one of Drupal's core strengths, and in 1.4.0 we are supercharging this capability. AI Automators can now execute any configured rule or AI type directly as a Views Bulk Operation (VBO).

This integration unleashes massive efficiency gains for content editors and site administrators. Instead of running AI operations page-by-page, teams can trigger complex, AI-driven workflows across hundreds or thousands of entities simultaneously.

Site builders can now configure Views to bulk-execute tasks such as:

• Automated Image Alt Text Generation for media libraries.
• Bulk Summarization of newly migrated archival content.
• Large-scale Classification and Tagging for taxonomies.
• Batch Translation of product descriptions or documentation.
• Custom AI-powered Editorial Workflows tailored to your specific business logic.

This is a massive usability win for teams responsible for maintaining and optimizing large, enterprise-scale content repositories.

4. Strengthening Drupal AI for Enterprise Reliability

Enterprise-grade operations demand high availability. Drupal AI 1.4.0 lays the crucial architectural groundwork for robust failover and redundancy support across your entire AI stack.

The module's architecture is now fully equipped to handle advanced failover processes. In the near future, site builders will be able to use powerful tools like ECA (Events, Conditions, Actions) to configure custom AI routing logic, unlocking enterprise-ready scenarios, such as:

• Automatic Failover: Instantly routing requests to a backup provider if your primary provider experiences an outage.
• Smart Routing: Directing AI queries based on real-time cost or latency metrics.
• Content-Type Routing: Using different LLM providers depending on the complexity of the content type.
• Custom Pipelines: Applying specialized response-handling pipelines to clean or format data on the fly.

This represents a significant step toward securing permanent, enterprise-grade reliability for AI in Drupal.

5. Advanced Guardrails and Real-Time Security

The guardrails feature introduced in 1.3.0 has received a massive upgrade in this release, making Drupal AI safer and more production-ready for large-scale, public-facing deployments.

In 1.4.0, guardrails can now:

• Be Configured Globally: Apply safety and policy checks automatically across all outgoing and incoming requests.
• Protect Real-Time Streaming: Enforce guardrails on streaming responses in real time, preventing unsafe content from reaching the user mid-generation.
• Limit Input Length: Enforce strict prompt length limitations.

The input length limit is a vital security layer designed to prevent "denial-of-wallet" attacks, where malicious actors attempt to spike your API costs by sending exceptionally large, resource-intensive prompts to your providers.
Furthermore, our new real-time streaming guardrails represent a unique solution that very few AI frameworks—and virtually no other CMS platforms—can offer out of the box.

Get Started with 1.4.0 Today!

Ultimately, Drupal AI 1.4.0 is less about flashy UI features and more about strengthening our platform's foundational architecture for the future.

With normalized chat interfaces, failover-ready systems, hardened security guardrails, deep VBO integrations, and stateful provider capabilities, this release solidifies Drupal AI as a more reliable, more extensible, and more enterprise-ready platform — built for the open web.

Update your modules, explore the new Drush generators, test out the Slack integrations, and let us know what you build!

• Visit the Drupal AI project to download 1.4.0 today.
• Watch a full video highlighting the main features of Drupal AI 1.4.0.

For details on the roadmap or to get involved in the initiative, visit our project page on Drupal.org.
 

Just two months after the milestone release of Drupal AI 1.3.0, we are thrilled to announce that Drupal AI 1.4.0 is officially here!

With the 1.x branch reaching a high level of maturity and stability, we are excited to transition into a more predictable, bi-monthly minor release cadence. Moving forward, the Drupal community can look forward to a steady, reliable stream of improvements, new integrations, and expanded platform capabilities.

Drupal AI 1.4.0 represents a major evolutionary step, focusing heavily on extensibility, scalability, normalization, and preparing the broader ecosystem for the next generation of AI-powered digital experiences.

Let's dive into what's new in this release.

1. A Highly Extensible AI Ecosystem for Developers

One of our primary themes for 1.4.0 is giving contributed module developers the tools they need to extend and enrich Drupal AI. We want to make extending this module as seamless as writing a simple prompt.

Markdown Editor Extensibility

Contrib modules can now extend the markdown editor experience directly. The newly available Document Loader integration, for example, allows content creators to load content from virtually any document type directly into their editor workflow.

This architectural improvement opens the door for the community to build richer editor experiences and provider-specific tooling without requiring any modifications to Drupal AI core.

New "Skills" and Drush Generate Commands

To radically accelerate development speed and reduce boilerplate code, we are introducing both AI "skills" and drush generate commands that allow developers to rapidly generate:

• AI Providers
• AI Automator Types and Rules
• AI Guardrails
• Field Widget Actions
• Operation Types
• AI API Explorers
• Function Calls
• Function Groups

For teams utilizing coding agents or AI-assisted development workflows, these new skills can automatically generate integrations that strictly follow Drupal AI best practices—saving hours of development time.

