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Conor Egan

In order for&nbsp;<a href="https://www.contentstack.com/platforms/ai" target="_blank">AI</a>&nbsp;to become a truly revolutionary force in life and business, we’ll have to trust it with more than just our grunt-work. We’ll have to outsource some of our decision-making as well.That’s where agentic AI comes in.An&nbsp;AI agent&nbsp;is a system you can interact with in plain language that has some amount of capabilities it can manage, including taking actions on your behalf. The simplest AI agents are “helper” agents such as support agents or virtual assistants. (<a href="https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/504767/tragic-life-clippy-worlds-most-hated-virtual-assistant" target="_blank">Clippy</a>&nbsp;was the godfather of this sort of thing). You can ask these agents to book your plane tickets or revise some text, or which barbecue grill would best suit your needs.&nbsp;Other AI agents run when you're not doing anything. They’re constantly listening, and can take some action if they think it's necessary.That makes them close to what we used to call&nbsp;automations. The key difference between an automation and an agent is that the agent has more than one function, and&nbsp;can make its own decisions and interpretations of what it’s supposed to do.&nbsp;&nbsp;Here are a few thoughts about the value of agentic AI as a force multiplier and facilitator, and why companies that are replacing human beings with AI agents are thinking about this technology the wrong way.<h2>Why should we use AI agents?</h2>Not all tasks fit neatly into a simple binary. Think of a governance agent that’s supposed to enforce brand guidelines or highlight when content should get another review. You might want more complexity in its output than a cut-and-dried yes or no.&nbsp;Your AI agent might decide that the problems with a piece of content are egregious enough to block it from being published, or that it needs someone else to review it, or there’s some other review state it should go into. Based on what’s happening, it might decide which tools to apply for the job. There are multiple paths that an AI agent can follow, and it has some agency in deciding what they are.&nbsp;In the Old World, you'd have to account for each of those branching paths, and if the scenario didn't fall into one, then nothing would happen. The advantage of AI agents is that&nbsp;they’re equipped to deal with situations they’ve never seen before.&nbsp;They’re not forced to operate within what they were “programmed” to do.Of course, there's a time-saving aspect as well. Humans are very expensive, and compute is not, so there may be certain repetitive tasks that an agent is better equipped for in terms of resource efficiency.For example, sifting through a great amount of content, summarizing things, identifying outliers — these are all things that can be pretty time-consuming for humans to do. AI agents can do these tasks quickly, and even help you identify opportunities that you might not have discovered yourself.<h2>Contentstack’s rule for AI development</h2>As&nbsp;<a href="https://www.contentstack.com/" target="_blank">Contentstack</a>&nbsp;prepares to roll out new agentic AI features this fall, our Product team has benefitted from a simple guiding principle:&nbsp;If it doesn’t deliver significant user value, we don’t do it.So, what is “user value”? In my opinion, it’s anything that falls into one of these three buckets:Number one, it does something that you're already doing, but 10 times better.&nbsp;For example, instead of sifting through all my data and having to hand-identify all the audiences, an AI agent can break up my audiences based on lookalike models. I could have done this myself, but with AI I can do it (at least) 10X faster.Number two, it allows me to do something that I literally could not do before.&nbsp;It's not just helping me with what I could have done otherwise. The AI enables some net new capability that was not possible before.&nbsp;And number three, it can turn a regular user into a power user.&nbsp;Let’s say we wanted to add natural language search in our CMS, so you could type in and find what you’re looking for without having to figure it out through advanced search. Rather than having to become a search power user or rely on your developers, the AI functionality gives you the same abilities as the most skilled users of the platform.&nbsp;If an AI concept does not meet one or more of these criteria, then it's not worth our team’s investment. And by the way, none of those criteria boil down to “it allows your company to cut the size of its workforce.” Which brings me to my next point…<h2>Why AI agents should enhance human effort, not replace it</h2>So far, companies have taken a couple different approaches with agentic AI. One is trying to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dude-wheres-my-job-conor-egan-shj6e/" target="_blank">literally replace people</a>. So, if you have someone whose job is to do X, they’ll seek to create an agent that does exactly that.But I think we get a lot more value from AI agents when we use them as facilitators, not workforce replacers. You hired smart people to use their talents, right? If that’s the case, you should probably get rid of all the things they have to do in the course of the day that don't differentiate you and your brand. Are there capabilities that you can give a team member via an agent that provides a force multiplier or allows them to provide more value? Start there.We’re quickly entering a world where AI will be able to put marketing on autopilot. It will create the campaigns, it will write the content, it will generate the assets, etc. And my question is always,&nbsp;“If everybody has the exact same tools, how is a great marketer going to beat a good marketer?”&nbsp;Because if you have a system that can spit out average content and everybody's doing it, things are going to be very noisy.It's not that AI can't help you develop novel experiences. But if you're creating content for other humans, then humans need to serve as the judge of taste. When AI tools are generating the same campaign ideas, the most successful marketers are the ones who will be better at deciding which ideas to pursue.&nbsp;<h2>Looking ahead: AI agents will eat more tasks from the bottom up (and that’s a good thing)</h2>Whether it's industrial farming or computers, new technology always eats jobs from the bottom up. It could be literal jobs that you have to do, or those “jobs” could be abstraction layers.In the early days of code, we were interacting directly with the hardware itself and writing in ones and zeros. Then we added operating systems, and now you can use a mouse, which is a layer on top of an operating system. We used to have to manage our infrastructure by taking racks to a server farm and plugging in the cables and installing the software, and now we have cloud services. We used to write Javascript and HTML by hand. Then we developed code frameworks where you don't even need to know the underlying Javascript.&nbsp;AI is the latest layer on top of all this. Soon, you won't necessarily need to know how to use Contentstack. Our platform is an abstraction of an abstraction of a database that you used to have in order to do all these jobs.&nbsp;AI agents are simply the most recent iteration of what technology has been doing for a long time. The real purpose of AI — just like all the advancements that came before it — is to get you to the value part faster. You can now spend most of the hours in your day doing the high value things that are going to have an impact, and less time figuring out how to learn the software.<hr/>Conor Egan&nbsp;is the SVP of Product at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.contentstack.com/">Contentstack</a>. Follow him on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/conoregan/">LinkedIn</a>.

