Chris Bryce: Okay, we are live with episode 28 of, uh, Beyond the CMS, uh, previously the Web Tech Talk show. And, uh, just really value a, a moment in time chatting with industry leaders on the value of. The future of content platforms, content creation, um, anything that we can do to serve CMOs, um, on their quest to present their brand information more elegantly.

Chris Bryce: Um, and today I am, uh, really stoked and super jazzed to have, uh, Sven Al Hamad join us from Webiny, um. Welcome. You're checking in from, uh, across the other side of the world. Uh, maybe just introduce yourself and tell everyone, uh, about what you're up to.

Sven Al Hamad: Yeah. Thank you, Chris. Um, excited to be here and, uh, to join you for this episode.

Sven Al Hamad: So, um, I'm Sven Al Hamad. I'm the CEO and Co-founder at Webiny. Uh, so Webiny is an open source, uh, CMS, uh, or content platform, mainly designed for, uh, large and enterprise businesses, uh, to manage their content as well as all the workflows around it. Previously Webiny actually started as a web agency like many years ago, but then we pivoted into a product that you see today.

Chris Bryce: Super cool. And, uh, from what I understand, you were originally a developer and uh, you are now in the post of of CEO. It's great that you've made time available today to speak with us and to share access to you. Do you wanna talk a little bit about that journey?

Sven Al Hamad: Yeah. Yeah. I, I mean, um, I started, I, I studied like computer science, uh, before that, I think I started coding when I was like 13 or 14.

Sven Al Hamad: Uh, actually, uh, my first ever like, uh, a production website was for my, uh, uh, school. And, uh, that's, that was in Flash that I moved to. That's how back I go. Uh, and uh, when I started Webiny as an agency, um, I was also kind of heavily involved in, uh, building a lot of these, uh, webpages, working with a lot of different frameworks and technologies.

Sven Al Hamad: Um, and, uh, as we evolved Webiny into the, the content platform you see today, I slowly kind of, uh. Uh, focus more on the business side, focus more on the product. Uh, I focus doing pre-sales, uh, heavily, uh, being in front of customers, understanding, uh, what they're after and their needs. But I still, uh, oftentimes go, go, go back and, uh, do a bit of coding.

Sven Al Hamad: Um, just like last week, I, uh, migrated our blog, which was powered by Markdown on Gatsby, and I rewrote the whole application with, uh. Uh, router on Next.js and move all the content into Webiny headless CMS. So it was again, uh, I just a learning journey. I like to check in on technologies, check in on the state of web, what people are doing, what people are using, both on the infrastructure side as well as on the, let's say, technology stack side.

Sven Al Hamad: Uh, because I mean, um. It's an, it's an area that in inside which Webiny exists. So understanding our environment is, is very key, uh, factor for me to then decide also how that influences our roadmap, influences certain, uh, technology decisions. Of course, I, I have my co-founder Pavel, CTO, at Webiny, who is way more advanced in that than me, but I like to.

Sven Al Hamad: Have a, a, a, let's say, an outside perspective in, while he has an inside out perspective. So, and that's why we kind of have a good, good overlap in terms of figuring out what, what technology to pick and, uh, how to approach development of certain features and so on.

Chris Bryce: You just reminded me of the kind of almost a, a bookend framework.

Chris Bryce: I, I remember writing. Was it Lingo script back in the Flash days, Lingo, and ActionScript. Good old days. And now we've got AI kind of jumping in here and, um, being mischievous all over the place. Um, but the reason why we're here, uh, is to talk about Webiny and, uh, maybe, um, just tell us about kind of what the product is at a high level, and then we'll drill into some of the great features and functions and why it's so important to know about your product.

Sven Al Hamad: Yeah. Yeah. Um, so, um, a bit about Webiny. Webiny is a content platform. We say it's a platform because it, it's not an off the shelf product that you just take and use. It's not designed for that. It's designed that you take it and actually you adopt it to your organization. The way your organization works, the way your organization, uh, creates content, manages content, publishes content, the way it stores the content where it's stored.

Sven Al Hamad: Uh, so with Webiny, you have the. Control of all of that. And, uh, Webiny ships with like five different products. But then there's a whole developer toolkit, uh, that you get access to so you can customize that experience, build new experiences within the platform. So you actually, we like to say like Webiny gets you.

