There’s a lot of noise about “AI in CMS” right now: flashy demos, single-provider integrations, and vendor marketing that points to feature parity rather than platform transformation. That noise obscures an important truth: the CMS AI era isn’t defined by who added an AI toggle first. It will be defined by who made AI safe, native, auditable, and genuinely useful in real enterprise workflows.
For Freddy Montes, Head of Product, and Maria Fernandez, Product Manager and former Head of UX at dotCMS, AI isn’t a feature; it’s the foundation of a new kind of content management: one where governance, collaboration, and intelligence are native, not bolted on. From planning to publication, we’re rebuilding how digital content is created, governed, and delivered, securely and intelligently.
Below, we synthesize the ideas from our AI-related episodes of the Real Talk, Real Trust podcast with dotCMS AI Vision and explain exactly how they map to what we are building.
Governance First: Because Enterprises Can’t Afford Guesswork
Regulated industries (finance, healthcare, government) don’t just need AI that writes fast. They need AI that can explain itself. That’s why our vision begins with governance, not generation.
Every AI output in dotCMS is traceable, reversible, and auditable, with human review baked into the workflow. Role-based permissions define who can use AI, brand tone and banned term lists enforce voice consistency, and pre-publication compliance scoring ensures no content goes live unchecked.
This approach reflects Maria’s UX perspective that trust is the new speed: users move faster when they feel safe, not when they feel rushed. In her video, AI-Driven UX: Bold Predictions About the Future, Maria describes how AI should feel like an invisible partner, one that helps editors, writers, and marketers move confidently through their workflows without losing creative control.
Multi-AI Orchestration: The Right Model for the Right Task
In reality, no single AI model fits every need. A healthcare brand requires compliance-certified language generation; an eCommerce marketer needs creative fluency. Our AI vision embraces multi-AI orchestration, letting teams choose or automatically route tasks to the right model for the job: OpenAI for ideation, Azure for moderation, Gemini for personalization, and others as needed.
We don’t embed AI.
We orchestrate it, based on compliance, tone, or complexity.
That flexibility creates an enterprise-ready system that’s open, secure, and future-proof. It’s also what Freddy calls “the developer reality”, an idea he explores in AI for Developers: What’s Hype, What’s Real. In that talk, Freddy highlights that AI needs clear APIs, version control, and observability before it can be trusted in production. That insight directly shaped our roadmap for multi-provider support, structured prompt APIs, and SDK-based workflows.
Human + AI Collaboration: Faster, Not Fuzzier
Both UX and product perspectives converge on one core truth: the future of content creation is collaboration, not automation.
dotCMS AI will enable editors to accept or reject AI suggestions in real time, test multiple options instantly, and repurpose content with confidence. AI will act as a context-aware collaborator, suggesting tone adjustments, rewriting content for new channels, or flagging compliance risks, all within the same interface.
Every change will remain reversible, every decision human-led. Because true productivity comes not from removing humans, but from augmenting their intelligence.
Developer-Ready Infrastructure
We’re also ensuring AI is as easy to build on as it is to use. Developers will have CLI tools, SDKs, and structured prompt APIs linked to content types, giving them full control over automation, integrations, and extensibility.
Our long-term goal is a file-based, version-controlled AI configuration system so teams can track brand voice rules, prompt templates, and AI parameters just like they manage code.
For Freddy, this is essential: a CMS AI layer isn’t credible unless developers can debug it, extend it, and trust it. That’s why observability and rollback support are central to the dotCMS architecture.
AI Workflows and Developer Tools: From IDE to Publishing
Our vision extends beyond creation and governance to give developers and content teams a shared, intelligent foundation to build on.
Through the dotCMS MCP (Model Control Protocol), developers can query and audit content and content types, create new ones, and move content through the complete workflow lifecycle, from draft and review to publish, unpublish, and archive.
The MCP also connects seamlessly with IDEs and design tools like Figma, enabling developers to auto-generate components and interfaces that reflect real content structures inside dotCMS. It’s not just automation, it’s orchestration of the entire content model.
On top of that foundation, AI workflows will handle repetitive but essential content tasks: translating content, tagging assets, populating metadata fields from prompts, updating embeddings, and even generating contextual images.
These workflows reduce operational friction so teams can focus on strategy and storytelling while AI handles the structure and scalability behind the scenes.
AI-Powered Search and Chat: Bringing Intelligence to Every Experience
AI in dotCMS isn’t confined to the editorial workspace; it extends all the way to the user experience layer.
With AI-powered search and chat, organizations can add brandable, intelligent assistants directly to their websites or digital experiences. These tools leverage the same orchestration and governance principles that power our editorial AI, ensuring accuracy, consistency, and tone alignment with the brand’s defined voice.
Teams can design and deploy AI-driven search or chatbots in minutes, integrating their existing content, tone, and visual identity. The result: personalized, compliant, and human-feeling interactions that extend the power of dotCMS AI from the back office to the customer interface.
Looking Ahead
Our roadmap reflects both Maria’s human-centered design principles and Freddy’s developer-first infrastructure:
2025: Multi-provider orchestration, AI workflows, SDK endpoints, and field-level generative AI built directly into the editing UI, MCP, and AI powered search and chat.
2026: Brand Voice & Tone configuration, compliance rule sets, AI-powered content optimization, and AI copilots.
From there, AI will evolve into an intelligent layer that continuously learns, predicts, and safeguards, identifying engagement drop-offs, auto-adjusting personalization, and even blocking compliance risks before they occur.
A Smarter, Safer CMS Future
The CMS AI era won’t be defined by who integrated generative text first. It will be defined by who makes AI auditable, contextual, and truly collaborative.
We believe in an AI that supports every role in the content lifecycle, from developer to marketer, without sacrificing trust, compliance, or creativity.
At dotCMS, we’re not waiting for the AI era to arrive.
We’re building it.
Watch the perspectives that inspired this vision:
🎥 AI-Driven UX: Bold Predictions About the Future — Maria Fernandez, Program Manager (formerly Head of UX) at dotCMS
🎥 AI for Developers: What’s Hype, What’s Real — Freddy Montes, Head of Product at dotCMS