Hi everyone, and welcome to today's FirstSpirit Product Office Hour. I'm Timo, I'm your host for today, and Michael Thal and Michael Thinschmidt are also here representing product and solution engineering, and they are experts on quite a few items, quite a few topics, so if questions come up that I can't answer, they will definitely help out. With that said, let us begin and have a look at the agenda. So today, as always, for the ones that are watching the first Spirit Product Office Hour for the very first time, there is an introduction as to what the session is all about. Then we will talk about an item that likely quite a few have on your mind, that is the acquisition of Crown Peak by Resolve AI. After that, we will reflect the releases, the events, many good things that happened to the product over the year. Also, you will see that we have an update on FormCentric. For the customers that are using WebForms and aim to migrate to FormCentric, you will probably find a few good bits and pieces in terms of information for you in that section. And after that, we will wrap up with an outlook of 2026, how we see that year and how we think it will turn out in terms of product and what we have planned. And with that said, if you're joining this session for the first time, what you can very well expect is that we will discuss new features with experts, internal and external ones that we invite to the session. Usually, we have demos of Crown Peak functionality and an outlook, the roadmap or the next year. And I try my best to monitor the chat. So if you have questions or remarks, don't hesitate to leave them in the chat and then I will see how I can answer them best today or after the session if I don't have an answer today. On the right hand side, you see QR codes. So if you're watching the recording and if you wonder, how do I register for the session? This is how you do it. You scan the QR code. There is a Zoom registration page that you will see for the English and for the German session happening every quarter for roughly an hour. And you see the next dates on the right hand side. With that out of the way, thank you to the ones who just joined. This is the first period Proud Office Hour. Welcome. Let us talk Resolve AI acquiring Crown Peak. As of the beginning of December, Monday, 1st of December, Resolve AI has acquired Crown Peak. What does this mean? Let me highlight a few things in terms of product, in terms of AI, and in terms of synergies. When we think of product, and let's talk CMS here specifically, we think of continued focus on the teams building new functionality, on the customer support team doing a great job going through those tickets, fixing issues together with you. We think of continued focus on our partner collaboration. So all those implementation partners that are building custom solutions together with you, we will keep on doing that. And we think of innovating for a spirit. So you will see more AI. You will see more multisive management. You will see Conan Creator take the next step. None of that will change. Rather, when we think of AI specifically, we will leverage the expertise that Resolve AI is bringing. Because their mandate, and this is now our mandate as well, is AI first. The goal is to build AI solutions for enterprise businesses that enable them to also become AI-driven companies themselves. And we think for a spirit is going to play a crucial role. While we also see, and we acknowledge that, of course, that Resolve AI is an expert in retail and commerce. They really, truly know this space very well. It's a fact. And with First Spirit, this is their first CMS. They're expanding into the content management space. And 2026 is going to be all about realizing value together. Together. With that said, now is also the time for you to ask questions. Leave some remarks. Go for it, please. And if you're looking at that press release in parallel and want to leave a question or a mark later during the session, I will, of course, have a look and then do my best to answer that. Let's now continue with FormCentric. Here, the update is the following. We have a new timeline. FormCentric here means the product, the tool to create forms with. And we differentiate three different scenarios. The first one is offering you as a customer in our First Spirit cloud that is using web forms. Offering you a path to FormCentric. Without a custom version. Custom meaning you have custom actions enabled, set up. Assuming that this is not the case, you're using the, let's call it, vanilla version of web forms. FormCentric. Our goal, and we are collaborating with the company FormCentric on that topic. Our goal is to have a successful migration by February 2026. So, you are a First Spirit cloud customer. So, you are using web forms in its vanilla shape without custom actions. And you want to use FormCentric. We will make that happen early next year. Then we have, and quite a few of our customers have this case. Then we have the scenario of you using web forms customized. Custom actions in web forms. The migration of custom web forms to custom form-centric is what we aim for to also successfully happen in Q1. There is a prerequisite to it because you, using the custom version of web forms, would need to update your version to 6.6.13. So, we can migrate that to FormCentric. The third scenario that we're looking at here is the headless scenario. So, let's assume your project is set up in a way that this applies. We also, of course, want to support you fully. In a technical sense, you can view this item as a separate one. Here, we've made great progress as well in terms of ongoing testing. And also, to those customers that want to start using FormCentric in your headless project setup, don't hesitate to reach out because you can become one of the early adopters that we want to support early in Q1 next year as well. As this might raise some questions on your side, or you might know of teams that would be interested in learning more about FormCentric Atlas, what we are planning is a FormCentric