Drupal AI Initiative: The Two Speeds of the Agentic Web: Pragmatism and Community-driven Acceleration
Author and photos: Martin Anderson-Clutz
Originally posted on Acquia.com blog
Enterprise AI is about cost management; Drupal's AI Summit shows community-driven acceleration. Drupal: the best CMS for the agentic web.
Attending a massive tech gathering like apidays New York 2026 provides a fascinating macro-lens view of where our industry is heading. With ten co-located conferences happening simultaneously, the event served as a perfect melting pot for the cross-pollination of ideas across different sectors of software architecture. Yet, while APIs served as the undeniable common thread weaving through nearly every presentation, stepping between the mainstream enterprise tracks and the co-located Drupal AI Summit felt like walking into two entirely different worlds.
The contrast highlighted a critical tension in technology today: the corporate race to manage costs and practical enterprise constraints, versus an open-source community’s agile, collaborative push toward a truly agentic web.
The Enterprise Reality Check: APIs as the New Agent UXIn the main apidays sessions, the initial euphoric hype around generative AI has clearly given way to hard-nosed engineering pragmatism. The prevailing sentiment among enterprise builders boiled down to two foundational rules:
- If it can be deterministic, keep it deterministic: AI can be an incredible asset, but it should not be the default solution for every problem. If a task can be solved using traditional, deterministic software tools, it absolutely should be, because those solutions remain cheaper, faster, and infinitely more reliable. When AI is required, developers should focus on deploying the minimum effective model necessary for that specific task to avoid wasting resources.
- APIs are the user interface for AI agents: For a decade, we built APIs for human developers or mobile applications. Today, we are building for autonomous consumers. An AI agent reads API specifications in real-time to execute tasks. If your APIs are poorly documented (suffering from either too much or too little documentation), too numerous per endpoint, or inconsistent in how they respond to queries with incomplete information, AI agents won't try to guess—they will simply abandon your system to look for different tools instead.
While these insights are incredibly valuable for infrastructure stability, the mainstream talks frequently veered toward selling proprietary products rather than exploring open topics, and genuine, collaborative case studies were rare. The most inspiring apidays session that stood completely apart from the product pitches focused on AGTP (Agent Transfer Protocol), presented by Chris Hood of Nomotic. AGTP is a proposed application-layer communication protocol designed to be a peer to commonly used standards like SMTP and HTTP, but architected from the ground up specifically for communication between AI agents. I'll talk more about AGTP more in an upcoming post.
The Open-Source Counterweight: Shifting Focus from Middleware to MarketersStepping into the Drupal AI Summit offered a completely different energy, characterized by an optimistic tone and solutions rooted entirely in freely available, open-source tools.
Standing room only at the Drupal AI Summit in New York City
Where the broader enterprise tracks viewed APIs as rigid backend guardrails to keep AI contained, the Drupal tracks explored how these emerging agentic capabilities can transform actual user and author experiences. This was the core focus of my own presentation, "AI-driven DXP: New Horizons for Marketers".
While the enterprise is busy worrying about model optimization, the digital experience platform (DXP) ecosystem is looking at how agentic AI fundamentally redefines how marketing teams create, manage, and orchestrate content. In an AI-driven DXP, the traditional boundaries of content management melt away. Instead of treating the CMS as a passive repository, an ecosystem built on agentic AI allows marketers to deploy autonomous workflows that can intelligently adapt experiences, connect disjointed data sources, and scale personalization without requiring manual engineering oversight.
The summit beautifully balanced these high-level, future-forward visions of marketing horizons with real-world challenges that development teams are solving today.
Real-World Impact Over SlidewareUnlike the abstract trend-decking found elsewhere, the Drupal sessions were rich with actual deployment stories. The sessions demonstrated how the Drupal community is leveraging its enthusiastic embrace of agentic AI to "maintain our edge". A standout example included a highly practical, real-world case study showing how teams are using autonomous AI agents to seamlessly migrate an existing WordPress site into Acquia Source CMS.
The Difference is StrikingIn sum, the contrast between the mainstream enterprise tracks and the Drupal AI Summit highlights a significant divergence in the evolution of the agentic web. While the broader industry focuses on cost management and proprietary guardrails, Drupal has found itself as the best CMS for AI. Drupal holds a significant advantage in today's agentic landscape thanks to its mature tooling for structured content, robust enterprise governance features, and an enthusiastic, collaboration-driven community. This unique combination of open-source agility and enterprise-grade architecture ensures that Drupal remains at the forefront of transforming user and author experiences in an AI-driven world.
Watch session recordingsAll sessions from Drupal AI Summit NYC are now available to watch on YouTube.
Join us at upcoming eventsWe have a number of summits and conferences during the year. Visit our events calendar for more details.