Sven Al Hamad: 80%, uh, of the way out of the box. And the other 20 is what makes it unique to you. And that's where you come in and use that developer toolkit. But also what's, what's cool about Webiny is that Webiny has been ground architected from the ground up to be, um. Uh, host self hosted within customer's AWS account and Webiny uses serverless services.

Sven Al Hamad: Webiny doesn't run on containers, it doesn't run on virtual machines or service of any kind. It only runs on services. So we're talking DynamoDB, Lambda, S3, SQS and stuff like that. What this means is that Webiny can scale from like one user to a million users without you needing to lift a finger. So although you are self-hosting, you have all of the benefits of data ownership and governance, but you don't occur that big DevOps bill because all of the DevOps work is done by AWS for you.

Sven Al Hamad: Plus it's way more secure. It's way more cost efficient, and it just gives you that peace of mind that you don't need to have monitors of uptime. Uptime doesn't exist in our world. It's always. A hundred percent. Right. Uh, so these are just some of the unique features of, of, of Webiny. And that's kinda like why we say it's a platform.

Sven Al Hamad: 'cause you get all of these, uh, three layers, the application, the developer toolkit, and the infrastructure.

Chris Bryce: Interesting. Uh, you, you just touched briefly on data and data privacy. Um, maybe I can ask you to dig into that a little bit more and, um, maybe, well, there's the current state of affairs in the world today, and where is our data and where's it being stored? Um. Yeah. Do you wanna talk about that a little bit?

Sven Al Hamad: Yeah. Yeah. So there's, there's a couple of aspects about, so the important aspects, uh, or what are the important aspects of data governance today? Well, um, there's, there's a, you as an organization, right? You producing your data, your data inside a content management system, right?

Sven Al Hamad: Your data is your output. It's the result of the hard work of the people on your payroll creating, uh, something. And that's the result that data. That data has value, right? It had value before AI. Now it has way more value. Why? Because that's the raw ingredient for the AI, right? That's what AI needs in order to be better, to understand the world around us much better.

Sven Al Hamad: It's that data, right? So first of all, use an organization, have certain responsibilities towards all of that investment that you made, that that investment is secure, right? You don't wanna be, let's say, using a SaaS vendor, first of all, you're gonna lose the control or. Over where your data is stored, who can access it? It's like it's giving the keys to your house to somebody else. You don't wanna do that, right? It's not safe. But then today there's constantly, Hey, we've updated our terms of service emails. What does that mean? Right? You open it up and there it says, oh, all of the data on our platform that you produced we can use to train our, uh, our AI, right?

Sven Al Hamad: Like, but I invested a lot of money into that data. Uh, it cost me money and now you're gonna use it to train your LLM, and then you're gonna send me LL send, sell that LLM back to me to, uh, uplift my subscription. So that's another thing that's not really good.

Sven Al Hamad: Um, and the, the, the, the third reason, which is a reason that's very important to very large businesses, we're talking enterprises, Fortune 500s, and stuff like that is like.

Sven Al Hamad: You as a, let's say a Fortune 500. You can't just go and use ChatGPT and create new works or, uh, allow your employees to use it. Why? Because there's a certain legal responsibility. If an employee in your company uses ChatGPT to create, uh, a new piece of content that goes live, how did ChatGPT create that content or help you create? Where is the source? Or because that content is derivative work of somebody else's work that ChatGPT was trained on. Right. And if that's somebody else. Well seize that or can drive that conclusion. They can file a lawsuit against you.

Sven Al Hamad: For you as a large business, you need to understand where did that raw ingredient come from to train that LLM that your employees use to create derivative works out of it, right? If you don't have that full connection on that understanding, you are walking on nothing nice. You're gonna be in trouble sooner or later. That's why data is important, because if you have that data, if you own it a hundred percent, nobody else has access to it. You can then use it to train your own machines, LLMs, and then create, uh, bots that work for your organization where you have peace of mind, how that data is stored, uh, how the work was created.

