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Enterprise content supply chains run 15 to 19 steps. Joel Varty, CTO of Agility CMS, thinks AI can get that down to six, so people are the only bottlenecks left. Chris Bryce and Joel dig into the MCP server that connects Claude directly to your CMS and kills the copy-paste layer of content operations.
Joel has spent 21 years building Agility, the Canadian headless CMS behind Cineplex, Scotiabank country sites, school boards, and higher education. He explains why Agility deliberately did not build an AI agent inside the CMS, and instead meets teams inside the AI they already use: Claude, Copilot, or Gemini.
The MCP server now runs the full loop: content models for developers, a content pipeline that pushes up to 250 items per batch, and bulk publish, unpublish, and delete. Plus metadata vs JSON-LD schema in plain language, AEO, blogging from a phone with a Claude project, and content ops through a CLI for regulated industries that need sign-off and audit logs.
Links: Agility CMS: https://agilitycms.com Connect your AI agent to Agility: https://mcp.agilitycms.com Dotfusion (Agility Partner): https://dotfusion.com/services/agility-cms-development-agency Chris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cbryce Joel Varty on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelvarty/
Creators and Guests
What is Beyond the CMS - A Content Management Podcast?
We are all about Content Management Platforms.
Welcome to "Beyond the CMS," the podcast where big ideas, insightful conversations, and industry-leading voices converge to redefine digital content experiences. Each episode, we sit down with influential thought leaders and innovators from the most prominent CMS platforms—including Contentful, Storyblok, Agility, Magnolia, and more—to explore emerging trends, groundbreaking technologies, and transformative strategies shaping the future of content management.
Our guests are industry experts, visionaries, and key executives who dive deep into topics such as headless architectures, personalization, AI-driven content strategies, composable solutions, and best practices for delivering seamless digital experiences at scale. Whether you're a marketer, developer, product manager, or simply passionate about digital innovation, join us as we uncover actionable insights, discuss bold ideas, and provide a unique behind-the-scenes look into the ever-evolving CMS landscape.
#contentmanagementsystem #contentmanagement #headlesscms #contentful #agilitycms #storyblok #cms
All right, we're live.
All right.
We are now at, uh, episode
48 of Beyond the CMS.
Um, and, uh, thanks for everyone for
making time out, uh, during their
lunch on Thursday on Eastern Time,
uh, a little early on the West Coast.
Uh, the whole idea here is to chat
about content trends in, in content
platform systems, content operations,
uh, just have some grassroots
conversation and ask me anything format.
So if you're tuning in right now,
feel free to leave a comment on
LinkedIn and, uh, we actually see it
on the interface here in the show.
And if you're watching this in the future,
leave us a link on YouTube or wherever
you've seen this, or send us an email
and we'll be happy to get back to you.
Um, Joel, you've been on
the show a few times before.
It's a real pleasure always to
get your insights and ideas in
and around the world of content.
You're the CTO at Agility CMS, one
of our s- favorite CMSs, and one that
we've been using since the beginning
of time almost when we look back.
Um, thanks for joining us today and, uh,
making time to share some of your ideas.
Yeah, it's great to…
It's always great to chat, man.
So many things are happening, and
yet so many things are the same,
so it's always good to catch up.
It is true.
Well, uh, why don't we start off, um, and
just assume that a lot of folks listening
may not know anything about Agility.
Um, and do you wanna just tell us a little
bit a- about the product and a bit of its
history and, and your role over there?
Yeah.
So I've been, I've been
with Agility for 21 years.
The company has been around for
a couple years more than that.
Actually, our anniversary is coming up.
I can't remember if it's the 23rd or 24th
anniversary of Agility being a company.
We started off as an agency,
though, building, like, web
applications and websites.
Um, Jon Voigt started it with Mike
Assad, his partner at the time.
Um, I've been around since we started
essentially having a CMS product that
we were using to build websites on.
Um, and in tw- 2000…
2018, we went 100% SaaS, and we're
no longer implementing websites as an
agency, but just providing the headless
CMS product, um, headquartered here in
Canada and, you know, global customer
base and sort of like growing pretty
fast with that, with that customer base
among a real diverse set of customers.
