What Is a Generative CMS? Sitefinity’s Shift to AI-Driven Experiences

What Is a Generative CMS 

Traditional content management systems store and publish content. Marketers and editors create pages, apply templates, configure segmentation rules, and serve the same variations to broad groups of users. 

A Generative CMS takes a different approach. It uses artificial intelligence to understand context and interpret what a visitor is trying to accomplish. It retrieves verified content from approved sources and assembles real-time experiences that respond to user intent. 

A Generative CMS: 

• Understands the visitor’s question or need 
• Retrieves relevant and approved knowledge
• Assembles a personalized experience in real time

This moves the CMS away from static content delivery and toward the creation of experiences that adapt to what the visitor is trying to do.

Progress Agentic RAG and the Idea of Trusted AI 

One of the greatest challenges with generative AI is the possibility of incorrect or invented information. Agentic RAG addresses this by limiting retrieval to trusted organization-approved sources. Every AI generated response can be traced back to its origin and verified for accuracy. 

Before we break down Agentic RAG, it helps to understand RAG: 

• RAG is a way to make AI smarter (or more accurate) by letting it look up information from outside sources (like documents, databases, or indexed files) before generating an answer. 
• Instead of just guessing based on its training data, the AI retrieves real facts, then uses those to create a response. This makes answers more accurate and up to date. 

What does Agentic mean? 

 “Agentic” refers to AI agents — small autonomous systems that can think, plan, and decide actions on their own rather than just follow a linear fetch-and-generate process. 

These agents can choose how to retrieve information, what tools to use, and how to refine their answers. (source: https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/agentic-rag) 

At a basic level, Agentic RAG combines two things. 

• Retrieval which pulls real content from approved sources 
• Generation which uses AI to create helpful responses from that content

Agentic RAG = RAG + autonomous AI agents. 

The “agentic” part means the system can decide which information to retrieve, how to use it, and how to assemble a response that matches the visitor’s intent. This creates output that is both intelligent and grounded in facts, rather than AI guessing or inventing information. 

This is what Progress means by trusted AI. It is not only intelligent but also governed, explainable, and safe for use in environments where compliance and accuracy matter. It also gives marketers and content teams confidence that AI assisted experiences remain on brand and aligned with official messaging.  

Dynamic Experience Assembly 

This is the capability that differentiates a Generative CMS. Instead of serving a predefined page to every visitor, the system can construct an experience in real time based on the visitor’s need. 

For example, if someone visits a banking website looking for small business loan options, the traditional experience requires them to search, browse menus, and explore multiple pages. A Generative CMS can interpret the question, retrieve relevant and approved information, and assemble a clear and helpful experience immediately. This may include summaries, comparisons, product details, next steps, and calls to action. 

The system is not guessing. It is interpreting intent and responding with verified content that is assembled into a meaningful and efficient experience. 

Do Users Really Want AI Driven, Adaptive Website Experiences 

It is important to understand what users actually want when they visit a website. Not every visitor expects or desires a fully personalized or AI assembled experience. Most users primarily want to find information quickly and with as little friction as possible. 

Research continues to show that visitors value: 

• Clear messaging
• Fast answers
• Predictable navigation
• Trustworthy content 

People are rarely asking for AI. They are asking for ease, clarity, and speed. 

Visitors do appreciate adaptive or AI-supported experiences when those experiences make their tasks easier. Natural language search, instant answers, context aware results, and concise summaries are often viewed as helpful. These features reduce effort and improve clarity for users who need direct answers. 

However, users tend to dislike experiences that attempt to predict their intentions too aggressively (“over-personalization”). If the website changes unexpectedly or makes assumptions that do not match the visitor’s goals, it introduces friction. 

For this reason, a Generative CMS should not replace proven UX patterns. Instead, it should support them and enhance the experience only when it adds value.  

Progress’s Generative CMS follows this approach. It does not force AI first journeys or remove traditional navigation. It simply improves discovery, supports more intuitive search, and provides accurate and verified information when a visitor requests it. 

The purpose of a Generative CMS is not to dictate the experience for all users. It is to support users who benefit from intelligent assistance while preserving a familiar and predictable experience for everyone else. 

AI Content Editing and Authoring Features in Sitefinity 

A key part of Progress’s generative strategy is the suite of AI tools built directly into the Sitefinity content authoring experience. These capabilities help marketers work faster, improve quality, and reduce manual effort while maintaining full control of the final output.

