The CMS space has been doing its usual shape‑shifting act, but early 2026 has felt different. Faster. Messier. More interesting. AI is now baked into almost every workflow, and suddenly everyone’s pretending they always planned it this way.

When I look at what’s actually driving the winners, it’s not the usual “market forces” stuff. It’s much simpler: who has momentum, who has the right foundations, and who isn’t tripping over their own legacy.

The first big shift this year has been community velocity. When those AI‑plugin scaffolding tools landed in January, the platforms with big developer ecosystems just took off. WordPress didn’t magically reinvent itself — it just had thousands of people building clever things overnight. Hard to compete with that kind of compounding energy.

Then there’s architecture, which has quietly become the real dividing line. Apple dropped its new spatial content format in February, and the headless platforms were ready almost immediately. Contentful, Sanity, the usual suspects. Meanwhile, the older CMS vendors were still rummaging around in the attic looking for the right extension point.

Trust still plays its part. In the enterprise world, Adobe and Sitecore remain the safe, predictable choices. Our partnership with Adobe is testament to key benefits of their tech.

But the real story of 2026 is the merging of content, data, and AI into one continuous flow. The platforms that make that feel natural are the ones pulling ahead. A CMS isn’t just a publishing tool anymore — it’s becoming the operating system for the whole digital experience.

That’s how the landscape looks from where I’m sitting (Coventry): momentum, foundations, trust, and AI. Everything else is just marketing noise.