I think we fit best in the sort of small
to medium enterprise, uh, space with
customers like, um, we have Cineplex
here in Canada, we've seen, uh, we
have a few Scotiabank sites as well.
A lot of different things in there.
But we also have like some school boards
or some school board sites that work
really well, and you and I just talked
about some of the higher education folks
that we've got on the platform and have
been on the platform for a long time.
Interesting one, we're coming
up to the 20th anniversary
of Cineplex being on Agility.
Right on.
Which is really exciting.
Yeah.
So cineplex.com
and all their properties for the Rec
Room, Playdium, and all the different
things that they have, um, they're
all on Agility, which is amazing.
Kind of talks to the power of Agility.
Um, and maybe I'll just kind of set
you up to answer some questions,
but Agility, the, uh, CMS, also
maybe I should introduce myself.
I'm Chris from Dotfusion.
Uh, we build on Agility, uh, large scale
mid to large enterprise websites, um, from
manufacturing to commercial real estate,
really a- across, across the board.
Um, not only is the tool accepted and used
globally, but there is an emphasis on kind
of Canadian data sovereignty, and we love
Agility as a Canadian product as well.
So anyone listening, I really
recommend that, uh, you reach out to
Joel and the team over at Agility.
You know, especially being in Canada is
important for your data infrastructure.
Um, but Joel, maybe tell me a little
bit about Agility, its architecture,
and I've just gotta ask you for
your definition again of headless,
um, for my inventory of, of quotes.
Sure.
I mean, I would say headless CMS is
like, there's a bunch of different
terms that it could be the same as.
So API driven, decoupled is another
one where like your data, your
content data is delivered via an API.
So there's like this disconnect
between where your website or
your app is hosted when compared
to where your content is hosted.
Um, and the net effect of that is
really cool because it means that
your site usually is a lot faster,
it's a lot more secure, and it's a
lot easier to build things, whether…
'cause you don't necessarily have to build
a website, you can build an app, you can
at least do all these other things, or
you can build one thing to get started
and then have it expand over time, either
into multiple properties or multiple
different departments of your company.
So it's a really nice way to kind
of quickly get something solved,
and a lot of the times that's how
we get in the door with a company.
That's definitely what happened with
like a Scotiabank, where we don't
have all of Scotiabank's websites.
We have like five or six of their
different country websites from the
Latin American companies that they
purchased, but it was really quick to
set up those sites, um, and build those,
um, build those out without having to
completely reinvent everything within
that, you know, pretty large organization.
So I'd say headless is like the
agile, it's why we call ourselves
Agility- Mm-hmm … the sort of agile,
nimble way to work with content, uh,
and to get stuff done really fast.
Yeah.
And, uh, for folks who don't know,
we've got a great case study where I
think we've moved the first Canadian
place, Brookfield Properties website,
into three different generations But
all with Agility at the back end.
So when you have a kind of a headless
situation, you can continue to change
the presentation of your content without
ever having to change the back end.
So it's a great just choice, I guess,
for keeping all of that content in,
in one place, um, especially the stuff
that kind of lasts forever and persists.
Um, another reason we love headless
and Agility is for its ability, um,
for us to build on Next and React,
which produces very discoverable pages.
Um, the Dotfusion website, for
example, is on Agility, and if
you type in best headless agency
in Canada, we come up first.
And there's many reasons for that
Of which one is luck, but there
are also some pragmatic scientific
things that we've been doing, and
Agility has an infrastructural part
of that equation, as does the kind of
formatting and the structure of data.
Do you wanna chat a little bit
about what your observations are
around, um, discoverable content and
helping your clients get discovered
because they're on Agility?
And I can attest that that
is a piece of the puzzle.
Yeah, I mean, we have always talked
about SEO as being one of the top
strategies and top, you know, like
discoverability for that, but AEO is
kind of a, a new term to be discovered
by AI agents as well as search crawlers.