Sven Al Hamad: Right? And then we have the geopolitical theme on top of it where there's. Let's a messy situation around the world today. Um, I'm based in Europe. There's a lot of companies now that like are questioning, Hey, um, is our data safe? Will we host with this cloud vendor or that vendor? Do we have an uh, alternative in Europe?

Sven Al Hamad: So there is questions like that and. Again, your data is your existence in some cases, so it is the most important thing. That's why we made Webiny self hosted, but we made it self hosted in a way that's super reliable, secure, and cost efficient. We could, that was very hard to do. Only the serverless technology unlocked that possibility with containers. You can't do that with virtual service. You can't do that. You need to have a service, uh, that you trust.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned, um, the privacy of data. I think it was a couple days ago. It looks like Midjourney is getting sued by Disney and the Star Wars franchise are producing Darth Vader images. And it was like, where'd you get that from? Uh.

Sven Al Hamad: Yeah, it's a thing. Ghibli Studio and OpenAI, when they released the, uh, the last uh, um, image gen, right? Everybody was creating Ghibli Studio style cartoons. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now you as a company, do you really want to create such an artwork and post it on your website because, well, you're lucky if they sue ChatGPT, but. If they go a step further, uh, you could be in trouble.

Chris Bryce: Yeah. Good points. Um, you made a decision, I guess, philosophically some time ago to, uh, go with an open source philosophy. Do you wanna talk a little bit about that and, and maybe we've. We sell to enterprise organizations and there's, there's a little bit of reluctance from some folks around open source and how, how the tooling and infrastructure is supported. But, um, yeah, maybe share a little bit about your commitment to open source and what that means.

Sven Al Hamad: Yeah. So why we decided on open source, um. It has few aspects, um, but I think the underlying theme there is control. Um, so going open source somewhat automatically implies self-hosting, right? So I, I. Talked about the data privacy aspect, and that's unlocked with self-hosting.

Sven Al Hamad: But then there's the other aspect which is we work with, uh, a lot of large organizations and, um, no two organizations are the same. They just, at that level, the processes they have are very unique to them and they can't be. Off the shelf vanilla style, uh, processes. So such a product won't work for them.

Sven Al Hamad: Right. So we were thinking like, how do you build a highly customizable product, um, that can serve any type of a use case while not knowing what use cases you might have? Right, right, right. And, and that's what open source actually unlocks. If you do it right, that means that you need to architect for open source.

Sven Al Hamad: So when we build a feature, what is built. For open source mean? Well when you build a feature, uh, if you build it for a SaaS, you could just mask the code. It doesn't have need to be the prettiest code. Uh, 'cause they never will see that code. Right. But they will never be able to extend it when we build the feature, I.

Sven Al Hamad: The building of the feature is like 30% of the work. Then you got the other 30% where you need to think about how do we architect this feature so it's fully customizable, extendable and maintainable, uh, doesn't cause performance issues when somebody extends it and changes the way it works. And then you got the other 30%, which is.

Sven Al Hamad: Document all of that. Make sure the code is pretty, make sure it's a hundred percent unit test coverage, functional test coverage, uh, write some, uh, example plugins on top of it so we like have to go two to three x more in our effort in building open source. But that means that a large organization. Can take our product and every single aspect of the solution is fully customizable in a very maintainable way.

Sven Al Hamad: And there's documentation and examples how to do that, which means that they, as an organization, they don't need to adopt to using our product. Instead they adopt our product to their organization. So it. Fits seamlessly within their existing ecosystem. It can also integrate with other applications and tools that are behind the firewall that have some custom APIs that it can integrate with tools that they've created.

Sven Al Hamad: Because when you're working with a SaaS vendor, if there's a marketplace and there's an integration, awesome, but there is. If there's not, you're locked out of that with us. You are not. Right? So with Webiny, we, we, we like to say like with Webiny, you're gonna get 80% out of the box, right? And that's intended. The other 20 is what makes you unique. It's your secret sauce. And using our developer toolkit, you will be able to map that 20 into Webiny and you're gonna have a product that you feel is working for you, not against you.

