The AI Era Is Rewriting the Rules of Content Strategy

Last month, I hosted "Content Trends in the AI Era," a webinar featuring Acquia's own Dries Buytaert and Jennifer Griffin-Smith alongside Chuck Gahun, Principal Analyst at Forrester. It's been one of our most popular pieces in a while, with a number of attendees reaching out afterward to share the recording with their teams.

When you have such a great line-up of speakers and you let them chat for 60 minutes, you’re going to end up with tons of insights. Even if you’ve already watched the full webinar, there were so many great moments that I wanted to pull together some highlights. These video clips, which live on Acquia TV, tell a cohesive story about where content technology is headed and what it demands from the organizations building on it.

The assumption that's no longer true

Chuck Gahun opened with what he called the "ages-long assumption" underpinning the entire content industry: that humans create content for humans to consume. That assumption, he argued, is no longer accurate. Machines are now your content's audience too.

The downstream effects are significant, particularly in B2B. Generative AI has already become the top information source for business buyers during product discovery. That's not a trend on the horizon; it's the current state. And it's raising the bar for what "good" product content looks like, because buyers are increasingly discovering through AI answer engines and then returning to brand and distributor sites to validate. The AI gets them to your door. Your content has to hold up under that scrutiny.

Watch: The AI Audience — Chuck Gahun on the Forrester research behind the shift

The third audience

During our conversation, Dries introduced a framing I keep returning to: for the last twenty years, we've been building digital experiences for two audiences, humans and search engines. Today, AI agents have joined as a third audience.

This reframes the question entirely. It's not just "how do humans navigate our website?" It's "how does an LLM interpret, trust, and draw from our content?" And when you think about it that way, the architectural choices that have always mattered for structured content suddenly matter even more.

This is where Dries made one of the most quotable observations of the session. Long before anyone was using the word "AI," Drupal was built to treat content as structured knowledge, not pages of text. Most CMS platforms, he noted, store content as blobs of HTML. Readable to humans; largely undifferentiated to machines.

Drupal, by contrast, lets you declare what something is: this is a product, it has these properties, it's related to these use cases, applicable to these industries, governed by these compliance requirements. In Dries' words: "You're not creating a blob of content — you're creating a map of meaning."

That's not a marketing line. It's a genuine architectural distinction that turns out to be exactly what AI systems need to do their job well.

Watch: Drupal's AI Advantage — Dries on why Drupal was built for this moment

The AI knowledge layer

Building on that structural advantage, Dries talked about what he calls the "knowledge layer" for AI and why building it is one of the highest-leverage things a marketing team can do right now. When your content is well-structured and semantically rich, AI becomes dramatically more effective as a tool: personalization gets sharper, customer questions get answered more accurately, and content gets reused more intelligently across channels. It functions, in his framing, as a force multiplier, not just for AI, but for the team wielding it.

Watch: The AI Knowledge Layer — Dries on structured content as a force multiplier

Infrastructure, not destination

I asked Dries to expand on something he'd said earlier: that AI flattens interfaces but deepens foundations. His answer reframed how I think about the modern website.

"Increasingly," he said, "the website is becoming infrastructure rather than the destination." When a user asks ChatGPT a question, your website may not be where they end up, but it's become the source feeding the answer. Which means the quality, structure, and trustworthiness of your underlying content has never mattered more, even as the front-end experience becomes less visible.

Watch: AI's Impact — Dries on why the website is becoming infrastructure for LLMs

The agentic future

Jennifer Griffin-Smith brought the session forward into what she sees coming next: an agentic command center built across the Acquia product suite. Not just a unified interface to tools and partner integrations, but a system capable of surfacing insights and recommending next best actions. In her words: "If we can have digital teammates that help my team do what they do, but 10 times over — that's a really, really exciting place to be in."

Jen's framing was forward-looking but grounded. The infrastructure has to come first: the knowledge layer, the structured content, the semantic architecture. Get that right, and the agentic layer on top becomes genuinely powerful.

Watch: The AI Command Center — Jen on agentic interfaces and what's coming next

If these clips resonate with you, I'd love to hear what you think. And if you know someone who's wrestling with their AI content strategy right now, these are well worth sharing.