Atlas deep dive session organized by us, giving you answers to your questions. So, I'm going to open up my surveys. And what you should see now is the FormCentric deep dive question, whether or not you're interested in such a session. So, if you could leave an answer as to yes, you are, or no, you aren't, that would be great. That would help us, of course, organize such a session. Thank you. And I'm seeing that the first answers come in. So, that's great. I'm going to leave the poll open for a bit, but also continue in my deck. Because there's lots to talk about. We have a wonderful recap prepared. And we want to start with saying thank you. Because without the discussions and the feedback, the insights coming from you, on our product, on our offering, on our services, it would be a very different one. Also, the strategy would be very different. So, thank you very much for that. We've had plenty of exciting, colorful, very insightful, I want to say, events. So, think of the Customer Connect days in Munich, in Stuttgart. Think of plenty of webinars, not only the Proud Office Hours, but webinars specifically on the AI suite or Multisite Management earlier this year. Or think even about the DMX school. And it was wonderful meeting you there on site and speaking with you face-to-face. So, thank you for that. I mentioned insights to give you an idea about the numbers that we're dealing with. For the past months, basically every day, we've gathered insights coming from you, coming from partners, of course, also coming from analysts, when we look at the competition, the market. But predominantly, most of them are coming from you. So, shout out and big thank you once more here, as they actively inform the way we plan. So, we do the quarterly planning, always, every time, based on the insights that we receive from you on our features. Now, let's highlight a few items that were released or tackled over the course of 2025. And I want to start with maintenance, because one shouldn't neglect that item. And there was a big one in Q1, early Q2, that was Java 21 compatibility of both First Spirit and Smart Search, all of its libraries, components, everything covered, jumping to the newest version. And now, with 24 being the next, the team is already working on that, by the way. Also, plenty of updates for those enterprise scenarios that are simply needed in terms of user management, login and authentication, especially updating KeyCloak and the connections that you need to our tool. Because the idea here is, of course, to keep First Spirit as secure, as performant and as up-to-date as possible. If we talk about accessibility and scalability, there are definitely two items to highlight here. The first one being content creator becoming more accessible. We do have DQM and DQM Connect in content creator. And we allow for you to make your content more accessible, but also when using content creator. We now allow you to use your keyboard. You have keyboard control over critical actions in content creator. We have highlighting, smart highlighting of elements and objects. And we have screen reader compatibility. There is even more. We have a whole page dedicated to that topic. Please do have a look if you're interested or reach out. Also, Modus App Management received an impactful update, making it, as I see it, an even better tool to distribute your content. And this time also consider the changes that are made in those target projects that you've distributed your content to. Because we now have a dedicated UI in your main project for those teams that are responsible for then saying, yes, we accept that change coming, let's say, from the Italian target project on that translation that was slightly off. And with our next distribution of content, that corrected translation will be considered. And here, of course, our goal is to aim for ease of use and scalability. Let me share a few highlights as we go through 2025 on teamwork and locales. We've provided a new collaboration feature. It is an open beta. You can try it out on your own, which allows you to not only work in your team on certain elements on a page, but also include AI if you're using the AI suite, that is. We have a collaborative AI agent for you. Also, and this is truly a big one that was a highly complex, long-lasting item. I'm going to be honest here. It's a big one, but also super impactful and valuable for you as we received the feedback on the item. That is the language-dependent release. What does this even mean for the ones who don't know? It means that you might have a page and you might want to publish only the changes that were made in a certain language. You might have made changes to that page in multiple languages, but you want to release only that change in, for instance, Italian and don't release that German page with those changes. And with that functionality, you can now do that in a truly granular way and defining which language you want to see published next. For us, this is tackling the day-to-day needs that we learn about when we have those interviews with you and we look at the data and we see your usage of the tool that we want to address here. Now let's talk about AI. In terms of the AI suite, we've seen both enhancements to the suite and new assistants. The image assistant received a major update because it's now able to perform bulk actions, meaning we look at a certain number of images in your database and those images then get scanned and we have the image assistant generate all tags for those in the background while you're working on content creator. Also, we released code assistant which is truly valuable if you're going through your HTML CSS and you want to learn more about performance, best practices, accessibility even, code assistant will help you and highlight issues in your code. And for us, this is about helping you be more thorough and efficient using FirstBird. One more on AI as we go through 2025. Prompt management. Prompt management means you are in full control over the AI actions across your