2. Chat Normalization Across Processors

Image showcasing Slack Chat Processor together with the Webform Agent.

One of the most significant architectural milestones in 1.4.0 is the introduction of normalization for chat systems - an abstraction layer that decouples chat interfaces from their underlying AI processors, so integrations are no longer tightly bound to specific implementations.

This opens the door to immediate, practical use cases: the newly introduced Slack Chat processor lets team members communicate with Drupal AI agents directly through Slack.

More broadly, it lays the groundwork for the upcoming AI Agents processor release and makes it significantly easier to build, package, and reuse conversational, multi-channel AI experiences across providers and platforms.

3. AI Automators + Views Bulk Operations

Handling content at scale is one of Drupal's core strengths, and in 1.4.0 we are supercharging this capability. AI Automators can now execute any configured rule or AI type directly as a Views Bulk Operation (VBO).

This integration unleashes massive efficiency gains for content editors and site administrators. Instead of running AI operations page-by-page, teams can trigger complex, AI-driven workflows across hundreds or thousands of entities simultaneously.

Site builders can now configure Views to bulk-execute tasks such as:

• Automated Image Alt Text Generation for media libraries.
• Bulk Summarization of newly migrated archival content.
• Large-scale Classification and Tagging for taxonomies.
• Batch Translation of product descriptions or documentation.
• Custom AI-powered Editorial Workflows tailored to your specific business logic.

This is a massive usability win for teams responsible for maintaining and optimizing large, enterprise-scale content repositories.

4. Strengthening Drupal AI for Enterprise Reliability

Enterprise-grade operations demand high availability. Drupal AI 1.4.0 lays the crucial architectural groundwork for robust failover and redundancy support across your entire AI stack.

The module's architecture is now fully equipped to handle advanced failover processes. In the near future, site builders will be able to use powerful tools like ECA (Events, Conditions, Actions) to configure custom AI routing logic, unlocking enterprise-ready scenarios, such as:

• Automatic Failover: Instantly routing requests to a backup provider if your primary provider experiences an outage.
• Smart Routing: Directing AI queries based on real-time cost or latency metrics.
• Content-Type Routing: Using different LLM providers depending on the complexity of the content type.
• Custom Pipelines: Applying specialized response-handling pipelines to clean or format data on the fly.

This represents a significant step toward securing permanent, enterprise-grade reliability for AI in Drupal.

5. Advanced Guardrails and Real-Time Security

The guardrails feature introduced in 1.3.0 has received a massive upgrade in this release, making Drupal AI safer and more production-ready for large-scale, public-facing deployments.

In 1.4.0, guardrails can now:

• Be Configured Globally: Apply safety and policy checks automatically across all outgoing and incoming requests.
• Protect Real-Time Streaming: Enforce guardrails on streaming responses in real time, preventing unsafe content from reaching the user mid-generation.
• Limit Input Length: Enforce strict prompt length limitations.

The input length limit is a vital security layer designed to prevent "denial-of-wallet" attacks, where malicious actors attempt to spike your API costs by sending exceptionally large, resource-intensive prompts to your providers.
Furthermore, our new real-time streaming guardrails represent a unique solution that very few AI frameworks—and virtually no other CMS platforms—can offer out of the box.

Get Started with 1.4.0 Today!

Ultimately, Drupal AI 1.4.0 is less about flashy UI features and more about strengthening our platform's foundational architecture for the future.

With normalized chat interfaces, failover-ready systems, hardened security guardrails, deep VBO integrations, and stateful provider capabilities, this release solidifies Drupal AI as a more reliable, more extensible, and more enterprise-ready platform — built for the open web.

Update your modules, explore the new Drush generators, test out the Slack integrations, and let us know what you build!

• Visit the Drupal AI project to download 1.4.0 today.
• Watch a full video highlighting the main features of Drupal AI 1.4.0.

For details on the roadmap or to get involved in the initiative, visit our project page on Drupal.org.
 

Join us THURSDAY, June 18 at 1pm ET / 10am PT, for our regularly scheduled call to chat about all things Drupal and nonprofits. (Convert to your local time zone.)

We don't have anything specific on the agenda this month, so we'll have plenty of time to discuss anything that's on our minds at the intersection of Drupal and nonprofits. Got something specific you want to talk about? Feel free to share ahead of time in our collaborative Google document at https://nten.org/drupal/notes!

All nonprofit Drupal devs and users, regardless of experience level, are always welcome on this call.

This free call is sponsored by NTEN.org and open to everyone.