The Drop Times: Finding Community at Drupal Dev Days Athens
Drupal Association blog: Acquia’s Fair Trade Initiative: A new model for sustainable Drupal funding
The Drupal Association is responsible for the massive infrastructure that keeps the Drupal ecosystem moving forward. From protecting and upgrading Drupal.org to coordinating global events, managing community programs, and providing resources to our vital Security Team, our work requires reliable funding.
Acquia’s Fair Trade Initiative changes the paradigm by embedding funding directly into the transactional deal flow of the new Acquia Partner Program. When an Acquia partner closes an eligible Drupal deal, 2% of that transaction is automatically directed to the Drupal Association to support our core mission. This ensures a sustainable model that aligns Drupal’s commercial growth with continued investment in its underlying infrastructure.
What makes this model truly exceptional is how it aligns incentives across the board:
- Funded Completely by Acquia: The 2% contribution is funded entirely out of Acquia’s margin. It costs the end-customer nothing extra, and it does not reduce partner revenue or incentives.
- Partners Earn Capital Contribution Credit: The funding is publicly tracked and credited in the partner's name within the Acquia Partner Portal. This financial support directly counts toward the partner’s standing in the Drupal Association’s Certified Partner Program.
- Predictable Scaling for Drupal: As the Drupal economy grows and partners close more business, funding for the Drupal Association automatically scales alongside it.
We want to extend a massive #DrupalThanks to Acquia for their visionary leadership, and to all the Acquia partners who are now automatically driving the future of the Drupal project with every deal they close.
Together, we aren't just building digital experiences; we are building a sustainable, open web for everyone.
Specbee: How to optimize your Drupal website's performance and pass core web vitals (a practical guide)
Dries Buytaert: Contentful and the limits of "Buy European"
This morning, Salesforce announced its plan to acquire Contentful.
Congratulations to Sascha Konietzke, Paolo Negri, and the whole Contentful team. They spent 13 years building Contentful into one of Europe's most visible enterprise software companies. Salesforce buying Contentful is real validation of the product, customers, and team they built.
The deal makes sense for both Salesforce and Contentful. Salesforce has long had a CMS-shaped hole in its product offering, and Contentful fills it with a mature, enterprise-ready SaaS product.
To me, the more important question isn't whether the acquisition makes strategic sense, but what it means for digital sovereignty. It's a textbook example of why "Buy European" isn't enough.
Before I go further, let me be clear about where I'm coming from. I founded Drupal and still lead the project, and I co-founded Acquia, the company built around Drupal, where I'm Executive Chair. So when I argue that this deal exposes a problem, you should factor in that Open Source is both my life's work and my livelihood.
Contentful is a German company, Contentful GmbH, registered in Berlin. For over a decade it has been a flagship European software company.
If the acquisition closes, it becomes part of Salesforce, a US corporation, and falls under US law.
For many of Contentful's customers, this acquisition will be a non-event. For governments, public institutions, and regulated industries, it exposes a harder truth: a vendor being European today is no guarantee it stays European tomorrow.
A practical example is the US CLOUD Act. Many people may not know about it, but it becomes relevant anytime a non-US vendor is acquired by a US company.
In plain English, the CLOUD Act means that US authorities can require any US company to disclose data it controls. That can apply even if its data is stored in Europe, managed by a European team, or running on European infrastructure.
This is not a hypothetical concern. The law came out of a dispute between Microsoft and the US government over emails stored in Ireland. US Congress changed the law while the case was pending, making clear that US providers can be required to produce data stored abroad.
That does not make Contentful a bad company. It does not make Salesforce a bad owner. And it does not take anything away from what the Contentful team built.
But it shows the limit of "Buy European". Contentful spent 13 years as a trusted European vendor, and one board meeting is enough to put it under US law.
An Open Source license changes that. Drupal customers running on Acquia, my own US-based company, are also exposed to US law. But because Drupal is Open Source, they can move to a European hosting partner, self-host, or fork the code. A Contentful customer cannot.
The Contentful team deserves credit for what they built. Few European software companies have reached its scale and size. But this is also a reminder for Europe. For software that governments, public institutions, and critical industries depend on, sovereignty must survive any acquisition.
That is the point of The Software Sovereignty Scale and The Sovereignty Prerequisite that I submitted to the European Commission as feedback on their Cloud Sovereignty Framework.
Open Source is the only way to guarantee long-term choice, control, and governance over your code, data, and infrastructure.
Special thanks to Tiffany Farriss for her review of this blog post.
Talking Drupal: Talking Drupal #555 - AI Learners Club
Today we are talking about AI, How to stay up to date with it, and if it will really take our jobs with guests Angie Byron & Amber Matz. We'll also cover AI Best Practices for Drupal as our module of the week.