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Contentstack's VP of Product shares his thoughts about the value of agentic AI as a force multiplier and facilitator, and why companies that are replacing human beings with AI agents are thinking about this technology the wrong way.

Agentic AI 101: What's an AI agent and when should they be used?

You know that feeling when you browse a website or use software and everything seems to work exactly as you expect? You can venture anywhere within the product with the confidence that you’ll find what you need. And, after a few minutes, you feel like a power user.&nbsp;While many things go into effective design, these experiences likely have one thing in common: an effective design system.&nbsp;In this blog series, I will explore the benefits of a design system, the challenges of creating one and how we at Contentstack overcame them. Let’s go!<h2>The benefits of a design system</h2>Imagine a world where every button, form, and interaction perfectly aligns with your brand’s identity and user expectations. No more guesswork, no more reinventing the wheel with each new feature. Instead, you have a centralized source of truth that ensures consistency across the board. This doesn’t just make your design team’s job easier; it also creates a smoother, more cohesive experience for your users. They know what to expect and trust you’ll deliver it.In practical terms, a design system streamlines collaboration between designers, developers, and stakeholders. It provides a common language everyone can understand, reducing miscommunication and aligning the team towards a shared vision. This alignment is crucial for maintaining the integrity of the brand identity across all products.A well-crafted design system reduces redundancy by housing reusable components and guidelines. This allows designers to pull components from an official source rather than create them repeatedly. This inadvertently also helps the designs be cohesive and intuitive, fostering a sense of trust within the users and improving their experience.&nbsp;Investing in a design system is a commitment to long-term success. It’s about creating a solid foundation supporting your product's ongoing evolution. We’ve been investing a lot of time in our design system, and while it's always a work in progress, I’m excited to see the positive impact our design system has had on our products, our team and our users.&nbsp;Nothing comes easy. There are challenges involved. Some of these are the easy ones, like planning for the design system, selecting the right tool, figuring out your design philosophy, gathering your tokens, etc. Some challenges, on the other hand, are even bigger. I’m talking about implementation challenges (*cue the scary music).&nbsp;For this article, let's focus on some typical implementation challenges.<h2>Challenges in implementing a design system</h2>Implementing a design system is akin to constructing the foundation of a towering skyscraper; it requires meticulous planning, collaboration and an unwavering commitment to quality. While the end goal promises a streamlined, consistent, and user-friendly product, the journey to get there is riddled with challenges. These challenges can be technical or organizational.One of the biggest challenges? Convincing stakeholders that a design system is worth the effort. Every team faces resource constraints, and often, it is a challenge to invest time if the payoff is not as immediate as a new feature or product. Trust me, I’ve been there.&nbsp;If you are making a case for a new design system, the most compelling arguments fall into three categories: Clarity, accessibility and scalability.<h3>1. Clarity&nbsp;</h3>Why did I pitch the need for a new design system? While we had a first attempt at a design system in place, it was too tech-centric and oriented towards a more tech-savvy user base. Basically, it lacked clarity from the user’s viewpoint. Contentstack's non-technical users were more accustomed to GSuite or marketing tools. This difference was crucial.&nbsp;<h4>Case study: Error messages</h4>Nobody likes to see a dreaded error message. This anxiety is heightened if the information delivered is overly technical or lacks steps to remediate. By standardizing the language, tone, and visual presentation of error messages, a design system ensures that these messages are clear, consistent, and user-friendly across the entire product. This clarity helps users quickly understand the issue and the steps they must take to recover from it.