projects. Whenever you use the AI suite, any assistant, any agent, any workflow, you are in control setting up those AI actions and editing the prompts behind those actions. For instance, you could say that a prompt should only be available in one of your projects. Another one should be available in multiple ones. You can even say this very prompt is so important it should be available in every project that you have. And yes, there is also implemented user actions and permissions and roles, all of that you will find as you know in true FirstBird fashion. One more thing and we will talk about that one a bit more throughout today's session. that is MCP, Model Context Protocol compatibility we now have as of 2025.11 that is the FirstBird version that offers that in the client sense and no worries it's getting a bit technical now but I will explain later on with server compatibility coming later earlier that is next year. And for us this is about compliance and also being leaders in this area as we see that combining those two items being able to connect to the AI ecosystem but also giving you everything that you need to set this up and configure and customize is forward thinking. Now I'm bringing up this item because we did receive some questions and remarks on it and so I thought why not bring it once more and for the ones who are regularly joining you of course know that the community has moved. The community is your place if you're looking for answers to certain questions on the product on its services on certain plugins functionalities you will find it there we have everything covered through a wonderful search but also you can access that without even logging in have a look but also if you do log in the functionality that you know from the legacy community the old one is fully available in the new one so you can still follow you can still post your questions and remarks and interact in the same manner as you used another one and I know that quite a few have already subscribed so this is a friendly reminder is the newsletter we've launched one and you're seeing the German translation here on the right hand side there is also an English one recently and now each and every quarter you receive if you like the news on First Spirit upcoming events we recap what has happened what is available and new versions of First Spirit to keep you up to date one more thing that is the marketplace in case you didn't know we have one you will find it by heading to that address you see in the URL at the bottom here and what you will see is that we have plenty of new plugins and connectors that were added throughout the year either from us or from our partners now as we reflect on the past months we also want to provide you a summary of the trends and high impact items that we identified and in a way this works best by comparing the year to what happened prior to it so if we say that 2024 was all about the first adopters of the AI suite that already had their thumbs up from legal and compliance things and that were heading into the new world of the AI features and if we say that the year was on the continuation of cloud migrations which we saw many of and also if we say that the year was all about preparation for the especially this applies of course to customers in the EU the preparation for the EU accessibility act then 25 was basically a continuation of certain items like AI where we saw a significant uptick in usage but also in custom solutions so this was a new one we have our offering that is used but also what we see more and more is that customers start truly using the AI API that we offer to then with their implementation partners build those custom solutions on top of what we already offer and this is great this is wonderful also we see a continuation here in terms of cloud migrations but something that in all honesty surprised us and that is the attention on content distribution this is an ongoing topic we are fully aware but we had to schedule two additional webinars on multi-site management earlier this year simply because there was so much attention on the topic coming from now as we look at what we think is going to happen next year and I'm happy for you to hold me to this and then in 12 months we discuss if these predictions were totally off or some of them were right even as we look at next year we expect a few things to happen first of all in terms of AI we expect to have more conversations on return on investment and transparency around the topic so the tool that was bought how much value does it actually bring in terms of for instance cost saving or time and effort saved we think it does bring plenty and we provide numbers you will see it on the roadmap later on and you notice a pattern we do expect more cloud migrations to happen but also for hybrid headless as a topic in the market to be a more prominent one we saw plays on pure headless this year as well and we expect more on hybrid headless and we are confident that we have a good answer looking at first period CMS actually there is a bit more than we expect let me walk you through it in terms of modicide management to give you an example here we already plan and discuss 2.0 you saw 1.5 that is the target project item and with 2.0 we might bring you an interface in the target project we might bring you more support for other types of items a whole different section on workflows and I'm saying might because we have a long list of requests probably the longest one on any item that I recall and we are actively reaching out to you and you actively reaching out to us we have those conversations one thing is for sure there will be more requests and we will continue to innovate on that item also form-centric in the first world cloud we discussed that that is a given that will happen let me just highlight one more here as we hear more and more customers speak about that and that is the fine-tuned AI customer models that means when you're using the AI suite you're not using a vanilla JGPT API but rather you're saying the model that you're