Um, and so like your, your content
needs to be discoverable by those search
crawlers, by the agents that are building
their initial like every time there's
a new version of, you know, Claude or,
uh, ChatGPT, these things, they're gonna
go and like build their knowledge base.
You wanna get, you wanna get, uh,
crawled as part of that knowledge
base so that your thing, your,
your, your content, um, is part of
the core knowledge for an agent.
But then that agent is gonna do research
after that, and so it's gonna reach
out and talk to your website, um, as an
agent, like basically do web searches.
So it's gonna be like not necessarily
Google's crawler, which is hitting it,
uh, fairly often just as part of their
crawl, but this is someone doing, uh,
like web research through an agent.
And so the person isn't doing,
hitting your website yet, it's the
person's agent hitting your website.
Um, so it's gotta come back with the
right knowledge from that, which means
your, your, this, the discoverability
from like a programmatic side of
your content is really important, and
that's why structuring your content
in a headless CMS is really important.
Uh, and, and actually really
easy to do if you just kinda
know the hoops to jump through.
Um, but then of course you still
wanna build a beautiful website for
humans to actually look at, right?
So it needs to be fast and have all
those things so that when that person
actually comes to your website, that
they're gonna have a good experience.
And what we're finding is that we
actually have fewer people going to a
lot of websites now because more people
are spending time in AI agents, but the
people that do land on your website are
actually way more likely to convert and
to actually be interested in that content.
Um, and so that's, it's been an
interesting sort of like up and down
of, of the traffic, but the traffic
is much more valuable when you do get
someone that does come to your website.
So you really wanna
capture their attention.
Yeah, it's a good point, and, uh, we
could talk for a while on structured
data, but, uh, just thinking while
folks are listening to a bit of
this thread that we're on here, can
you just, uh, discuss a little bit
about, um, what's the difference
between the metadata and schema data?
We, we are typically working with
CMOs who are not necessarily that
technical and have way better things
to do than to understand all of this.
Yeah.
But can you explain that in, in
kinda layman's terms and, and how
Agility, I guess e- enables the
publishing of that type of content?
So from a very high level, if you
think of SEO and metadata, those
are the things that were really
the, the, the metadata of a page.
So like, it's gonna be like its
title and its description, and maybe
even like the Open Graph image.
It's a little bit more on
the social side of things.
But lo- those are the things that when
you search for content, the things that
show up in, in a Google search, right?
It's usually your title
and your meta description.
Sometimes it'll show something from
the page's content too if it matched up
something in the content, uh, depending
on what search agent you're using.
Um, but those are the, the…
That's the, the metadata for pages.
Like, it usually comes down to
that, the, the meta title and the,
the meta description, which are
very, like, open-ended fields.
Like, they're just text.
They don't have a lot of structure.
But you can also add a much tighter
schema onto each page that tells, um,
of the program, so whoever's crawling
that page, it tells the agent or the
crawler exactly what that data is, and
Google kind of led the way on this.
Uh, it's called JSON-LD.
Um- Hmm … so it's like r- it
used to be called it Rich Snippets.
It's moved on.
I can't remember the exact name now.
But essentially, it's like
a JSON schema for your page.
So you can tell an agent, "Hey, this is
an event page, and it's for something
that has, you know, these two hosts.
It's gonna be Chris and Joel.
Be on the podcast.
It's this time."
So if you have an event page for your,
uh, for, you know, that's part of the
something, like, that's gonna happen at
a certain time with certain people, you
can have all that structure in there.
You can even have a carousel
of images that represent that.
If you have an article page,
there's a specific article schema.
So these are well-known schemas that are
out there to say, "Okay, if you have this
kind of content, these are the thing…
These are the standard pieces of,
um, sort of text or, uh- Mm … data
that need to be in there."
With a headless CMS, it means that you can
translate your structured content to that
schema automatically, um, and provide,
you could provide tools right in product.
So Agility has tools right in the product
to kinda help, help this, and we're
gonna give more to do more stuff for AEO.
That's one of the things that is coming
down the pipe, uh, in the not too distant
future is, like, more AEO and SEO tools.
Super cool.
