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The need for speed: How Kentico’s AI strategy is accelerating everything

Everyone has an AI "copilot" now, but is it actually saving you money? We looked under the hood of Kentico's new AI strategy, from AIRA to KentiCopilot, to see how they're attacking the two biggest costs in digital: operational admin and upgrade friction.

Andy Thompson
Andy Thompson

15 January 2026

6 minute read

You can’t walk five metres in the digital landscape right now without tripping over an AI announcement. Every software vendor on the planet has launched a "Copilot" or an "Assistant" in the last 18 months. It has become the new table stakes for the DXP industry.

For those of us responsible for digital budgets and roadmaps, the question isn't "Does it have AI?" – that’s a given. The real question is: "Is this just a shiny wrapper on top of legacy architecture, or will it actually provide real value for my digital channel?"

At Luminary, we’ve been watching the landscape closely. While some platforms are bolting AI onto aging stacks, Kentico has taken a different approach. They aren't just giving marketers a text generator; they are using AI to fundamentally attack the two biggest costs in digital: operational inefficiency (how long it takes your team to do things) and technical friction (how long it takes agencies to build and upgrade things).

Here is why Kentico’s strategy is different, and why it matters for your bottom line.

The foundation: Built for velocity

To understand why Kentico’s AI strategy works, you have to look at what’s under the hood. You can’t just stick a Ferrari engine in a Model T Ford and expect it to win the Melbourne Grand Prix.

A few years ago, Kentico made the bold decision to rebuild their flagship platform from the ground up as Xperience by Kentico (XbyK). It is built on the latest .NET architecture, and designed for the cloud. This "clean slate" is the critical enabler.

Because the platform is modern and modular, Kentico can release cutting-edge features month after month. Unlike legacy monolithic platforms where you might wait a year for a major version release to get a new feature, XbyK operates on a continuous, SaaS-like cadence, with no ‘major’ annual upgrade cycle. This means when they release a new AI agent or capability, it gets into your hands immediately.

This architectural agility allows them to deploy a two-pronged AI strategy:

  • AIRA: For the marketer
  • KentiCopilot: For the builder

Pillar 1: AIRA – Practicality over poetry

AIRA (Artificial Intelligence Recommendations and Assistance) is the public face of Kentico’s AI.

The name itself is a giveaway to their strategy. It’s not just about "Generation" (writing text); it is split into Assistance (helping you do daily tasks faster) and Recommendations (guiding your strategy).

My phrasing of "practicality over poetry" is deliberate here. Too many vendors have integrated LLMs just to enable features like "make this text longer," which can easily result in digital slop. AIRA balances the "boring but useful" tactical stuff with high-level strategic agents.

The tactical toolbox

In the daily grind of content operations, minutes add up. AIRA includes features designed to shave time off the mundane tasks:

  • Smart assets: When you upload images, AIRA can auto-tag them (with full content auto-tagging coming soon) and generate accessibility-compliant alt text.
  • Intelligent optimisation: It detects the focal point of an image and handles intelligent cropping for different device viewports automatically.
  • Generative helpers: This goes beyond simple text expansion. It includes practical tools like translating content for localisation, writing engaging email subject lines, and generating metadata.
  • Data interrogation: This is a conversational UI that lets you "chat" with your data. Instead of digging through complex analytics dashboards, you can ask questions like "Where are we dropping off in the checkout flow?" It’s like having a junior analyst sitting next to you.
Screenshot of Xperience by Kentico's smart asset tagging

Smart assets: the alt text “a group of people jumping on a bench by a lake” and the tags “Young people” (aw, shucks) and “Outdoors” were automatically added by AIRA.

Screenshot of Xperience by Kentico's Customer Journeys with an AIRA conversation

Data interrogation: you can have a natural conversation with AIRA to dig much deeper into Customer Journeys

The strategic workforce

This is where things get really interesting. Kentico is moving beyond simple "tools" to releasing Specialised Agents. These act less like software features and more like specialised team members.

Two key examples include:

  1. The Content Strategist: Available in the upcoming February refresh, this agent doesn't just write copy; it thinks about your content ecosystem. It can analyse your existing content to identify gaps and provide recommendations on what to create next. It acts as a guardian of your brand voice, maintaining living editorial guidelines to ensure every piece serves a strategic purpose.
  2. The Campaign Manager: Coming soon, this agent is designed to be a brand-aware co-pilot. Instead of starting every campaign from scratch, it will recall historical campaign briefs and performance results. It turns campaign management into a continuous learning system, ensuring you don't repeat past mistakes and helping you build on what has worked before.

Pillar 2: KentiCopilot – The invisible efficiency engine

While AIRA gets the headlines, KentiCopilot is arguably where the biggest ROI lives. This is the suite of tools designed for the developers and implementation partners (like us).

It is often invisible to the client, but it directly impacts your project costs and timelines. If AI can reduce the "grunt work" of development by 20-30% or more, that translates directly to faster launch times and more budget available for high-value feature development rather than just "getting the site running."

Kentico is "dogfooding" this intensely. They use KentiCopilot internally to build their own digital properties, such as their demo sites and Community Portal. This means they feel the friction of development before we do, and they build AI tools to solve it.

The builder's assistant

KentiCopilot provides developers with real-time access to documentation via MCP servers, which eliminates the common AI problem of "hallucinating" code that doesn't exist. It also automates the "plumbing" of development, generating boilerplate code and widgets, so our developers can focus on the complex business logic that actually adds value.

The upgrade accelerator

One of the biggest headaches in the DXP world is the upgrade cycle. Moving from legacy versions (like Kentico 13) to a modern stack has historically been a complex migration project.

The latest updates to KentiCopilot specifically target this friction point with AI-assisted code upgrades. These tools assist developers in migrating code and content models from older versions to Xperience by Kentico. It dramatically lowers the cost of an upgrade, turning what used to be a daunting migration into a manageable evolution.

Proof point: The Accelerator Expert

Kentico is so confident in the speed of their new capabilities that they have launched the Partner Accelerator Program.

This is a promise that agencies such as Luminary who have earned the Accelerator Expert accreditation can launch a brand new website (given finished designs and standard requirements) in a matter of weeks, not months. We’re talking about a six-week turnaround from designs to go-live, for a fully functional DXP implementation.

Luminary is proud to be a launch partner of this program. It’s not just marketing fluff; we are actively using these tools to cut build times for our clients right now.

This highlights a key philosophy we hold at Luminary: the productivity multiplier of AI is real, but it requires expertise to unlock it. In other words, these tools don't do the work for you; they accelerate the experts who know how to wield them.

Efficiency engine

AI in a DXP shouldn't just be a toy for writing blog headlines. It should be an engine for efficiency that permeates the entire lifecycle of your digital product, from the code being written, to the upgrade being performed, to the campaign being launched.

If you are staring down the barrel of a complex upgrade, or if you just feel like your current platform is moving too slow for your market, we should talk.

Andy Thompson
Andy Thompson

15 January 2026

6 minute read

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It's time to upgrade to Xperience by Kentico!

Kentico 13, and earlier versions of the platform, are approaching end of support - which means it's time to think about switching to Xperience by Kentico.

Find out more

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