AI at Umbraco Codegarden: strategy, evolution and updates

This year team 3chillies were at Codegarden in person with Paul, Andrew and me all travelling to Copenhagen. Echoing what Paul said in his Codegarden takeaways, it was excellent to catch up with old acquaintances, meet some new faces and attend so many of the sessions.

Of course, we knew in advance that the main theme of the conference was going to be AI. It’s at the centre of Umbraco’s strategy and roadmap, is on the mind of every digital marketing team and represents a fundamental shift in how we do things. So, in this companion post to Paul’s article, I’m going to explore the main AI themes and AI product announcements that are coming out of Codegarden.

Umbraco confidently reiterates it's AI strategy

Umbraco HQ had previously revealed their AI strategy, which consists of three main guiding principles. In a nutshell:

·       AI on your terms: AI is always on your terms, so you stay in control, in terms of choosing the models that suit and defining behaviours.

·       Modular AI experiences: Everything remains modular, so no AI is forced upon you, and everything continues to work as AI evolves. Organisations use only what they need and can extend how they like.

·       AI is everywhere Umbraco is: There is both “AI in Umbraco” and “Umbraco in AI” – so everything is always connected.

This three-pronged strategy was confidently reiterated during the sessions – including CEO Mats Persson’s keynote – and was positioned as an area of strength that contrasts sharply with the lack of control around AI features that are being integrated by other CMS vendors into their products. The fact that Umbraco is open source was also mentioned as a source of competitive advantage over other CMSs because “the AI already knows everything about us”.

Umbraco’s approach basically enables businesses to introduce AI that is at their pace and matches their needs, while also being fully ready for the agentic AI era. As organisations stay in control it also ensures that organisations can better retain confidence they are being compliant in areas such as data sovereignty, with Persson saying it was “AI that you can defend in front of legal”.

Our view on the strategy

At 3chillies we feel Umbraco really has got the AI strategy right. The approach to AI aligns with the same principles and approach that runs through all Umbraco installations, but also enables organisations to:

·       Ensure there is alignment with existing approaches to AI across their organisation.

·       Keep a better handle on AI costs which are often hard to control.

·       Keeps options open in a time of rapid and fluid evolution, including relating to the introduction of agents.

·       Make the best use of existing organisation-wide investments in AI.

·       Avoids the hesitation that can come with making investments in AI products, as stakeholders can be hard to commit to budget, as things move so rapidly

·       Provides a basis for a more natural and iterative approach to AI, which allows teams and partners to learn as they go and apply the best models to different scenarios.

·       Enable implementation partners and agencies to keep on adding value to clients.

·       Supports innovation across the community.

Umbraco in AI: Umbracp Editor MCP

Umbraco CTO Filip Bech-Larsen’s product keynote included a number of announcements and recent updates that help advance the strategy for both “Umbraco in AI” and “AI in Umbraco”.

The big update for Umbraco in AI was the release of the new remote Editor MCP, which supports the ability for editors to directly search, draft and edit content directly from their preferred LLM.

We think this is a significant step in connecting editors and marketers to the LLMs and AI services they are likely already using in other areas of work, and more fully integrates the CMS into the daily use of AI across businesses. The Editor MCP will also be available on Umbraco Cloud.

The security, compliance and governance angle is also covered as every project has an authenticated endpoint and is covered under Umbraco’s Cloud Data Processing Agreement, allowing teams to surface Umbraco in their LLM of choice with reduced effort.

Additionally, there are also new agent resources in development with new skills covering Umbraco Cloud, content modelling and implementation.

AI in Umbraco: Governance, Copilot and more

There have also been some significant updates relating to bringing AI services directly into Umbraco and the backoffice – these cover a number of different directions, including a new layer of governance and guardrails which supports control and compliance:

·       Guardrails for prompts: You can specify any rules that a prompt must follow before it goes off to an LLM, ensuring that no confidential information is being added, for example, and it all stays safe within Umbraco.

·       Tests: These allow you to test different AI-related integrations, agents and prompts, for example so you can compare working with two LLMs to see which performs better or is more cost effective.

There are also advances for the Umbraco Copilot user experience, so you can use a Copilot-style bot within Umbraco, which is connected to your LLM of choice, with new support for:

·       speech-to-text dictation

·       file uploads (via drag-and-drop)

·       semantic search, through the Umbraco search

·       the ability to work with content blocks

·       and the ability to embed human approval for editors into the process before any content goes live.

Additionally, the support connections to different LLMs have expanded with new connections to DeepSeek, Mistral, Hugging Face and Fireworks, while the community is developing more packages. For example, we saw a demo of AI Log Analyzer that provides “AI-powered log analysis to the Umbraco backoffice log viewer” and originally emerged from a hackathon.

Collectively we think these changes represent a positive evolution that will encourage more teams to inject Umbraco with AI in ways that will drive value, as well as support experimentation.

Support for the agentic AI era

The combination of Umbraco’s AI strategy, improvements and other product updates helps pave the way for the age of agentic AI with the opportunity to deploy more effective AI agents. For example:

·       JSON Schema support and document patch endpoints shipped in Umbraco 17 allow AI agents to interact with Umbraco in a more granular and effective way, enabling a better understanding of content and data.

·       The new Umbraco Automate product enables teams to better drop agents into automation processes, with the potential for more exciting and sophisticated marketing automations.

·       The new testing and governance capabilities in Umbraco.AI enables stricter governance and confidence in using AI agents.

·       Umbraco Compose offers an opportunity for agents to interact across a wider set of data covering your martech stack.

·       The wider support for LLMs again opens up more possibilities for agentic AI.

AI presents a compelling reason to upgrade your Umbraco version

The combination of AI advances and support that is contained across Umbraco 17 and 18, as well the opportunities to extend the power of AI and agents through Umbraco Automate and Compose, presents a compelling opportunity to upgrade from 13 or before. There are also AI-powered community packages being released, and those are just set to proliferate.

If you want to integrate AI with your Umbraco CMS and digital marketing stack, then you do need to be on these later versions of Umbraco. The rapid evolution of AI capabilities that is inevitable going forward also presents a valid reason to keep more up to date with the latest Umbraco releases.

Often upgrades are not regarded as a priority, but AI presents a strong business case for any Umbraco upgrade project.

Full steam ahead with AI

Umbraco was perhaps a bit later to the game to AI than some of its rivals, but after Codegarden we really feel there has now been significant evolution built on top of consistent thinking.

Digital marketing teams using Umbraco should now start to think about how they want to use AI to their best advantage. If you’d like to discuss integrating Umbraco with AI, then get in touch.