Some conferences feel like a string of slides. The Umbraco US Festival feels more like a reunion that happens to come with a world-class curriculum. This year the community gathered in Chicago again, and the mix of hands-on learning and genuine fun was as strong as ever.
The schedule was packed. Plenty of interesting sessions and a hands-on workshop filled the days, parties bookended the whole thing, and a few delightfully local touches kept spirits high: Chicago-style hot dogs for lunch, bags of Garrett’s popcorn making the rounds, and even a local magician wowing the community with card tricks. Through all of it, the conversation kept circling back to one topic: AI.
Here’s what stood out to our team, from the big themes to the two sessions Marcel Digital was proud to lead.
The Big Theme: AI
If AI took the spotlight last year, this year it ran the whole show. Nearly every session, hallway chat, and late-night conversation came back to it in some form.
The conversation has matured fairly significantly from a year ago. In 2025, a lot of the excitement centered on what AI could do. This year, the focus shifted to what teams are now building: AI that lives inside the CMS, works with real content, and fits into the way editors and developers already work. The questions got more practical, too. How do we structure content so AI can understand it? How do we build AI features that are reliable, maintainable, and don’t slow down the backoffice?
Our team was right in the middle of that conversation, with two sessions tackling AI from two very different angles.
Structuring Umbraco for Better AI Visibility
Kyle Brigham, our Chief Strategy Officer, spoke on a topic at the top of many organization’s punch list: The Future Is AI Search: Designing Umbraco for AEO and AI Discovery. He started with a shift every marketer is feeling. People increasingly get their answers straight from AI-generated responses, often without ever clicking through to a website. The goal is to become the source those answers are built on.
From there, Kyle walked through what Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) means for how Umbraco sites are planned and built, going well beyond meta titles and descriptions. He focused on three key points:
Discovery happens everywhere now. Google is still part of the picture, but so are AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot. Content has to hold up across all of them.
Architecture matters to machines. How you model content types and organize pages in the backoffice shapes how easily an LLM can parse, trust, and reuse your content.
There’s no shortcut plugin. Tools can help, but the sites that get cited are the ones with clear, genuinely useful content and a real strategy behind it.
The bottom line: AEO belongs in the kickoff conversation for every Umbraco build. Want to go deeper? Our AEO services page is a good place to start.
Putting AI to Work Inside the Backoffice
On the development side, Alex Vilmur led a hands-on workshop sponsored by Marcel Digital, Beyond the Chatbot: Building Extensible AI Workflows in Umbraco. After running last year’s UI Builder workshop, Alex showed developers how to build AI directly into their Umbraco code.
Using Umbraco AI and Umbraco Automate, Alex walked the room through building agentic workflows that react to what happens in the CMS. Along the way, the group covered:
Writing custom Context Providers in C# so AI has the right information to work with
Connecting outside services so workflows can reach beyond Umbraco
Running heavy AI jobs in the background so editors aren’t left waiting
Hooking workflows into backoffice events while keeping the interface fast and responsive
The two sessions made a natural pair. Kyle focused on getting content found by AI; Alex showed how to put AI to work inside Umbraco, in ways that scale and actually make editors’ lives easier.
The Partner Summit
Umbraco also combined a partner summit with the festival, giving partners key insights, product updates, future roadmap insights, and direct access to the Umbraco team to discuss current and future implementations.
This year, the summit outlined key milestones for the next iteration of Umbraco, and how it has effectively established itself as the most AI-enabled CMS on the market today. They leaned into the facts: Umbraco is a commercially-backed open-source CMS which gives organizations the ability to leverage an LLM - or LLMs - of choice to unlock more power, efficiency, and scalability with the CMS.
Rather than forcing users into utilizing pre-built, integrated AI technologies, Umbraco allows users to connect their own LLM in precisely the way they want. Products like Umbraco AI and Umbraco Automate give users more control over integrating AI, and Umbraco is continuing to empower partners to build better and for the future.
The Best Part: The Community
As always, the people made the festival. The Umbraco community has a way of making everyone feel like a regular, whether it’s their first festival or their fifth. Between sessions, we caught up with longtime friends, met plenty of new faces, and found ourselves in hallway conversations that were just as valuable as anything on the schedule.
What stands out every year is how openly people share. Agencies that might compete for the same projects swap lessons learned, developers trade tips and fixes, and everyone seems genuinely invested in helping each other build better sites. That spirit of collaboration is what keeps Umbraco moving forward year after year.
Where We Go From Here
If this year’s festival made one thing clear, it’s that AI now sits at the center of the Umbraco world. It’s shaping how content gets found, how sites get structured, and how developers build inside the backoffice. The teams that come out ahead will pair smart architecture and strong content strategy with AI that’s built thoughtfully into the platform.
To everyone who joined us in Chicago, thank you for making this another unforgettable festival. To those who couldn’t make it, we hope to see you next year. In the meantime, if you’re thinking about how AEO or AI workflows could fit into your Umbraco site, let’s talk.
