One full day of customer stories, product innovations, and honest conversations about where AI is taking content operations. The theme: "The Future Done Right. 30 Years of Customer Innovation."
Here are the highlights.
Kicking off Connect: Sören Stamer on 30 years of CoreMedia, and what they actually teach you
Sören Stamer, CoreMedia's CEO and co-founder, used his keynote not only to celebrate 30 years, but to draw real lessons from them. What do three decades of navigating technology transitions actually teach you when the next wave arrives?
Key points:
- The last 1,000 days changed more than the 9,000 before them. Since ChatGPT launched in late 2022, content operations, search behavior, and customer expectations have shifted more than in the whole decade prior.
- Solve durable problems, not hype cycles. CoreMedia survived the dot-com bust, mobile, headless, and composable by building on a stable architecture and not by renaming the company after the trend of the year. The metaverse is a recent reminder of what happens when you do the opposite.
- Digital sovereignty is a board-level concern. Dependency on foreign cloud infrastructure is no longer a procurement question. For governments, utilities, and global retailers, recent outages have made it a hard business risk.
- Your next customer might not be human. AI agents increasingly search, compare, and buy on behalf of real people. If your content is not structured to be machine-readable, tagged, governed, and accessible via API, you will not show up in that interaction.
- Human + AI is the operating model. Automation can scale fast. Enterprise trust still needs human oversight, brand governance, and clear accountability. The two work best together.
Watch Sören Stamer's full keynote - click here
Roy Smeets on where the CoreMedia Experience Platform is going
Roy Smeets, CoreMedia's Chief Product & Technology Officer, gave the audience a clear-eyed picture of where the CoreMedia Experience Platform is heading, and he did it without burying the practical in the visionary.
Key points:
- CoreMedia KIO is live and in production. The AI co-pilot handles metadata extraction, content variant creation, bulk operations, and tone-of-voice adjustments, all inside the editorial interface. Brand voice rules, prompt libraries, and approval workflows keep governance intact while teams move faster.
- Personalization embedded where editors work. Roy previewed the direct integration of engagement data into Studio: real-time audience signals visible inside the editorial interface, without switching tools. Smarter decisions, faster.
- The "Studio of the Future" is conversational. Editors state goals; the interface surfaces the right content, data, and actions. Less navigation. More intention.
- Agentic AI: the next frontier. Brand agents that engage directly with consumers' personal AI assistants — recommending, negotiating, transacting — are no longer theoretical. CoreMedia is building for that model now.
- The tools are here. The time to act is now. From CoreMedia KIO to personalized content at scale and AI-powered customer support.
Watch Roy Smeets' full product presentation - video here
Jeroen Blaas: Separating hype from reality in digital experience
Jeroen Blaas, CoreMedia's Chief Revenue Officer, opened the afternoon with a clear promise: no vague 10-year visions, no AI hype. Just what's real today and what you can use tomorrow. He walked through four industry trends and the data behind each one.
Key points:
- Personalization is not hype. It's 40% more revenue. McKinsey data shows companies that excel at personalization generate significantly more revenue. Still very much a real priority.
- The CX paradox is real and widening.9 in 10 executives believe customer loyalty is growing. Yet only 4 out of 10 customers agree. And 52% stop buying after just one bad experience. Irrelevance is the #1 cause.
- AI-first CX is already here. 50% of consumers already use AI-powered search to guide their choices. The question is no longer whether your customers use AI. It's whether your content is ready for it.
- Digital agility drives measurable results. Agile organizations improve financial performance by 30%, operational performance by 50%, and customer satisfaction by 30%.
- The future is AI and human, not AI or human. 53% of customers still trust humans over AI for recommendations. The winning model is AI making humans better, not replacing them.
Watch Jeroen’s full presentation - link to YouTube video
Customer stories: innovation in practice
From 30,000 pages to the right answer: GTAI on AI-powered search
Germany Trade & Invest (GTAI) had 30,000 pages of content and navigation that could not scale. Senior Online Marketing Managers Yvonne Richtsteig and Maike Neumann, alongside Tobias Glaßner from ]init[, showed how they replaced a category-page model with AI-powered search that reads user intent and returns a precise answer, not a link.
Highlights:
- AI search replaces rigid navigation for a 30,000-page content library
- Users get direct, contextual answers instead of category pages to browse
- Structured content is the foundation that makes the AI layer work
DIHK: what actually happens when an editorial team embeds AI in daily work
Julia Fellinger, DIHK's Editor-in-Chief and Press Spokesperson, came to Connect not to present a strategy, but to share what happened when the strategy met reality. DIHK — the Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry — relaunched their website on CoreMedia and embedded CoreMedia KIO into daily editorial work at the same time.
Highlights:
- A ground-level account of AI adoption: what changed, what the team had to learn, and what they would do differently
- Told from the editor's perspective, not a technology roadmap
- Exactly the kind of proof that lands with practitioners at the evaluation stage
IKB: from fragmented presence to integrated digital experience
IKB used to run separate digital builds that had grown apart: different workflows, inconsistent experiences, maintenance overhead. Matthias Münch and Angelina Fuchs (IKB) and Sandra Grob and Oliver Klee (adesso) showed how the relaunch on CoreMedia pulled everything onto one platform.
Highlights:
- Single platform now powers all of IKB's digital touchpoints
- Editorial teams work from one consistent workflow
- The project changed how the bank thinks about its digital presence, not just where content lives
IBM iX on keeping Bundeswehr.de evolving
Marie Oelgemöller and Tim Habermann from IBM iX presented on the ongoing evolution of Bundeswehr.de. A high-scrutiny public platform serving a complex user base under strict security constraints.
Highlights:
- Not a relaunch story but a sustained commitment to a live, high-stakes platform
- Focused on the engineering and editorial discipline required to keep it current
- A clear example of what enterprise-grade platform management looks like in practice
Watch the IBM iX presentation.
The live demo: seeing CoreMedia’s AI and personalization in action
Oliver Heyden, Head of Solution Architects EMEA, ran a live demonstration of CoreMedia KIO and the personalization engine inside Studio.
What the audience saw:
- CoreMedia KIO handling real editorial tasks inside the authoring interface
- Real-time engagement signals visible within Studio. No tool switching required
- Personalization and content management working as one, not bolted together
What 30 years actually means
CoreMedia was founded in Hamburg in 1996. From then to now, a lot of changes have happened. The internet, e-commerce, mobile, headless, composable, AI. Each wave reshaped the category, and CoreMedia adapted without losing the thread.
The customers and partners on stage in 2026 had not just deployed CoreMedia. They had built real content operations on it. Ones that could absorb new AI capabilities without starting over. That takes a platform built on durable foundations, not the hype of the moment.
The next question is what the next era demands, and how to get it right.
Ready to see the platform in action? Book a demo.
For more highlights from the event, explore our playlist on YouTube. We hope to see you again in 2027!