Chris Bryce: Very cool. And you mentioned the developer toolkit, and you're totally right. You know, we, we have fairly, uh, limited customizations with some kind of, let's call it standard SaaS apps or content platforms. And, uh, working with open source really unlocks those doors. Uh, and I know you have a, a. A bias or an emphasis on kind of the developer aspect of the product. Do you wanna talk about Webiny's, kind of developer toolkits and how you engage with the developer community?

Sven Al Hamad: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe just before I jump into that, just to mention a, a comment on your comment where like, enterprises are reluctant about open source. Um, I think there's two types of enterprises, uh, enterprises that embrace open source and enterprises that just. Prefer off the shelf SaaS solutions.

Sven Al Hamad: The ones that embrace open source by culture and nature are way more efficient because they are, they understand the power of open source. Open source oftentimes doesn't mean there's a saying, I don't remember who said it, but it's like, open source is not, uh, free beer. It's free speech. Right? It gives them that, uh, underlying control that no SaaS can ever do. Right. And for some enterprises that is the most important thing. Uh, it gives them that freedom and control, and that's what open source means for a lot of those enterprises.

Sven Al Hamad: Um, and they will stick to an open source solution, not because it's cheap or. Sometimes it doesn't need to be cheap, uh, or that it's free at all. No, they don't mind paying. They, they want to even pay a premium for open source to get back that freedom and control that open source unlocks.

Sven Al Hamad: Um, to come to your other question, so about, uh, Webiny's developer toolkit and what do we do and how do we engage with developers? Um. By being open source, you do have certain responsibility, uh, that you don't have as a SaaS. That is a responsibility towards a developer, right? You have a community. A SaaS can have a community. You have a developer, but a SaaS might just mean, Hey, here's my docs for my API. We, we have do it completely different, right?

Sven Al Hamad: We need to think about every single line of code that we write, what a third party developer might. See, when they look at that, how would they be able to extend that and understand from a logical standpoint of how that extension needs to work or will work, or what are the possibilities in which this can be customized and things like that. Right? So we have to think about a lot of different things because our product is not our, just our. Let's say headless CMS, which is one of the applications we have, but our product is also our design system.

Sven Al Hamad: Our product is also our documentation. Our product is also our development framework. All of these things are products for us and we need to take. That type of a view, it's not just something you bolter on, on top of a feature you built. No, it is a first class citizen and we treat it as a feature. Our, our docs page is a, a, a product for us, right. That we invested a lot of time in figuring out how do you do documentation properly, how do you version documentation and all of that.

Sven Al Hamad: Our upgrade guides. We have whole set of mechanisms that developers can use as supporting tools to upgrade Webiny versions more seamlessly, more safely. Migration guide, these are all, uh, all the tools and, and, and, and things that we, we. Take a great pride in creating and we are creating those tools for people like us developers, engineers, people that wanna get things done, that don't wanna kind of fight the code or fight the, the upgrade guide or just be confused about it.

Sven Al Hamad: We, we, we deeply invest into that aspect. We're not perfect. We're far from it, and we still have a long way to go, but developers are people that we talk to every day. We have. I know close to 3000, uh, developers on our Slack, and they come give feedback. We have an open source GitHub, uh, repository with, uh, 7,000 stars.

Sven Al Hamad: Uh, people report issues there, so we do everything publicly. Our roadmap's public, our PRs are public. Our next release milestones are public. You can see every single line of code that goes into that. So being transparent, open, um. To developers, uh, and understanding what they wanna want out of a product, how will they use a product and manage it is, uh, something that we think about a lot at.

Sven Al Hamad: And every feature we build has that, let's say, angle to it besides the angle of how a marketing person will use it, how a non-technical person will use it, and things like that. Right. So, um, and that's how we design, uh, everything we do at Webiny.

Chris Bryce: Oh, very cool. You, you mentioned in passing that one of the, the products. Um, is kind of headless CMS or headless opportunities. Um, always a question I love to ask to everyone on the show. What is headless? Uh, are our customers still don't really know what that is, is a strange term. Sounds a little weird. Um, what, what's your take?

Sven Al Hamad: Yeah. Um. I would say still about 50 to 60% of the market doesn't know what headless is. Um, especially people migrating from, let's say, legacy solutions like, uh, Drupal, like WordPress, uh, so solutions that come with a head, uh, because they then say like they don't understand the fact that, hey, we stop at the API layer and then you need to build this other part. Um. It's really bad for user experience.