Um, you had…
We were chatting a little bit
earlier, and you had mentioned that
it was, um, Agility's decision not
to pack too much AI inside Agility,
which is a bit, um, contrary to
some of the other CMSs out there.
But I thought you had just a really
good reason, and, um, I'd be interested
to know a little bit more about your
take on where AI fits into the, I
guess, the content operations of an
organization and its platform What I
have observed, what we have observed
at Agility, is that many organizations
are figuring out their AI strategy
right now with a particular agent.
There are…
And most folks are either using, uh,
Claude, which I really like, or Copilot.
Some far-- Some are using Gemini.
Uh, and there's a couple others that
are in there, but those are the, the
sort of the three big sort of platforms.
And they all have coding agents that you
can use, and they all have sort of, uh,
non-technical sides of their agent too.
So stuff for, like, regular,
regular users to use.
Organizations are figuring out
how to use those sort of, uh,
foundational pieces of their AI puzzle.
How you fit into that does not work very
well if you have another agent in your
product that you want them to use, right?
Because now they gotta
go to this other place.
And, and I think there's a room,
there's a place for that at some point,
potentially, but I think there's a much
more value is to say, "Okay, you have
all of these things in your digital
ecosystem, and Agility is one of them.
How, how can we get Agility
into Claude for you?"
And that's what we're spending the most
time on now with folks, is basically
showing them from a development point
of view, how do you cut down your
development time from hours and hours
to work on something to, like, a lot
less time, minutes, to build this thing
that used to take an hour or a day?
And then…
But also get rid of the copy and paste.
Mm-hmm.
People are copy and pasting out of
Word or Google documents into, um,
like, fields in Agility, and those
fields are super powerful because
they lead to schema-driven stuff on
your website, so it's super valuable.
How can we use AI to get stuff out of
those unstructured documents, which
are what people use to create, and
into the structured, uh, pieces of
Agility, while at the same time may-
maybe we're gonna translate to different
locales at the same time using AI or
follow brand guidelines and, and ask
a bunch of questions about the content
if there's some problem with it.
You know, maybe, "Hey, we don't
use the word patient, we use the
word customer," that kind of thing.
The-- All of those guidelines which can
be really hard to follow, you can do
those as part of a content pipeline.
So setting that up for customers,
helping them either migrate content from
old things or just do a, their regular
content pipeline for, for stuff has
been really, really valuable, and they
can do that as part of their existing
AI, like, their existing AI strategy.
They don't have to have a
whole new strategy just for
how do we use Agility's agents.
Interesting.
And I, I love that you tapped onto the,
uh, I don't wanna cut and paste idea.
Um, that's been the feedback
of the year, uh, over here at
Dotfusion is like, all right, there
must be a way to solve for this.
Yeah.
Um, and how you solve for
this is, um, well, one major
option is through a MCP server.
Right.
Um, do you wanna talk
a little bit about…
I've, y- I think you've gone
through a couple evolutions
of the Agility MCP server.
Um, maybe just tell us where
you've been and, and where
you're at and where you're going.
Yeah.
So we initially built our MCP server
more to help with developers, so that
when I'm building a website, I don't
have to jump back and forth into Agility
to, like, update content models and
component models and to, like, you
know, add all of the, the interesting
things that are, that are necessary.
Like, you know, making sure all the
field labels are good and everything
has, like, a field description, all that
extra stuff that developers hate doing.
So that was the first thing,
is just be able to create
models, and that works amazing.
Um, but what we discovered
is that people actually wanna
create content in Agility too.
This is not, not from the developer
side of things, although developers
wanna do it too, but just like,
how do I just get content in there?
Um, and a lot of times, like, I wanna
be able to translate it, follow brand
guidelines, all that sort of stuff.
So we built pretty amazing sort of
content pipeline into it, and it's, it's
not just one piece of content at a time.
You can actually send through the MCP
server up to 250 content items at a time.
So if I have a folder of Word documents,
drop them into Claude and it just
goes through them like nothing.
Um, or even importing an existing site.
Point Claude at your existing site.
Hey, the WordPress site, I
don't wanna do anything with it.