Information on joining the meeting can be found in our collaborative Google document.

Drupal 12 is coming later this year. As with previous major releases, the contributed ecosystem will require updating for breaking changes . Thousands of modules and themes will need their deprecated API uses updated before they are ready. Doing that by hand, across all of contrib, would cost the community an enormous number of hours.

That is the job the Project Update Bot exists to do. We have refreshed it, and it now targets Drupal 12 readiness: it scans contributed projects automatically and opens issues with patches that fix deprecated API uses for you.

If you are a maintainer, you should already know the bot. For the Drupal 12 cycle, our rector rules grew to cover more than 80% of the deprecated API uses introduced in that release. Using our proven toolset: Gábor Hojtsy's Upgrade Status for the analysis, and Drupal Rector for the fixes, now maintained primarily by SWIS and the glue that puts it all together Project Analysis.

Two things improved this round. Rule coverage is more complete, some of that came from AI-generated rector rules based on Dries Buytaert's drupal-digests. And submodule dependencies are now resolved during analysis. In the earlier cycles we scanned submodules but not their dependencies, which caused failed scans and false errors. That is fixed now, so results are cleaner and considerably more accurate.

Patches arrive as either GitLab or Drupal.org issues. The two work a little differently, and every issue the bot opens explains how to apply the patch, pause the bot, or close it. You stay in control of your project throughout.

If you have questions or want to help, we are in #d12readiness on Drupal Slack. And if a patch looks wrong, tell us so we can fix the rule for everyone, open an issue in the Drupal Rector or project_analysis queue.

The bot builds on a lot of other people's work in Upgrade Status, Drupal Rector and drupal-digests. Thanks also to the maintainers who let us test the refreshed bot on their repositories.

This blog post summarizes the key insights from the CX Decoded podcast episode featuring Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal and Executive Chairman of Acquia.

In the fast-moving world of digital experience, few names carry as much weight as Dries Buytaert. As the creator of Drupal, he has spent over two decades navigating the evolution of the web. But in his latest appearance on the CX Decoded podcast, Dries issued a candid warning: AI isn’t just another tool - it is a fundamental disruption that is stress-testing every business model in its path.

During the conversation, Dries broke down the "Stable Triangle" of open source and explored why the rise of AI is creating a period of both incredible excitement and existential fear.

The Disruption of the "Stable Triangle"

For 20 years, the Drupal ecosystem has relied on three balanced sides:

1. The Product: The Drupal software itself.
2. The Ecosystem: The digital agencies that build on the platform.
3. The Community: The contributors who maintain the code.

AI is currently hitting all three sides simultaneously. It is changing user expectations for what a CMS should do, challenging the hourly-billing model of agencies, and flooding the contributor community with "AI slop."

The Rise of "AI Slop" and the "Can-tribution"

One of the most provocative points Dries made was the distinction between a contribution and a can-tribution.

Because AI lowers the barrier to entry, anyone can now generate a thousand lines of code and submit it to an open-source project. This sounds like a win for innovation, but Dries warns of "AI slop" - low-quality, AI-generated code that lacks context or security rigor. For human maintainers, reviewing this influx of code is exhausting.

The takeaway: Just because you can contribute doesn't mean you should if you don't understand what the AI has produced. Quality and accountability must remain human-led.

Agencies: Moving Beyond the Hour

The agency world is facing a reckoning. If an AI can generate a website or a specific feature in seconds, charging by the hour becomes a race to the bottom.

Dries argues that agencies must evolve. Their value will no longer be in the "writing of code," but in strategic configuration, high-level architecture, and accountability. In an AI world, clients aren't paying for labor; they are paying for a partner who can guarantee that the AI-generated solution actually works, is secure, and achieves business goals.

The Broken Economics of AI Crawling

Dries also touched on the "broken deal" between publishers and AI companies. Currently, AI crawlers extract value from publishers' content to train models, often giving nothing back in return - no traffic, no revenue, and no attribution.

He highlighted a potential shift toward marketplace models (similar to what companies like Cloudflare are exploring) where publishers can set terms for how their data is used. For mid-sized publishers, this might be the only way to survive the "extraction economy."

A Cautionary Tale: The Tailwind Labs Lesson

The podcast concluded with a sobering example: Tailwind Labs. Dries used this as a "canary in the coal mine" for business models. When the thing you sell (like a CSS framework or specific design components) can be perfectly specified and generated by an AI prompt, your original value proposition disappears.

The Final Verdict

Dries’s message to CX leaders and developers is simple: Prototype fast with AI, but build for the long term with a robust CMS. AI is an incredible accelerator for those with expertise, but a dangerous trap for those looking for shortcuts. To survive the stress test, businesses must move away from selling "tasks" and start selling "results and reliability."