Sven Al Hamad: Uh, it's bad from the product experience, right? It, it, it is awful from a product experience. People want products with less friction and here is a friction size of a Titanic, right? It does come with a lot of benefits, right? Uh, but you just need to pause that friction. You as a content platform, uh, you need to give.

Sven Al Hamad: A full package, just decouple it. Uh, don't just give the bit to to, to the API, uh, give the other bit, but it has to be decoupled, so you need to ship a full end-to-end solution. Um. Not just that bit because customers will feel the friction will struggle, uh, with best practices in how to use the API, how to fetch pages, how to pre-run the pages, how to serve them from cache deploy, the one CDN.

Sven Al Hamad: There's a whole plethora of challenges that comes off that we're selling Next.js solved some of those, but still it's a big, big friction. It's like me giving you a car, uh, that just has the engine. Right, right, right. It is like, yeah, it is the most expensive part. Yes, it runs, but you're not gonna get anywhere.

Sven Al Hamad: Um, that's currently, uh, headless. Um, how a lot of companies do it and it's not the best, right? Mm-hmm. But unfortunately, that is, that that's the case because like we ship, I don't know, here's the headless with a Next.js front end as a, as a package. So it's much easier to adopt, but then somebody can comment.

Sven Al Hamad: Yeah. But we use, I don't know. PHP for our front end or some other framework or something custom. It is like they're gonna feel that friction. They just, well, there's no way around it unless they jump to Next.js. And in some cases that means learning a new technology for somebody.

Chris Bryce: Yeah. Um, you, we talked a little bit about commercial open source and I thought, um, maybe there's an opportunity to share a couple of the customers that maybe well recognized brands to give some kind of, um, some comfort in knowing that large organizations have this methodology of, of being in control of their stuff. Uh, do you wanna share a couple case studies with me?

Sven Al Hamad: Yeah. Yeah. Um, I'll share two, so two case studies. Um, I would say one big, uh, advocate of open source is Siemens. So here in Europe, um, I. It's a worldwide brand. Uh, everybody knows it. But what people don't know is that, for example, Siemens has a whole organization dedicated to, uh, advocating open source, contributing to open source.

Sven Al Hamad: Like, uh, they're one of the top contributors, uh, uh, to GitLab, uh, an open source alternative to GitHub. So Siemens not only uses. But they actually give back, uh, which is awesome to see. And one of the main reasons why, uh, when Siemens was looking for their new CMS, they picked us was that open source, uh, aspect.

Sven Al Hamad: Because they, as an organization, they work in a very specific way and they need to do things in a very specific way. And with us. That that meant that they're gonna be heavily customizing the product. And we allowed that, right? We allowed to translate all of those business requirements directly into the admin platform.

Sven Al Hamad: That there's a specific way of how things are organized in, on the content side, like no other CMS, that there's a specific way, how there's relationship between to the content. Again, no other CMS has that, and uh, like we looked at some of these things even from the aspect, like Siemens is doing it, do we wanna move it into a product and.

Sven Al Hamad: Like, there's a lot of very, very specific things that just work for them as an organization. And our product did deliver on that aspect where it allowed them to do that, which was great. Right? There's a key to have an amazing development team in between that can take our product, customize it for them.

Sven Al Hamad: So we had a partner in the, in the mix, which did an amazing job there. Uh, but for example, that was one, uh, great success, success story where. A large organization with hundreds of regional offices, hundreds of thousands of pages, uh, thousands of content editors is using an open source solution, right? Um, the other example would be, um, MotorTrend.

Sven Al Hamad: They're the largest automotive media portal in the world. Um. For them, again, they took Webiny from the aspect of being a modern serverless based open source, uh, content platform. And again, they went in and heavily customized everything. And like we have, uh, a chat, uh, private chat with them where their engineers and I engineers collaborate basically on a daily basis when they pitch an idea.

Sven Al Hamad: There's never a no with Webiny it's gonna be either we are gonna build it. It's gonna be available to you, or we're gonna give you a path how you can build it and then own it, right? There's never, you can't do this Webiny. Such a thing doesn't exist in our world, right? But like these two large organizations, and I, I believe like MotorTrend does couple of billion content views a month.