&nbsp;Additionally, a design system can include guidelines for designing helpful and actionable error messages, ensuring that they are informative but also reassuring and constructive, thereby improving the overall user experience during error situations.For example, previously, there were no guiding principles on how an error message had to be displayed. Instead, it was based on how the APIs return an error. Teams were primarily concerned with showing an error if something went wrong without strongly emphasizing the user's perception. The instance below explains what I am talking about:<img src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXeDrIR7QN2xqZD_0Wj1GKJA-EHuICN0zQ8777pJql4qHIXRZ3u30cwSRnEV5qJk9kR455I0PXsUWJvM7F_julA1SnZtveMjTgHTTmec4XKkrPFmGKBb0cPL10T9Ch9X3DDpEDq--It_t26GgIoQcfLJDqoN?key=SqVhrRSvxZMEcpfsnCvqqQ" width="624"/>As per the new Contentstack design philosophy, our guidelines further mandate that:<ol><li>Error or any messaging messages are clear, concise, and helpful.&nbsp;</li><li>Language should be simple and free of technical jargon, with specific descriptions of what went wrong.&nbsp;</li><li>Messages should provide actionable information and offer clear steps for resolution, such as links to help articles or contact information for support.&nbsp;</li><li>The tone should be polite and reassuring, avoiding language that might make the user feel at fault.&nbsp;</li><li>Error messages should be prominently placed visually, and cues like bold text or color should be used to highlight critical information, ensuring users can quickly understand and address the issue.</li><li>They should be screen reader-friendly. (This might be considered an accessibility issue, but you get the point!)</li></ol>Here is an example of an error message that follows the guidelines:<table><tbody><tr><td>[Need “after” screenshot]</td></tr></tbody></table>You can see how the same error, but with the design philosophy applied, is clear, actionable and reduces the user's excess anxiety.<h3>2. Accessibility&nbsp;</h3>I also emphasized that accessibility couldn’t be an afterthought; it needed to be baked into the design system from the ground up. Our existing system lacked this critical component.<h4>Case study: Borderless forms</h4>Our previous design system introduced the concept of borderless forms.<table><tbody><tr><td>[screenshot of borderless form]</td></tr></tbody></table> This made the form feel more like a notebook or freeform text editor. Surely our users (who have used such tools) would find the editing experience familiar.The problem? Our users are accustomed to forms with clear outlines for what can be edited. In the old design:<ul><li>Colors were not identifiable and did not provide a proper visual hierarchy</li><li>UI components were not recognizable due to the borderless nature of our forms</li><li>Keyboard users found it difficult to navigate through the application The solution? In the current design system, borders are back in, making for a more accessible experience </li></ul><table><tbody><tr><td> [screenshot of new entry editor]</td></tr></tbody></table><h3>3. Scalability</h3>Contentstack started as a simple headless CMS. Early in our history, getting by without a formal design system was manageable. However, eventually, with new products and features on the horizon, we needed a more flexible UI—one that would work not only for our CMS product but also for those new products that were coming.&nbsp;To do this would require changes to our existing product as well.&nbsp;<table><tbody><tr><td> [screenshot of two interactions in the platform done two different ways]</td></tr></tbody></table>Here, we can see how the same interaction is applied differently to a different product.<table><tbody><tr><td>[screenshot of the two interactions working the same]</td></tr></tbody></table> Now, we can see a unified interaction across different products. There was some work up front, but by scaling our design system to account for more interactions, we could set a consistent foundation and scale to more products much faster.

