CMS Kickoff 2025: the case for a "more human" CMS

At the CMS Kickoff 2025 conference in St. Petersburg, StreamX's CEO Marta Cukierman and CTO Michał Cukierman met with 90 content experts to address making content management systems more fit for all users' needs.

The event, hosted at the James Museum, brought together tech leaders and content professionals to discuss real-world problems in digital content management. 

Marketing experts, technical writers, and communication professionals shared their struggles with existing CMS platforms, highlighting the need for more adaptable and human-centered solutions.

Nicole France from Contentful provided a diagnosis of the current CMS marketplace, emphasizing the importance of usability and keeping end-user experience in mind. Those  themes resonated repeatedly throughout the conference, along with different perspectives on shift and innovation brought last year by the rise of generative AI.

Michael Spenceley from Johnson & Johnson explored AI's potential in compliance-heavy industries, demonstrating how advanced technologies can streamline complex workflows. SearchStax’s Sameer Maggon shared new approaches to search capability integration, showing the creative thinking driving the CMS industry.

Marta Cukierman's key takeaway, which she later shared on LinkedIn, centered on the power of story-driven product demonstrations. She argued that effective solutions should tell a compelling story about their functionality, moving beyond simple feature listings to create meaningful connections with users.

The conference reinforced the community’s "back-to-basics" philosophy, that personal connections and knowledge sharing remain fundamental to developing impactful CMS tools. This approach reflects a growing recognition that technology must serve human needs, not the other way around.

StreamX has been an active member of the CMS Experts Community, a global network established by Boye & Company, since 2024. This community brings together innovative startups and established players recognized in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for digital experience platforms. Marta has been a voice in this community from the start, having previously spoken at events like the Aarhus 2024 Conference in Denmark.

Looking ahead, Marta is set to present on backend solutions for modern front-end systems, including Adobe's Edge Delivery Services, at Hamburg CMS Experts meeting in late January 2025. Read more about how StreamX approaches this kind of problems here: