Future of Digital Experience Platforms: Insights from Kentico's 2025 Partner Conference

The digital experience platform (DXP) landscape is undergoing its most significant digital transformation in decades, and if you're not paying attention, you're already behind.

As a Kentico Gold Partner, Sagepath Reply recently attended Kentico's annual Partner Conference 2025—an exclusive gathering that offered a front-row seat to Kentico’s vision for DXPs and the approach they are taking with Xperience by Kentico. What we witnessed wasn't just a product roadmap presentation; it was a comprehensive vision for how AI technologies, content management systems (CMS), and personalized custom digital experiences will converge to reshape the way we build digital experiences, manage content, and optimize every digital touchpoint across the customer journey.

CEO Dominik Pinter, CRO Bill Cunningham, and VP of Product Debbie Tucek delivered insights from Kentico’s position, and there were equally valuable contributions from other implementation partners about the changing needs of our industry, clients and partnership frameworks.

Let’s dive into our key takeaways.

The State of Digital Experience in a Turbulent World

The current business climate is nothing short of challenging. Economic headwinds—tariffs, geopolitical conflicts, energy crises, and persistent inflation—are forcing organizations to scrutinize every investment with unprecedented rigor.

Yet, customer expectations for seamless, data-driven experiences have never been higher.

The AI Efficiency Imperative

Business leaders across Sales, Operations, and Service departments are demanding increased efficiency, and they're looking to AI-driven digital experience solutions to deliver it. This creates a fascinating tension: tighter budgets coupled with ambitious performance targets. 

The promise of AI in digital experience platforms (DXPs) is compelling. It's enabling business experts—people who deeply understand their industries but may lack technical expertise—to perform increasingly complex technical tasks through intuitive, simple interfaces. Your clients are becoming more technologically capable, faster than ever before, making data-driven decisions that directly improve conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

Every business on the planet is facing the same mandate, but IT operations consistently have the most aggressive expectations for efficiency gains. Improvement isn’t optional, it’s a matter of how quickly and effectively these improvements can be captured.

A Fundamental Shift in Partnerships

This democratization of technology is reshaping the entire digital marketing and DXP ecosystem. Team structures are evolving. Project scopes are being redefined. Accountability models are shifting.

Most significantly, the role of professional services firms is transforming from being the sole source of expertise to becoming a complementary resource for increasingly capable client teams. This shift is driving a change among savvy agencies and consultancies via alternative approaches to project structures, shared outcomes and greater trust.

The message is clear: adapt to this new partner-model evolution or risk obsolescence.

AI(RA) Everywhere: Kentico's Vision for Intelligent Digital Experience

If there was one overarching theme from the conference, it was this: AI isn’t a feature anymore—it’s the foundation of the modern digital experience platform DXP.

Xperience by Kentico is embedding their artificial intelligence capability (AIRA) across every layer of its platform, and the implications for technical implementation, marketing automation, and personalized content delivery are profound.

Kentico Copilot for Developers

The new Kentico Copilot represents a game-changing toolkit for development teams. With a built-in agent capable of generating code and Kentico-supported AI agents ready to deploy, developers can focus on strategic problem-solving rather than repetitive coding tasks.

This agent-driven development model empowers teams to move faster and prototype more efficiently. The flexibility to choose your preferred LLM means teams aren't locked into a single AI ecosystem. This open approach reflects Kentico's understanding that different organizations have different needs, and it encourages integrating AI where it provides the most value. High value areas to consider adopting:

• DXP Migrations: Which once took weeks can now be accelerated with AI-assisted templates to refactor content, data, widgets and pages. Kentico continues to publish detailed guides on how to do this on their blog and sample prompts/templates in their documentation. 
• Widget Creation: Traditional development gets a turbo boost with thoughtful AI use, producing quality first-time code. If you really dial in your process, you can achieve  100% code creation by only using prompts, as Sean Wright demonstrated. The key to unlocking this is refining an AI workflow which fits your uses and is fed appropriate context….and some trial and error.

Intelligent Content Curation

For content teams, AI is drastically reducing the tedious work which has historically consumed valuable time. Through intelligent content curation and automation:

• Automated translations break down language barriers at scale
• Content variations enable personalized custom experiences without manual duplication
• Auto-categorization ensures content is organized intelligently within content management systems (CMS)

These capabilities redefine AI-driven content management, freeing marketing teams to focus on content strategy, creativity, and improved customer engagement.