Go through all my pages and just add them
into Agility That works fricking amazing.
It's crazy how much time that
used to take copying and pasting
or trying to write a routine.
So that, that was sort of like phase two.
Um, I, I…
It blows my mind how much people
were willing to let Claude
do all that work for them.
I thought- Mm-hmm … oh no, people wanna
have more control over their content.
Turns out they don't, they
just wanna get work done.
So, and they're- Mm … and they're okay
with it being, you know, let's get it
on the website and so we can look at it,
and then we can review it after there.
Um, and so we held off on doing publish
and delete operations, and unpublish
and approve and all that sort of stuff.
Thought, "Okay, people are
gonna want to go in the CMS to
actually do those manual things."
Turns out they wanna automate that too.
Um, and so by…
based on, uh, customer demand, we
added, uh, recently in the last, I
don't know, two or three weeks, uh,
the ability to publish, unpublish,
delete content and pages in bulk,
um, as part of the MCP servers.
So you can write content workflows now
that do the whole gamut of essentially
creating your website or what…
or your apps, putting the content
into Agility for you, and approving
that content and publishing it
out onto your, uh, you know, your
different channels that you've got it.
So all of that stuff can be
automated through, and Claude
is by far the best at it.
Um, but every, every one of those
clients, whether it be Gemini, ChatGPT,
or, um, or Copilot, they can all
hook into, uh, into the MCP servers
and use them to differing amounts.
Claude, I think is the best at it.
Uh, but the other ones
work pretty well too.
And is, um…
Agility has kind of a marketplace
of connectors and, and integrations.
It, it…
Do you find something in that
marketplace for connectors to
AI stuff, or is this something
that you connect, uh, separately?
Asking from kind of a lay purpo-
person's perspective, how do I
get Claude to connect to Agility?
Yeah.
So- Uh, mcp.agilitycms.com
is its, its own mini website that
we've got set up that has the
instructions on there for how to
connect Agility to your agent.
Um, so we've got all the different
ones that I just mentioned and a few
others like if you're using Cursor for
development, there's specific ways to
do that to get it in there, and some
of them are like one-click installs.
So what that does is essentially adds
the Agility connector into your AI agent.
Awesome.
There are a gazillion amount of connectors
out there to connect into everything.
Um, for instance, there's a
HubSpot connector that'll go
and query your HubSpot data.
There's one that'll
query your commerce data.
There's everything that can do everything.
People are-- There's tens of
thousands of MCP servers out there.
Not all of them are that good-
Mm-hmm … um, because you really
have to work with, you know, the use
cases that people wanna work with.
Um, and so like for instance, I
had, I had high hopes for Figma's
MCP server from- Oh, me too.
Yeah … it's basically slightly
less good than taking screenshots
from s- from Figma, um, as,
as far as I've used it lately.
So like I don't love that one very much.
It does work.
Yeah.
But like Chrome has a pretty good MCP
server, um, that works really well, so you
can like control Chrome, uh, as a browser.
And so there's all kinds of ways
to kinda automate how you can help
your agent to go and do stuff.
Um, and there's lots of different,
uh, things now like Open Claw and
other, other things that are trying
to automate your, your, your computer.
Mm-hmm.
That's, that's sort of one aspect of it.
I think the really powerful
version of these things is stuff
where you don't have to be there.
Uh, you know, it doesn't
have to be on your computer.
This can be something where like maybe
it, it should work from like from Claude.
I have Claude on my phone,
my iPad, and my, my laptop.
I can actually create blog posts on my
personal blog from my phone just by,
you know, I narrate into it and like
I was just in Scotland, did this, uh,
for my trip 'cause it was like amazing
views from these hikes we were doing,
take some pictures, and I'm like,
"I'm gonna blog about this right now."
And so I would just open Claude, you know,
narrate what was happening, send, uh,
upload a few of my images, and say, "Go."
And this was in what's called a
Claude project, which I had basically
tuned to my blog to say, "Hey, send
it to th- to this Agility instance.
I wanna create blog posts" and, you
know, figure out from my content what
work, what category it should be and
that sort of stuff, and then create nice
galleries for the images that I put up.