using is fine-tuned to the data points to the content that you fed it with so the results that it gives you are more on-point more detailed closer to for instance your tone-off voice in terms of AI trends that we are truly embracing let me just walk you through three different ones the first one being scope so you heard me talk about our offering and the custom solutions and we have both things in mind here scope means throughout the CMS we will have more and more AI capabilities that go wide and that go deep so expect more consolidation of AI functionality across the different systems but also expect AI more places GEO for anybody who's working in marketing this is of course no new topic but I think it's still fair to say that it's a hot topic generative engine optimization what does this even mean and I will speak more on that topic because I have more slides in the next few minutes it means basically that what we're observing is that traffic is shifting it's shifting from websites to chatbots large language models the chat GPTs and clouds of this world and one needs to find an answer to that because you still want to be found by those LLMs and you still want to be adequately represented when they give answers in let's say JGPT you should be at the very top with your products and your services and geo is what that is about once more MCP here the idea is that we have an AI ecosystem outside of the CMS and that AI ecosystem provides plenty of functionality that usually you won't find in a CMS but through that connector you're able to leverage that functionality and just as a reminder because I mentioned a few assistants I mentioned the API this is what we offer today so you have those assistants covering textual use cases visual ones as well you have the API for custom solutions but you also in open beta it's going to be generally available early next year you have your collaborative AI agent and your support for MCP plus the script based AI workflow functionality a few more words on Geo to truly emphasize why we think this is an important item we want to make sure that your content is found and that the answer that is given by the AI brings you at the very top so giving you a few data points on traffic that I mentioned is shifting and explain what is happening in the market when you look at Google and you look at the ratio between how many times we saw a crawl of a website and how many times you saw a referral to that very website or one of those the ratio is 7 to 1 so for 7 pages crawled we get 1 referral and this ratio if you rewind by 10 maybe even 15 years was way closer to 2 to 1 now Bing and this is important for the DACH customer specifically that Microsoft service has a ratio from 40 to 1 perplexity now we're talking AI chatbots brings you to a ratio of 136 to 1 and the as of today most common one of course being OpenAI's chat GPT will give you a ratio of 1000 to 1 if you're interested in those data points and want to zoom in on a certain tool there are many more you can find on that Cloudflare dashboard and I think they truly drive home the point of that market shift that we are seeing in terms of traffic that is less and less with your website and more and more with AI what can you do today today you can actually already start and again the ones who are working in marketing and the ones that are familiar with search engine optimization SEO know this because many topics overlap best practices in terms of giving your content structure for instance you need to focus with key points and the Q&A format is appreciated by LLMs because it matches their queries is what we know today this also of course applies to informative chunks and content being original so bring your verifiable facts have credentials of the author or the studies that were done on the topic and link your sources to speak clearly a natural language that is also great in terms of generative engine optimization it's definitely one of those best practices that should be highlighted but also to be meaningful and provide at the same time variations of your content without repeating yourself and one can do that of course by connecting related subjects with one another last but not least and this is SEO 101 do a good job in terms of your markup an FAQ section is an FAQ section it should be reflected like that how to's are how to's and your metadata so providing clean HTML is a good thing also in the new world of AI a few more words on MCP the third trend that we are fully embracing as I mentioned this is all about connecting to the ecosystem and leveraging what is out there within the CMS too as it stands today First Spirit is already compatible in the following sense we are able to connect to outside of the CMS outside MCP servers Jira Confluence come to mind we have good use cases covered by doing so like have a page set up in Confluence that reflects your company's tone of voice that should be considered whenever perform an AI action that is on text within the CMS and can do so by saying we use our connector we use what is written down on that Confluence page and that is then each and every time we have a textual action for instance tone of voice is the most predominant example that we know of today and have that nicely reflected within the AI speed for instance when using content assistant as I mentioned earlier this is one part the second part equally as important is thinking about this the other way around so use JGPT and you type in create a new website about AI in FirstSpirit you send that prompt FirstSpirit receives that prompt because it's compatible also with those outside tools and then translates that into a new website with its components using the template in your project and also generating content on the topic at hand AI tools and features in FirstSpirit right away we have that covered and it was recently demoed it will be made available to you as well in Q1 next year so if we zoom out and try to connect the dots summarize a bit what we know is that working with content can be cumbersome and as we deal