Process Automation That Delivers

Perhaps most exciting for digital marketing operations teams is the level of marketing automation now possible within the DXP:

• Marketing campaigns can be generated with AI, from concept to execution
• Content drafting and editing maintain brand voice while accelerating production

The result? More campaigns, faster execution, and better customer experiences—all driving higher conversion rates with the same team size.

Beyond AI: Additional Feature Enhancements

While AI dominates the conversation, Kentico is also delivering crucial enhancements to core digital experience platform capabilities that improve scalability and long-term success.

Customer Journey Insights

The new Customer Journey Insights feature provides analytics across all content channels with actionable recommendations to improve both digital marketing effectiveness and improved customer experience. This unified view eliminates data silos and empowers teams to make data-driven decisions quickly—key for any modern digital transformation initiative.

Enhanced Email Capabilities

Email marketing is getting more sophisticated with:

• More granular recipient-list management
• Detailed journey-step tracking for better attribution and optimization

These improvements ensure that email remains a powerful channel within your digital experience toolkit, helping marketing teams nurture leads and deliver more personalized content.

What's Next: Your Action Plan

The insights from the conference paint an exciting picture, but they also come with urgent action items for every Xperience by Kentico customer and partner.

Migration Is Non-Negotiable

If you're running Kentico 13, mark your calendar: December 31, 2026 is the official Kentico 13 end-of-life date. That might seem distant, but rushing a DXP migration during the 2026 holiday season is a recipe for stress, errors, and budget overruns.

The good news? Kentico’s Migration toolkit, MCP Server and AI tools have significantly reduced migration complexity and duration. Start planning now, and you'll thank yourself later.

Agent-Driven Development Is Ready

Agent-driven widget development is no longer experimental—it’s production-ready within the Kentico ecosystem. However, it’s important to set realistic expectations: design complexity and functional requirements still play a significant role in how effectively AI agents can deliver. The technology is powerful, but human expertise remains essential for complex implementations.

Content Management Is Being Reinvented

AI-powered content management automation is fundamentally changing how marketing teams work. Less time on execution means more time for content strategy, creative development, and identifying the right content for your audience.

This shift from tactical execution to strategic orchestration of digital transformation represents a profound upgrade in how marketing teams create value and deliver consistent digital touchpoints that drive measurable results.

The Partnership Evolution

Partner engagements are evolving rapidly toward blended human-and-AI teams with complementary skillsets working at unprecedented speed. AI isn't replacing partners—it’s becoming a partner itself within this digital-experience ecosystem.

The organizations that thrive will be those that embrace this model: human expertise enhanced by AI technologies, working in tight collaboration with client teams. Speed to launch, learn, improve, and scale will increase exponentially as integrating AI becomes standard practice across professional workflows.

Ready to Transform Your Digital Experience?

The future of digital experience platforms (DXPs) is being written right now. The convergence of AI, content management systems (CMS), and marketing automation is creating opportunities that simply didn’t exist a year ago.

But opportunity alone isn't enough. Execution matters. Strategy matters. Partnership matters.

At Sagepath Reply, we’re not just observing these changes—we’re actively helping clients navigate this transformation. Whether you’re planning a migration to Xperience by Kentico, exploring how AI can accelerate your content operations, or reimagining your entire digital experience platform strategy to improve conversion rates and meet evolving customer expectations, we’re here to help.

Want to dig deeper into these topics? Let’s talk. Reach out to our team and discover how you can leverage these emerging capabilities to deliver exceptional digital experiences that drive real business results.

The future of digital experience platforms is here. Let’s build it together.

About The Author:

Jeff Correa, Director, Enterprise Solutions | Sagepath Reply

Jeff is an enterprise technology and systems engineering expert with over a decade of experience delivering high-impact digital solutions. He specializes in designing and implementing custom products that solve complex business challenges and elevate user experiences. Partnering closely with clients, Jeff defines digital strategies, leads experience design, and oversees the technical execution of large-scale initiatives. His deep expertise is especially valuable in complex B2B environments, where innovation and functionality must work hand in hand.