So it has all that as a Claude project,
which is kind of like a skill- Does
it automatically and then now, now
it can publish automatically too.
At the time we didn't have our
publish, uh, capability there so
I had to manually publish, but
now it will publish it as well.
So pretty amazing, uh, set of capabilities
and the more MCP servers you have,
the more capabilities you have.
It does slow down your agent to a
certain extent so I think people
are now understanding, okay, I gotta
pick and choose which connectors
I'm going to use in Claude and what
I'm gonna get the most value out of.
But as they fine-tune that stuff, it's
amazing how fast these workflows get.
So you know, where it might
have taken, we call this the
content, um, content supply chain.
So content supply chains in an
enterprise typically have between
15 and 19 steps, which is insane.
How can we get that to like maybe
10 steps, maybe even six steps?
So it's only the people that are the
bottlenecks and we don't have all of
these technological bottlenecks now.
Um, AI can really help with that re-
the sort of reducing the content supply
chain and automating that pipeline.
Yeah.
We have a, a shared client, uh, it's
a rural telco out in, in Manitoba and,
um- We were trying to solve for the
amount of cutting and pasting they were
doing, and we, we looked into a, like
a typical blog post or a news post.
It can have up to 17 or 18
different attributes to it.
Right.
Read time, author, like
schema data, meta, like it…
And that's a lot of stuff to be
porting over on two different screens.
So we kind of love that idea, um,
of kind of streamlining all of
this as, as your AI model becomes
your real interface to everything.
Yeah.
Um, and I love that idea 'cause we've got
kind of a research agent that's writing
all of our posts, goes through a human
to kind of tune it and like, I mean,
it's interesting conversation maybe,
like if I tune AI for three weeks so
it knows me, then at what point in time
is the writing sort of from me anyway?
It's just, it's just spending,
it's saving me the time.
Yeah.
It's kind of a fuzzy zone 'cause
I've got things pretty tuned that
it knows kind of my preferences
very well and writing style.
Um, yeah, that's a, that's
just a good discussion I guess.
Well, I think the term for that, by
the way, is called cognitive offload.
It's like instead of using a rock to,
to, to hammer in a nail, you use an
actual hammer and it gets a lot easier.
Now I, now I don't have to,
I don't have to focus so much
and it's actually a lot easier.
Mm-hmm.
And eventually I just get an air
nailer and I don't even think
about it, the nail just goes in.
So why wouldn't I use the air nailer
to, to hammer in nails a lot faster
if I'm building a house, right?
If I have a rock, oh, this is how
we always did it, but I'm gonna
hit my hand on that rock and it's
gonna- Right … be super slow.
So why wouldn't you use the
tool if it's providing value?
Now, if I have a whole new hammer
and the house falls down after that,
probably not a very good hammer.
Yes.
So I think the question should be,
is it AI slop that it's creating?
Is that content, does it
actually have any value?
And is it at the same level of value
as stuff that you like typed out?
Yeah.
Um, probably you just can't type fast
enough to get it at, you know, once you've
got it trained enough and once you've got
it tuned, you can't type that fast, Chris.
You can have ideas that fast,
you can't type that fast.
Yeah.
I say the same thing to developers
who are sort of holding back
on, on using coding tools.
I'm like, "Okay, I understand that you
have, you, you have your craft, right?
But you can't type that fast."
Yeah.
You can't even talk that fast
for, to get out the ideas.
You can have ideas a lot faster, so
think about the ideas and less about
how fast you can type them out Um, yeah
it's a tool for getting your
ideas out there, and ideas
can come from so many places.
Our creativity should not
be bounded by technology.
It should only be bounded by
how many ideas we can have.
And man, I know you, you can have a
lot of ideas, and I think a lot of
people are, have sort of curtailed
their creativity because of the tools
that they have, and AI should be able
to let that, uh, let that come out.
That's, which is a…
I've changed my mind on AI several times,
but I've, I've seen it help people become
so more creative, uh, as a creative outlet
because their ideas and what those are
capable of now have this tool to take
them to the world in a much quicker way.
