Replatforming in the AI Era: A Guide to Future-Proofing Your Website

What is Replatforming

Websites tend to date quickly, both from an aesthetic standpoint but also from a technical perspective as well.

Happily, the look and feel of a site is something that can be updated and modernised relatively quickly, easily and painlessly. On the flip side, technical updates of the underlying platform that runs a website are not quite as easy or cost effective to undertake – particularly if you have a more complex piece of software in place like a Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

This is why website replatforming, as it is referred to in the industry, is not something that is undertaken lightly and why a large amount of time, effort and consideration goes into making decisions about what new platform an organisation should move to. The aim is to future proof it against having to go and replatform again in the foreseeable future.

With the advent of AI and the opportunities it presents in the digital space, both in terms what is available today as well as what is likely to be available in the near future, the decisioning around what platform to choose to operate your website in order to ensure it is “future proof” has never been more crucial.

Existing AI Use in Websites

We are rapidly leaving behind the days when having AI-powered features on your website were a quirky nice-to-have. AI usage is becoming more prevalent across almost every part of the digital experience, so it is no wonder CMS & DXP platforms are scrambling to bake AI tools into their products or integrate them with existing AI software/services, or in some cases do both.

Providing the Foundations AI Needs to Thrive

All of these wonderful AI powered tools and features that enhance websites and make them easier to manage and administer are still reliant on the foundations we provide them.

An AI model is a lot more effective at ingesting and interpreting content that is structured and organised into clearly defined and easily distinguishable units of information. Sure, you can train an AI model on unstructured content, but as interfaces and expectations evolve, a key differentiator between excellent and just okay will be how content is structured for the AI, or if it is structured at all.

For an AI model to do its job effectively a proper framework for the way content is made available to it needs be used. This article is using grammar as a framework right now to provide structure and meaning to the content - paragraphs to separate ideas, sentences to separate thoughts and so on. For an AI, content should be built using logical components, with appropriate metadata to keep it organised and labelled, helping AI “understand” and “contextualise” the content.

It therefore follows, that when looking to replatform in the AI age you need to choose a solution that enables structured blocks of content, each with metadata capabilities that enable effective tagging and categorisation of content, so that AI can better comprehend the content as well as make smarter decisions regarding content recommendations and delivery.

When your CMS supports this structuring of content, it acts as a multiplier effect for your AI toolkit. Discoverability features become that much more effective and accurate. AI-powered search delivers seemingly mind-reading results and recommendation engines exhibit even more impressive boosts to engagement and conversion rates.

Future AI Website Capabilities

Looking a short distance into the future, it is the ever-elusive personalisation that benefits the most. Personalised content delivery is a trend that continues to gain importance, as user expectations of more tailored experiences grow at a rapid pace.

Enter “dynamic content assembly”, a term you’ll be hearing a lot more of moving forward. This is the next logical stage in the evolution of content delivery and personalisation. First we had monolithic, templated content that followed a rigid and consistent experience for all of your users, regardless of who they were or what they needed. Then headless component architecture was introduced, breaking pages down into those logical units mentioned earlier, creating more variety and customisability per page. With dynamic content assembly, an AI can take those components and build a page in real-time for each individual user based on their specific interactions, preferences and the first party data you have collected - engaging them in a way that is tailored specifically to that individual to anticipate their needs and deliver them an experience that surpasses their expectations.

Continuing down this path, we need to prepare for the major shift from users browsing content to users conversing with content. With this in mind, it will be important to consider that the users conversing and interacting with websites will start to include AI based assistants autonomously browsing your site on behalf of their human user – gathering information or taking actions on their human master's behalf. Having structured content that is AI ready will become even more critical with these shifts in web interaction dynamics.

What to Consider when Website Replatforming

When considering website replatforming in the context of the current wave of AI disruption, it's crucial to ensure the new platform will be able to integrate seamlessly with current and emerging AI tools. This doesn’t necessarily mean out of the box (OOTB) platform specific connection capabilities, instead API driven systems that allow for modular capability additions are likely to be equally (if not more) valuable and provide you with more agility and flexibility to handle future pivots in AI capabilities.

Content structuring is another key consideration. Your platform should allow for efficient content organization to make it more accessible to AI systems. Properly structured content enhances AI-driven search, recommendation and personalisation features.

The platform you choose must also be scalable to accommodate the rapid evolution of AI capabilities. As these technologies advance, you'll need a system that can grow alongside your business and handle future AI demands. You don’t want a system that locks you into a rigid and limited capability set.

Why it Makes Sense to Replatform Now

Despite the rapid current rate of change in the digital space, now is actually the perfect time to be investing in replatforming your website. These type of projects take time – time to plan, time to get approval, time to build and time to migrate, restructure and re-work content... And now is the perfect time to get your digital house in order so it is ready to leverage the AI innovations that are out there already, as well as the ones that are about to land.

AI is bringing us to the brink of an entirely bespoke experience for your users, but AI on its own can only go so far - your website platform and the way you use it will be key in supporting this new wave.