To hear the full conversation, check out the CX Decoded podcast episode on CMSWire.

Author and photos: Martin Anderson-Clutz
Originally posted on Acquia.com blog

Enterprise AI is about cost management; Drupal's AI Summit shows community-driven acceleration. Drupal: the best CMS for the agentic web.

Attending a massive tech gathering like apidays New York 2026 provides a fascinating macro-lens view of where our industry is heading. With ten co-located conferences happening simultaneously, the event served as a perfect melting pot for the cross-pollination of ideas across different sectors of software architecture. Yet, while APIs served as the undeniable common thread weaving through nearly every presentation, stepping between the mainstream enterprise tracks and the co-located Drupal AI Summit felt like walking into two entirely different worlds.

The contrast highlighted a critical tension in technology today: the corporate race to manage costs and practical enterprise constraints, versus an open-source community’s agile, collaborative push toward a truly agentic web.

The Enterprise Reality Check: APIs as the New Agent UX

In the main apidays sessions, the initial euphoric hype around generative AI has clearly given way to hard-nosed engineering pragmatism. The prevailing sentiment among enterprise builders boiled down to two foundational rules:

• If it can be deterministic, keep it deterministic: AI can be an incredible asset, but it should not be the default solution for every problem. If a task can be solved using traditional, deterministic software tools, it absolutely should be, because those solutions remain cheaper, faster, and infinitely more reliable. When AI is required, developers should focus on deploying the minimum effective model necessary for that specific task to avoid wasting resources.
• APIs are the user interface for AI agents: For a decade, we built APIs for human developers or mobile applications. Today, we are building for autonomous consumers. An AI agent reads API specifications in real-time to execute tasks. If your APIs are poorly documented (suffering from either too much or too little documentation), too numerous per endpoint, or inconsistent in how they respond to queries with incomplete information, AI agents won't try to guess—they will simply abandon your system to look for different tools instead.

While these insights are incredibly valuable for infrastructure stability, the mainstream talks frequently veered toward selling proprietary products rather than exploring open topics, and genuine, collaborative case studies were rare. The most inspiring apidays session that stood completely apart from the product pitches focused on AGTP (Agent Transfer Protocol), presented by Chris Hood of Nomotic. AGTP is a proposed application-layer communication protocol designed to be a peer to commonly used standards like SMTP and HTTP, but architected from the ground up specifically for communication between AI agents. I'll talk more about AGTP more in an upcoming post.

The Open-Source Counterweight: Shifting Focus from Middleware to Marketers

Stepping into the Drupal AI Summit offered a completely different energy, characterized by an optimistic tone and solutions rooted entirely in freely available, open-source tools.

Standing room only at the Drupal AI Summit in New York City

Where the broader enterprise tracks viewed APIs as rigid backend guardrails to keep AI contained, the Drupal tracks explored how these emerging agentic capabilities can transform actual user and author experiences. This was the core focus of my own presentation, "AI-driven DXP: New Horizons for Marketers".

While the enterprise is busy worrying about model optimization, the digital experience platform (DXP) ecosystem is looking at how agentic AI fundamentally redefines how marketing teams create, manage, and orchestrate content. In an AI-driven DXP, the traditional boundaries of content management melt away. Instead of treating the CMS as a passive repository, an ecosystem built on agentic AI allows marketers to deploy autonomous workflows that can intelligently adapt experiences, connect disjointed data sources, and scale personalization without requiring manual engineering oversight.

The summit beautifully balanced these high-level, future-forward visions of marketing horizons with real-world challenges that development teams are solving today.

Real-World Impact Over Slideware

Unlike the abstract trend-decking found elsewhere, the Drupal sessions were rich with actual deployment stories. The sessions demonstrated how the Drupal community is leveraging its enthusiastic embrace of agentic AI to "maintain our edge". A standout example included a highly practical, real-world case study showing how teams are using autonomous AI agents to seamlessly migrate an existing WordPress site into Acquia Source CMS.

The Difference is Striking

In sum, the contrast between the mainstream enterprise tracks and the Drupal AI Summit highlights a significant divergence in the evolution of the agentic web. While the broader industry focuses on cost management and proprietary guardrails, Drupal has found itself as the best CMS for AI. Drupal holds a significant advantage in today's agentic landscape thanks to its mature tooling for structured content, robust enterprise governance features, and an enthusiastic, collaboration-driven community. This unique combination of open-source agility and enterprise-grade architecture ensures that Drupal remains at the forefront of transforming user and author experiences in an AI-driven world.

Watch session recordings

All sessions from Drupal AI Summit NYC are now available to watch on YouTube.

Join us at upcoming events

We have a number of summits and conferences during the year. Visit our events calendar for more details.