Yeah.
It's almost like more Lego.
Right on, you know?
Let's do it.
And- Yes … just a bit of a hack on how
I create content is I'll have an idea
that I'll kind of rebound with, with AI.
We're kind of a Claude shop
here, but with whatever.
And then its, its pattern is to interview
me back on what's important about it,
what is my particularly unique angle,
what would I say if I was talking to
a pal out on a bike ride about it?
Like, it's colloquializing the
mission of writing the content.
Yeah.
S- so it's kind of like- I acknowledge
I'm not here s- you know, saying that I'm
writing something with my best craft of
creative writing skills, but it's my best
craft of getting AI to do what I want.
Right.
You know, and so I get this kind of, uh,
interesting relationship and, um, a lot
of chatting back and forth, of course.
You had just mentioned in, in passing,
uh, staying on this MCP server
idea, that you had dabbled with a
bit of like a MCP UI in Agility.
Um, and not all kind of product
ideas come to light, but I really
love the idea that you're constantly
experimenting and trying new things.
Um, do you wanna just talk a
bit, little bit about that?
'Cause I don't think people really
even know what that idea is.
Well, MCP UI is the idea that after
you connect like an MCP server, that
the MCP, that server could actually
serve up some u- some user interface
inside, like Claude, for instance.
Um, and you haven't seen this take
off, but like when ChatGPT was trying
to do, um, I think they called it apps
inside ChatGPT, which is essentially
the same protocol, slightly different.
Um, and I think they're trying to unify
that between Anthropic and OpenAI's
implementations now, as well as Gemini to
get this, to get this to work so that…
A- and this, and it has not take-
taken off very well because the
first implementations were for
retail, and people didn't really
like the idea of buying things.
But the idea would be that if I'm,
um, you know, if I'm, if I'm in my
agent and it decides to connect to
something like Agility or, you know…
So like my thought was, okay, when
we are setting, getting some content
in there, maybe we could surface
up s- a little piece of UI to say,
"Yeah, I wanna publish my content."
Um, turns out people don't even
wanna have to click anything.
They just want it to happen.
And also agents are pretty good at
asking for permission for things anyway.
Um, so that wasn't really useful.
But I think it could be useful
for other pieces of user interface
potentially, where I need to maybe
like are, you know, maybe it's for
uploading files specifically or for
doing a little preview or something.
I'm not quite sure.
Um, I, I was really big on it as a
thing, but I, I actually don't think
MCP UI is going to be that big a deal
unless there are, you know, specific
use cases that that's really for.
I, interestingly enough, the other day
for ChatGPT, I used, I used the Apple
Music, um, app, which is essentially
an MCP UI, to create a playlist.
I said, "Hey, I want a playlist
from things from the '70s, '80s,
and '90s of these kind of songs."
But it, it only allowed me to do 25 songs,
and it, like, it was okay, but it was an
interesting- Right … branded interface.
I thought, "Okay, this could be useful."
I haven't used it since.
Um, but so I think there's an idea there.
The idea was so that people
would buy stuff Yeah.
But I think the trust, you know,
we just got, you know, pe- like
my mom to be able to trust to be
able to buy things on a website.
Buying them inside ChatGPT is a
little less, uh, not quite there yet.
So I think the e-commerce
thing didn't quite happen.
Whether it will, I'm not sure.
Cognitive offload we're great with.
Mm-hmm.
Financial offload, not quite so much.
Not yet.
R- right.
Easy, easy.
Not quite yet, eh?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Uh, another idea just from some of the
notes that I've taken that I thought
were, like, particularly interesting
discussion ideas was, um, you were
talking about the complexity…
Well, I guess DevOps is complicated,
and now you're, you're experiencing
feedback from your customers that
they're also starting to create
rather complex content ops.
Yeah.
Um, and Agility is able to kind of
be in the midst of all of that as the
publishing kind of conduit to things.
Do you wanna just chat a little bit
about what you're seeing out there?
Yeah.
So w- there's a continuum,
I think, of complexity.