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From chaos to cohesion: Implementing effective design systems in digital products

With 2022 almost in the books, I would like to reflect on the past year of our product growth and the journey that we have taken with our customers.&nbsp;&nbsp;This year did not give us much time to celebrate battling back a global pandemic before testing our global economy yet again. Two once-in-a-generation disruptions have shown that being agile and staying in touch with customers is required to stay competitive.We recognized this back in 2011 when our parent company, Raw Engineering, pioneered headless CMS to better serve their clients. Contentstack and the whole composable movement was born out of a failure of old monolithic technologies to give teams the tools to meet the moment.&nbsp;Fast forward to today and that <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021-10-18-gartner-survey-of-over-2000-cios-reveals-the-need-for-enterprises-to-embrace-business-composability-in-2022" target="_blank">movement is now mainstream</a>, the debate finally decided: Composable is the best enterprise architecture choice. Teams of all sizes across all industries are going composable. If you don’t believe me, just watch legacy CMSes trip over themselves to rebrand as “headless” and finally embrace the cloud.However, enterprises choosing composable is just a first step on the journey.&nbsp; Where do you start? How do you integrate? How quickly can you get to the value? Answering these questions drove our product roadmap this year. We challenged ourselves to go beyond the bounds of a traditional headless CMS to create a complete composability platform. Getting composable right is hard, but we help everyone do hard better.Here are some of the ways we did that in our product journey 2022:<h2>Contentstack Marketplace</h2> The first step when it comes to composable is getting all your softwares to communicate. The Contentstack Marketplace includes integrations for dozens of technologies without the need for code. We also released an application framework that allows your developers to write their own applications on top of our platform. I have loved seeing how customers have taken these tools and built incredible capabilities for their content creators.&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure style = "margin: auto; text-align: center;width: auto;"><img alt="Infographic explaining the Contentstack philosophy: Give you the tools to make Contentstack your own." src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/blt7359e2a55efae483/bltbc2dc5b0d9e4fa60/6393bb85fedd22105d09a233/Conor1.png" /><figcaption style = "text-align: center;" style="text-align: center;">The Contentstack Marketplace takes the pain out of composable and gives you the flexibility to extend Contentstack to meet your changing needs.</figcaption></figure><h2>Automation Hub</h2>Now that everything is integrated, you need to build business logic into your stack. As the number of your technologies grows, this can become a real challenge and requires time-consuming and brittle integration code. Automation Hub is a low-code integration and automation product that solves this problem. It allows you to build complex, multi-step workflows that automatically execute across Contentstack and all your other technologies. This saves a massive amount of time and removes the risk of costly errors.<figure style = "margin: auto; text-align: center;width: auto;"><img alt="Infographic illustrating the elements of Contentstack Automation Hub." src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/blt7359e2a55efae483/blt1a98a1fd0d6ea0c1/6393bc6e661bba10794ca4ef/Conor2.png" /><figcaption style = "text-align: center;" style="text-align: center;">Automation Hub automates your business logic, making it feel like all of your tools were purposely built to work together.</figcaption></figure><h2>Mission Control</h2>Modern digital teams now have to manage more channels to meet their customers where they are. It can be easy to completely lose track of what is being done, where and how all of your systems interact. We released Mission Control Analytics to give a birds-eye view of all of this activity. It helps you understand traffic patterns, which SDKs (Software Development Kits) your teams are using and identify potential implementation issues by monitoring API problems across your stack.<figure style = "margin: auto; text-align: center;width: auto;"><img alt="Screenshot showing the dashboard of Contentstack Mission Control." src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/blt7359e2a55efae483/blt74cc1928b46d26df/6393bd364a9a84319e138170/Conor_3.png" /><figcaption style = "text-align: center;" style="text-align: center;">Mission Control lets you monitor all your projects and all your channels in a single view.</figcaption></figure><h2>Contentstack on Azure</h2> This year we went multi-cloud with the addition of Azure hosting. This made us the first multi-cloud SaaS content management platform in the market. We put in a huge amount of work to ensure 100% parity between Azure and AWS deployments. This gives our customers a choice of which architecture they want to use.We are excited to be joining the Azure marketplace next year!<figure style = "margin: auto; text-align: center;width: auto;"><img alt="Microsoft Azure logo, a blue cloud with the words Microsoft Azure.." src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/blt7359e2a55efae483/blte4192be1636cca4a/6393bd916675d51080de0f45/Conor4.png" /><figcaption style = "text-align: center;" style="text-align: center;">Azure hosting lets you choose the cloud that is right for you, then we make sure you never have to think about infrastructure again.</figcaption></figure><h2>Flawless Black Friday and Cyber Monday</h2>Nothing gets us more excited and focused than the holiday season. Some of our customers do over a third of their yearly business in November and December. We receive tens of billions of API calls, each essential for keeping digital experiences available and ready to win new business. Stability and availability are our most sacred obligations and I am happy to say that we maintained 100% uptime for our fifth straight Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I could not be more proud of the team that put in long hours to ensure we delivered yet again.These capabilities are just a few of the 138 enhancements we were able to deliver this year. I want to give huge thanks for the tireless work of our product, engineering, and design teams for never settling for “good enough” and continuing to lead the industry in defining composable.&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure style = "margin: auto; text-align: center;width: autopx;"><img alt="Illustration showing sale signs for Black Friday and Cyber Monday." src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/blt7359e2a55efae483/blteccf9deeea7e8ab4/63975f81898adc2ff7dd3dc0/Black_Friday.jpg" /><figcaption style = "text-align: center;" style="text-align: center;">Black Friday and Cyber Monday are unlike any other events, and we're happy to have delivered for our customers for a fifth straight year.</figcaption></figure>I also want to thank our customers for their faith in us. I am fortunate to have a front row seat to all the customer innovation on our platform. As a product creator, there is nothing more gratifying than seeing customers use the tools you have given in ways that you did not even imagine. They are meeting the moment to deliver great customer experiences, and doing hard better.We learn as much from our customers as they do from us, and some amazing new products are coming next year. I wish I could say more, but we’ll just have to wait until ContentCon 2023 in May. See you next year!