Sven Al Hamad: Um. A big, um, um, database of, uh, of like hundreds of millions of records, petabytes of assets, assets. All of that works seamlessly on, on our platform, right? Uh, and they were able to then add hundreds and hundreds of customizations, uh, specifically for their team, for their editorial needs on top of our platform in a very maintainable way, because they're still updating the platform on a regular basis.

Chris Bryce: Interesting. Um, gotta bring up AI into this conversation somehow. Um, time goes by pretty quickly. I just wanted to give a shout out to everyone who's making some time during their lunch hour over, uh, in the Eastern time zone and I. Feel free to, uh, ask us any questions or follow up later if something comes to mind. We'll go through any of the comments on our posts here, and we'll be sharing all of this and segments of it on our social channels afterwards as well. But, um, yeah. Uh, what's your take on AI? What's going on? Are you all in, uh, observing? What, what's happening over there?

Sven Al Hamad: Um, I think from, from our end, and it, it's a bit of a, a bit of a mix, uh, a bit of everything. So first of all, being open source and, uh. Allowing customers to have full control. Um, our view is that we need to be agent agnostic. Uh, some customers wanna use ChatGPT, some clo, some wanna bring their own, uh, trained LLMs. So we need to work across the board and being open source, what we do is just provide integration points where you can then enrich the experience with AI and you can mix and match AI agents as you like.

Sven Al Hamad: Right. So we, we want, we're standing back also, we're talking a lot to our customers and. There's a, there's a, there's a quite a range of perceptions in terms of how they want to use AI. We have customers that say, look, I wanna generate as much content as possible through AI and a human only kind of reviews and publishers. That's one aspect.

Sven Al Hamad: But then on the other opposite end of that, we have customers that say, look, I want my content editors. Be my creative team. They create all of the content themselves and AI automates everything around the content they've created, be that SEO tags, keywords, uh, taxonomy recommendations that AI does everything but the content.

Sven Al Hamad: And in the first example, AI does the content and the human does the other. So we have two different approaches. So we don't wanna, as a platform, uh, prescribe. What and how you should be working because you as an organization are taking a holistic AI approach. If not, you should. Uh, and that means that you wanna replicate, you want a tool into which you can replicate your AI strategy, not a tool that's gonna prescribe one AI strategy in one end, because you're using that tool and then on another, and using a different tool that has a different approach, it's gonna be very messy for you, right?

Sven Al Hamad: So we need to keep those open towards how you should be using AI. Should you be using AI? Yes, you should. That's a definite right answer. And uh, that's kind of like on the back, that's on the back office, that's on the admin panel. How do you enrich and make sure that the teams are more productive with AI? Right?

Sven Al Hamad: But then there's um, I think that next stage of Webiny, which is gonna be Webiny that is being purposely built for AI, right? Uh, this. Not yet inclined, like no visibility on the internet about that. But it's just a question of when, um, because we, as humans, we wanna. We should value our time. If we're not, we should be.

Sven Al Hamad: That means that if I'm searching for information, uh, Q&A, hey chat, find me the best. Now I go to, I dunno, ChatGPT, list me the best, I dunno. Top 10 developer friendly CMSs and OpenAI gives me, gives me a list, right? And then I go and go to the website of each of these. Uh, but that's like stepping from 2025 into, uh.

Sven Al Hamad: Two thousands. I started to read the pages, go one page at the other, and then create myself an Excel sheet on the side. But what if that I can go on a, on a website and stuff like that and have more energetic experience, that the web becomes agent first in a way that every website is just a bubble into which I type in what I wanna know, and it tells me I don't need to be clicking through pages and browsing and reading text, right?

Sven Al Hamad: 'cause that feels already today, at least for me. Old school, right? Yeah. There's a lot of browsers that are now patching and adding, Hey, here's an OpenAI extension that can summarize this page for you. Fine, right? Uh, but it still has limited context. What if I have content editors that create AI specific content that's being fed directly as a context into the agent that lives on my website?