Um, right from, you know, we have one,
one website, it's a school board, and
they have, like, one instance of Agility
and, like, each folder of their site
map is, is a, is a different school.
So, like, the most simple, they've…
You know, three people are editing
all this content, very small team.
They have one, one deployed
website for all of these, like,
website code for all of these
things, almost no DevOps, nothing.
That's, like, as basic as it gets.
Um, all the way up to there's a lot
of folks out there that'll have, like,
one instance of Agility in, like, a
sandbox, but they'll have, um, pretty…
a lot of pretty good DevOps workflows, or
they'll have, like, a dev staging UAT and
production code environment for DevOps.
Um, and y- but you only need to
have one instance or maybe two
instances of Agility to do that.
And actually, we've got a docs page
that sort of shows all these flows.
But then on the far, the far end of it,
you get folks that have content that
is in all those environments as well.
And a lot of the times this is when,
um, when our customer who, who owns
that content, actually they are
delivering a product as well, um,
that another customer's gonna and
then use as a B2B kind of a thing.
So it's like a B2B2B situation.
Mm.
So they have that, that content, and
it's often in regulated industries,
it needs to actually have, like,
sign-off between different environments.
Um, this is like…
And, and oftentimes it's
matched up not just to websites,
but to apps or both as well.
So they've got, you know, this
regulated industry, they need to have
sign-off on the code moving up to
different environments, but also on the
content as well that moves with that.
Um, and so they can, you
can use our CLI to do that.
Pretty complicated.
It's a little tricky to get it all set up.
What is a CLI, sorry?
Oh, command line interface.
Noted.
So, yeah.
So in the same way that they'll
use a DevOps pipeline to push their
code to different workflows, they'll
invoke the CLI to get the content to
move to different, uh, environments
using that same or similar workflows.
Cool.
What's kinda neat is when you do
DevOps, it keeps all the logs of
everything for you that come out of,
like, that command line interface.
So it's instead of someone doing it on
a terminal in their, on their computer,
which you could do, but in this case,
it's like a GitHub Action or an Azure
DevOps action that's, that's in, that's
invoking this and can essentially moving
content from one instance to another,
um, so that somebody can sign off on it
to say, "Yep, that's good to have on QA.
Let's move it to UAT or to customer
acceptance testing," or whatever
they're gonna call their next
environment, all the way up to prod.
So you…
So it's- You know, you've got
customers that are doing it the most
basic way, and they're like, "Yeah,
quick, get it, get it on the website.
We don't wanna wait any longer," to,
"Okay, we gotta go through these.
We've gotta jump through all these hoops
with the code that it's intended to go
with so that, you know, we can, we can
ensure that everything is, like, you
know, hunky-dory all the way along."
Crap, like, time goes by so
fast once we get rolling.
Yeah.
Um, I've, I've just got one more
note there on this idea of, of,
of contents ops through CLI.
Yeah.
One of the many challenges of, of pure
MCP content ops is there is no log.
Yeah.
It's just magically there.
Great in most cases, but as you edge
into the more enterprise-y use cases,
financial data, gated content, stuff
where much more governance is required,
I think this is a great concept that
I haven't heard anyone else talking
about, is managing content ops through
kind of a more robust pipe than- Yeah
I kinda call it the magic version.
Yeah.
Which is great.
Um, um, but that's also great to know
and for folks in the kinda mid to large
enterprise space listening, this is
another great reason to choose Agility.
Um, I've gotta bounce.
We're a little bit over time.
Uh, thanks to everyone who checked
in over lunch on Thursday, and
folks listening in the future.
Uh, can't wait to chat again, Joel,
and looking forward to just seeing you
soon and getting caught up on things.
But, uh, it's a great pleasure
and just great info and insights.
If anyone's interested in Agility,
we've been building on it for 18
years or something like that now.
Reach out to Joel, Gina,
the gang over there.
Um, just a wonderful service team as well.
Um, get yourself a trial
and, and get in there.
Um, so signing off.
I'm gonna click some buttons.
And, uh, Joel, thank you again.
Appreciate it, man.
Take care.
Okay.
Peace.