These features include: 

AI Assisted Editing for Existing Content 

Editors can instruct AI to:

• Generate new content based on prompts
• Rewrite text to be clearer or more concise
• Expand or shorten content
• Adjust tone to match brand voice
• Improve readability
• Convert dense paragraphs into scannable bullet points 

This allows teams to elevate content quality without leaving the CMS or relying on external tools. These are powered through integrated AI services like OpenAI (often via Azure OpenAI) and available directly in the Sitefinity editor. 

Generating New Content Drafts

Other AI capabilities that are related to content is the ability to use AI to generate initial drafts for: 

• Web pages
• Blog posts
• Product and service descriptions
• FAQs
• Headings and metadata 

These drafts provide a starting point that teams can refine, ensuring accuracy and brand alignment. 

Content Summaries and Metadata Support 

For long or complex content, AI can automatically create:

• Summaries 
• Executive takeaways
• Bullet point lists
• SEO friendly meta descriptions
• Image alt text suggestions

This is particularly useful for organizations that publish technical, regulatory, or high-volume content. 

AI Assisted Page Assembly 

Marketers can describe the type of page they want to build, and Sitefinity can suggest layouts, sections, and content structures that match the intent. This reduces development time and helps maintain consistency across the site.  You can even demo this feature at https://www.progress.com/sitefinity-cms/ai/page-builder 

AI Image Search 

I think this one is very useful.  There are so many times that I am looking for an image in Sitefinity, but forgot where I put it or the file name associated with it. I just know that it’s the one that has “our team sitting around a table meeting with our president writing on the white board”. 

And now with Sitefinity Hybrid AI Search, I can type in that exact phrase and the image will display in results. 

AI-Powered Content Classification 

Sometimes it’s difficult to come up with the right tag for a piece of content. Proper tagging of content within a CMS is extremely important, not just for categorization on the frontend but good tagging practices means better organization in the backend. 

This AI feature recommends tags that are relevant, so you don’t need to spend time trying to come up with it yourself.  

AI Translation 

Remember the days when website translation was done word-for-word.  Context was lost and the output accuracy was a toss-up.  AI-powered website translation services like Microsoft Translator are real-time, context-aware, and scalable — accurately translating large websites within a few seconds. 

Sitefinity’s AI Assistant (AI Chatbot) 

AI chat isn’t the newest feature on this list but it’s the one most marketers are most familiar with.  This is because it’s a highly visible feature that website users commonly interact with. 

The biggest differentiator with Sitefinity’s AI Chatbot is that it uses RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) to pull answers from your own published pages, content items and documents stored within your CMS. 

What this means is the AI assistant responds with answer grounded in real, organization-approved content rather than generic or hallucinated text.  No made-up answers. Just trusted answers sourced from your content. 

The other obvious benefit of using Sitefinity’s AI assistant is that it’s native to the platform and won’t require complex integrations or management in a third-party tool. It’s configured and dropped on a page right from the Sitefinity backend.  

AI-Assisted Widget Development with the MCP Server 

This is a more technical AI feature but worth talking about briefly. 

Sitefinity now has an AI-powered assistant that helps developers create website widgets using natural language, instead of manually wiring everything together.  While AI is available to assist developers. It’s important to realize developers still own thinking, quality, and outcomes. 

For example, while this AI feature can generate structure, developers still must clarify requirements, ask the right questions, and translate business needs into technical intent. 

Learn more about developing widgets with Sitefinity MCP server.

How Progress Can Claim the Title as the First Generative CMS 

Progress positions Sitefinity as the first Generative CMS for several reasons. 

1. Agentic RAG is integrated directly into the CMS rather than being an external add on. 
2. Experience assembly, intent interpretation, and verified content retrieval work together to create dynamic, context aware experiences.
3. The platform supports multilingual RAG, trusted data sources, AI assisted authoring, and dynamic personalization in one system.
4. No mainstream CMS platforms currently deliver this combination of real time generation and governed content retrieval inside the CMS itself.

This is why Progress frames Sitefinity not as a CMS with AI features but as a new category entirely. 

While there are many CMS platforms that include AI tools and features, they often rely on external services, custom integrations, or developer-configured AI workflows. Sitefinity offers integrated generative AI + governed retrieval within the CMS itself, which is the key to the claim.  

What AI features are available with my Sitefinity License?