With 2022 almost in the books, I would like to reflect on the past year of our product growth and the journey that we have taken with our customers.  

This year did not give us much time to celebrate battling back a global pandemic before testing our global economy yet again. Two once-in-a-generation disruptions have shown that being agile and staying in touch with customers is required to stay competitive.

We recognized this back in 2011 when our parent company, Raw Engineering, pioneered headless CMS to better serve their clients. Contentstack and the whole composable movement was born out of a failure of old monolithic technologies to give teams the tools to meet the moment. 

, the debate finally decided: Composable is the best enterprise architecture choice. Teams of all sizes across all industries are going composable. If you don’t believe me, just watch legacy CMSes trip over themselves to rebrand as “headless” and finally embrace the cloud.

However, enterprises choosing composable is just a first step on the journey.  Where do you start? How do you integrate? How quickly can you get to the value? Answering these questions drove our product roadmap this year. We challenged ourselves to go beyond the bounds of a traditional headless CMS to create a complete composability platform. Getting composable right is hard, but we help everyone do hard better.

Here are some of the ways we did that in our product journey 2022:

The first step when it comes to composable is getting all your softwares to communicate. The Contentstack Marketplace includes integrations for dozens of technologies without the need for code. We also released an application framework that allows your developers to write their own applications on top of our platform. I have loved seeing how customers have taken these tools and built incredible capabilities for their content creators.  

Now that everything is integrated, you need to build business logic into your stack. As the number of your technologies grows, this can become a real challenge and requires time-consuming and brittle integration code. Automation Hub is a low-code integration and automation product that solves this problem. It allows you to build complex, multi-step workflows that automatically execute across Contentstack and all your other technologies. This saves a massive amount of time and removes the risk of costly errors.

Modern digital teams now have to manage more channels to meet their customers where they are. It can be easy to completely lose track of what is being done, where and how all of your systems interact. We released Mission Control Analytics to give a birds-eye view of all of this activity. It helps you understand traffic patterns, which SDKs (Software Development Kits) your teams are using and identify potential implementation issues by monitoring API problems across your stack.

This year we went multi-cloud with the addition of Azure hosting. This made us the first multi-cloud SaaS content management platform in the market. We put in a huge amount of work to ensure 100% parity between Azure and AWS deployments. This gives our customers a choice of which architecture they want to use.

We are excited to be joining the Azure marketplace next year!

Nothing gets us more excited and focused than the holiday season. Some of our customers do over a third of their yearly business in November and December. We receive tens of billions of API calls, each essential for keeping digital experiences available and ready to win new business. Stability and availability are our most sacred obligations and I am happy to say that we maintained 100% uptime for our fifth straight Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I could not be more proud of the team that put in long hours to ensure we delivered yet again.

These capabilities are just a few of the 138 enhancements we were able to deliver this year. I want to give huge thanks for the tireless work of our product, engineering, and design teams for never settling for “good enough” and continuing to lead the industry in defining composable.  

I also want to thank our customers for their faith in us. I am fortunate to have a front row seat to all the customer innovation on our platform. As a product creator, there is nothing more gratifying than seeing customers use the tools you have given in ways that you did not even imagine. They are meeting the moment to deliver great customer experiences, and doing hard better.

We learn as much from our customers as they do from us, and some amazing new products are coming next year. I wish I could say more, but we’ll just have to wait until ContentCon 2023 in May. See you next year!

Conor Egan

Posts by Conor Egan