Sven Al Hamad: I come there, I type in my question, I get my response. I'm a happy person. I've just saved myself a bunch of clicking and scrolling, right? So. It's we're in transition period. I think a lot of things will change and as that web changes, there's gonna be a lot of changes on what is a web analytic, what do we events we wanna track, how do we understand who's an engaged customer, who's not, what are, what the funnels look like? All of these things in like next 12 months to couple of years, it's gonna be a very different experience than, than today, I think.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, I'm really with you. We, we've been doing a bit of prototyping with websites that are just creating content on the fly with agents, reading a brand prompt and a governance prompt and keeping everything in check. And it seems like we're not far away from platforms enabling that as well. Um, I noticed we're a little bit technically outta time, but I did have another question for you. If you don't mind before we go, just around personalization are CMOs are our typical. Customer and, and viewer of our content, and that conversation comes up often. Um, what are your thoughts on personalization?

Sven Al Hamad: I think the personalization is not gonna happen on the websites. It's gonna become irrelevant. Personalization is gonna happen at the chat bot level, where I ask, Hey, here's my context. I'm a CMO in this organization. I'm using this today. Here are my challenges.

Sven Al Hamad: Recommend me top five products to resolve this problem. Right? This is where the personalization gonna happen, right? Yeah. Yeah, I don't need, I don't need the personalization on the website that's gonna become less, uh, less relevant. Um, of course there's the e-commerce bit where I put something in my cart and then you suggest I.

Sven Al Hamad: That, that remains. But personalization on the content level, I think it's gonna become irrelevant. Content in general, how we present it, uh, visually on the website is become, it's gonna become irrelevant. Websites are just gonna be information context to bots. Eventually, uh, I'm after information as a human being.

Sven Al Hamad: I'm not after I like it when it's nicely presented, but if I. Can get my answer in two seconds versus 20 minutes or a couple of days. I would prefer a bubble where I ask my question, uh, and the bubble gives me an answer. Right. So that, that's, that's gonna be the personalization. It is the most personal personalization you can have.

Chris Bryce: Yeah. Yeah, great points and, and a unique take as well. Um, 'cause there's a lot of emphasis on other platforms too. How do we get things hyper-personalized? Do we create like a hundred images that are gonna kind of pick and choose based on something? That's a lot of work for not a lot of real impact. 'cause like you said, yeah, I want some info.

Chris Bryce: And you can see that even with design right now, even larger brands are, I guess, um, pulling back on ultra fancy kind of JavaScript stuff because you know, it takes a long time and it's tricky to read for SEO and yeah, anything that has even a bit of a friction. Is going to be faded away.

Sven Al Hamad: Yeah. And browsing a website today, no matter how fast that website is, is bigger friction than going and asking a bot to give me an answer. Right. So if you then extrapolate that into the extreme, you're gonna get an experiment where every human being is not gonna be interested in the internet anymore, right? They're gonna be interested in typing into a bubble. The internet is still gonna exist, but it's gonna exist as a data repository and we're gonna still need to manage it somehow. Right? But you don't need to be, uh, showing all of that data publicly. 'cause people won't care. You're just gonna be building websites for nobody, right?

Chris Bryce: Yeah. It's gonna be a question and answer future for everyone. So, and yeah, we are heading in that direction. So a lot of these practices be that personalization, JavaScript, which just, all of that's gonna go away, I think, right? It's gonna be, again, irrelevant. You can already see massive drops in Google traffic across the world.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, it's interesting times and also a great conclusion and segue into a, a quick promotion for our show next week, um, where we're gonna feature Janice Lee, who's the head of customer success over here at Dotfusion, actually, uh, and we're going to be talking about this exactly, kind of the, the future of the web as we know it. And I like the terms you use, it's kind of your content repository or your data repository really, and, and what happens and how do agencies and customers and platforms all make these adjustments.

Chris Bryce: So, um, it's 12:35 over here, uh, in Toronto, Sven. Thank you very much. I appreciate you making your time to join us. Like really awesome insights. Um, thanks to everyone who made time during their day or early evening to, to join us here. And, uh, we'll be back next week with episode 29. And, um, have a great afternoon. We'll talk to everyone later.

Sven Al Hamad: Thank you, Chris. Thanks to everybody. Bye.

Chris Bryce: Hope you enjoyed. Thank you.