For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/555
Topics- What Is AI Learners Club
- Amber Defines the Club
- Origin Story and DrupalCon
- AI Debate and Community Tensions
- Issue Queue Conduct and Moderation
- Thread Tone vs Substance
- AI Adoption Outside Drupal
- Conflict Mediation Playbook
- Maintainer Burnout and Flood
- Safe Space Learners Club
- How the Club Started
- Picking Topics and Demos
- AI Taking Our Jobs
- Future of Learners Club
- Context Control Center
- AI Learners Club
- What Angie's working on these days
Amber Matz - tugboatqa.com amber-himes-matz Angie Byron - ai_best_practices webchick
HostsNic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Scott Falconer - managing-ai.com scott-falconer
MOTW CorrespondentMartin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu
- Brief description:
- Do you want to start using AI tools for Drupal development, in the most efficient way possible? There's a composer plugin for that!
- Module name/project name:
- Brief history
- How old: created in Mar 2026 by Angie Byron (webchick), one, of today's guests, a long-time Drupalist, one-time Acquian, and a fellow Canadian
- Versions available: dev version only, which doesn't seem directly opinionated about what version of Drupal you're using, though it does have minimum versions of PHP and Symfony libraries that suggest Drupal 10 is functionally your minimum
- Maintainership
- It is officially seeking co-maintainers
- Test coverage
- Documentation - an in-depth README, or you can ask an AI model! (like I did for this segment)
- 54 open "Work Items" on Gitlab, so lots of active discussion already
- Module features and usage
- AI Best Practices for Drupal aims to be the opinionated starter experience for AI-assisted Drupal development
- You can think of it as a single Composer install that makes any AI coding agent "speak Drupal": following community standards, preferring contrib over custom code, and avoiding framework-naive mistakes. It replaces scattered, tool-specific CLAUDE.md files and Cursor rules that some Drupal developers currently maintain individually, with one canonical, community-governed package that works across Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and more. With contributions by a variety of Drupal luminaries including Marcus Johansson, Christoph Briedert, and Scott Falconer, it's the Drupal equivalent of Laravel Boost: stop explaining Drupal to your AI every session and just get writing code.
- After install or update, it will create an AGENTS.md file from a provided template if there isn't one already, or it will update a specifically marked "ai-best-practices" section of an existing file
- You will also have a directory of provided skills, and guidance for creating new Drupal agent skills
- Also included is a set of evals, meant to automatically identify when AI models go off course and provide feedback
- AI Best Practices for Drupal is meant to provide guidance that will be particularly useful for AI agents, so it's ideal for Drupal developers getting started with AI tools, or for AI developers who want to get started with Drupal
ImageX: A Simple Guide to Creating Company Contact Details with a Map in Drupal
Addresses and other contact details are among the most familiar pieces of information we encounter online. They guide deliveries, define locations, and connect digital content to the real world. The way they are structured and displayed quietly shapes how useful and reliable they become.
The Drop Times: Drupal 12 Readiness Starts Showing Up in Contrib
Drupal 12 is still months away, but readiness work is already becoming visible in contributed projects. One recent example comes from Scheduled Transitions 2.9.0-beta4, which declares compatibility with Drupal ^11.3 || ^12. The release itself is modest, but it serves as an early reminder for teams beginning to review upgrade paths and dependency inventories ahead of the next major Drupal release.
Scheduled Transitions is an editorial workflow module that allows content revisions to move automatically between moderation states at scheduled times. While the module itself may not be widely discussed, it represents the kind of workflow dependency that organisations often rely on for day-to-day publishing operations.
That makes its Drupal 12 compatibility declaration noteworthy. Upgrade planning should not stop at Drupal core. Teams also need visibility into the contributed modules that support moderation, scheduling, revisions, translations, layout management, search, and editorial access. Early compatibility signals help identify which parts of a publishing stack are already preparing for the next release cycle.
According to the Drupal core release schedule, Drupal 12.0.0-beta1 is planned for the week of 14 September 2026, with Drupal 12.0.0 scheduled for the week of 7 December 2026. Drupal 10 is also expected to reach end of life on 9 December 2026, giving site owners a practical reason to begin evaluating dependencies before the final quarter of the year.
The takeaway is straightforward: start small, but start now. Check which contributed modules already declare Drupal 12 support, note any changes in PHP requirements, and identify workflow dependencies that have yet to publish a compatibility path. Scheduled Transitions is only one example, but it highlights the quiet preparatory work that often determines how smoothly a major upgrade goes.
With that context in mind, the major developments covered in last week’s edition of Editor's Pick newsletter are presented in the teaser blocks below.
Readers can follow The Drop Times on LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, and Facebook for ongoing updates. The publication is also active on Drupal Slack in the #thedroptimes channel.
Kazima Abbas
Sub-editor
The Drop Times