The future is now: Contentstack’s vision for 'digital 2030' and beyond

Digital 2030. It sounds big and scary.

We’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about what digital experiences will look like five years from now. We even published a report with insights and predictions from 18 industry experts.

Most likely, we’ll all be wrong about what the future will hold. After all, none of us are Nostradamus. (Or the writing staff of The Simpsons.)

The only prediction for 2030 that I feel comfortable making is that nothing will be the same

Absolutely nothing.

In five years, the way we build and deliver digital experiences will look completely different. And the question is: Are you ready for that world?

Are you ready for a future where: 

• AI agents act on behalf of customers and businesses, engaging digital experiences more often than humans?
• Your customers demand hyper-personalized experiences?
• In an agentic world, content is actually data?
• And the ability to activate on first-party data is your competitive advantage? 

But here’s the thing. This future we need to be ready for is not five years away. Spoiler alert: It’s now.

Why adaptive experiences will define the future

I believe that in order to be competitive you need to deliver experiences that are adaptive. So what are adaptive experiences?

They are dynamic, in the moment connections between a brand and a customer, fueled by:

• Brand-aware AI
• Real-time Insights, which allow brands to alter the experience for maximum relevancy
• And automation, scaling to meet the needs of every visitor at a 1:1 level

Ultimately, the future of digital is about delivering content and experiences that respond, evolve and improve continuously — across every channel, in every moment. 

But here’s the rub: You can’t be adaptive without being personal.

And getting personal is hard. Personalization is the most important thing that no one is actually doing.

Why is that? For one thing, it’s a content problem.

If I want to personalize my homepage, I need 288 versions of the content! Scaling this with limited resources is impossible. So it doesn’t happen.

But one thing we learned when we started speaking to more and more customers about it is that it’s also a data problem.

What we heard is that brands have either not yet solved for a single source of truth on historical and real-time customer data, or they haven’t yet figured out how to activate that data for the purposes of personalization. 

Personalization is broken. It’s never been possible to do it right. Until now. 

That’s because there are new playbooks for content and data.

Scale and context are your rocket fuel

Last year we laid the foundation with a new playbook for content made possible by AI. As we navigate this new digital landscape, it’s important to remember that AI isn't here to replace creativity — it’s here to unlock it and help us scale like never before.

Automate the stuff that you never could before. Maximize ROI on your precious human resources.

One thing though: Your AI generated content needs to be brand-aware, or it can do more harm than good.

And now there’s a new playbook for customer data as well. The key here is the combination of transactional and behavioral data at the individual user level, updated in real-time and the ability to activate that data to adapt the experience of the user. 

When you solve for content, you get scale.

When you solve for data, you get context.

Scale and context unlocks adaptive experiences.

This isn’t just about web performance metrics. It’s about brand relevancy. That’s what’s at stake for the future.

Because if your content and data isn’t structured, intelligent and discoverable, AI can’t work on your brand’s behalf.

And that’s an existential threat to all brands trying to survive in the coming years. 

So, what are we doing about it?

How Contentstack is building for the future

In February, we announced Contentstack EDGE — the world’s first Adaptive Digital Experience Platform, built for the AI era.

Not just another CMS. Not another martech tool to duct tape together. Contentstack EDGE is the only platform that brings together content, data and AI, delivering adaptive experiences across every channel, in real time. 

We are entering a new era for digital excellence. An era where the gap between the brands that win and the brands that lose will be clearly defined by the ability to deliver adaptive digital experiences.

When you do this well, everything changes.

You give your customers a reason to opt in with zero-party data. To engage. To buy. To stay loyal.

That's the new bar. 

So what’s standing in your way? There are three common hurdles we identified for growing brands.

1. Your ability to scale campaigns is non-existent
2. So is your ability to adapt in real-time
3. You aren’t able to stitch together a personalized journey of your customers across channels

Good news. That’s what Contentstack EDGE is built to solve.

Let’s take a look at a not-so-fictional story of what this looks like in practice. 

This is the future we see.

This is the future we’re building for.

Gurdeep Dhillon is the Chief Marketing Officer at Contentstack. Connect with him on LinkedIn.