as a CMS with content day in day out we want to make that more efficient for that research part the creation of a page optimizing that having people review that content hitting publish but the work is not done yet iterating on that refining the content all of that takes time and we think that with assistance we already cover at least the optimization and the review part nicely we think that with AI workflows we are able to cover even more the creation of a page the publishing aspect to it as well and this will be shown in the demo we we we also think that the whole part of researching the topics the content that the page should be about but also iterating on that nicely can be covered by a project agent that has contextual knowledge about your project and in a semi autonomous manner AI works inside and outside of the CMS with that said what I want to do is go to my demo environment and what you're seeing now is content creator by the way you might notice the new colors and if knew user interface elements we are working on a visual refresh it's going to come early next year this is basically a sneak peek let us focus though on AI because what I have here is a page on customer connect in Dusseldorf you will see that we have it here on the left hand side in our menu structure and as I scroll down you'll see that there are a few items a bit of text down here a form and then we have our footer now let me open up said assistant that has contextual knowledge about this page but also about the components the projects template outside of this page so I'm going to say create a copy of this page and I'm asking it to then make it all about customer connector and you see on the left hand side that we started with the customer connect and we've arrived at this copy page and on the right hand side you see an update on what the assistant actually did so our new page is here and it's asking me for my next action and I'm simply going to say yes help me update the headline the sub line the text and other sections so my next customer connector in Berlin and this is of course a hypothetical one we are creating in our demo case today is all about Berlin and the location and as I scroll down you'll see that here this changed to Berlin we have Berlin here mentioned Brandenburg gate even the iconic landmarks the tech hubs great there's more information down here even the address was changed and again it's fictitious none is planned at this point it made something up but it's fine because I asked it to generate that information and it's also saying that the SEO part the metadata the tags and all of that were updated yes we want further adjustments you see the action item down here so I'm going to say to add and testimonial by myself on the event and as it has an understanding about what a testimonial means in terms of the project's template and its components it adds the testimonial at the very bottom of the page because this is how this very project is set up yours might be different and it also generates a text by myself so imagine the possibilities with an AI that has contextual knowledge about how your project is set up how your components work where they should be placed what length they should have and how fast you generate a whole new page based on the ask that you gave it now if you want to try out the AI suite you can because what we offer is a trial phase and without getting too technical here the summary is we got you covered in terms of on-prem and SAS you bring your own key to your own model you're using our AI model you're using OpenAI Azure AI or even AWS Bedrock we natively integrate into those if you use AI by a different vendor Google Gemini is a great model sure we are also able to connect to that model based on a bit of project and implementation work the AI API that we offer is able to connect to that as well on the right hand side you see that what we think works best is we align on a time frame a certain number of weeks it's free of charge for you and we have clear goals and check-ins as mentioned let us have a look at the roadmap it's a busy one this is the feedback that we already received but it's also one that we're confident in simply based on the track record of the teams they reliably delivered and we think they will continue to do so let me start on the left and highlight a few items for we spoke about MCP today for those of you that are using CAS of course we also want CAS to be compatible and what we have already is a prototype our partners gave us great feedback on it one partner built a chatboard that is directly connected to CAS and can be used through natural language to access certain data points and information that CAS is providing in that chatboard I already spoke about collaboration and the AI agents we want to make this generally available to bring it out of the open beta phase also language dependent release we spoke about that here the open beta phase will end and it's going to be made generally available to you you got a first glimpse of the visual refresh here we're thinking about quite a few things a new color scheme different icons more modern ones sure a different design language but also improvements to the user experience for instance shorter click paths dqm dqm already has some AI that is the executive AI powered summary that you can access when you're on a dashboard and you want to understand what the most impactful items of the past three months were here we're thinking of an even more advanced solution for instance providing more recommendations on mitigation but also making dqm mcp compatible so the same topics that I touched on in terms of first spirit CMS they'd apply to dqm opening up to the AI ecosystem the first spirit rest API without getting too technical here is going to unlock several use cases built by implementation partners built by you of course that especially in the realm of AI are going to become very very useful as you saw on the slide when we spoke about the marketplace so many new connectors were added and we plan on adding even more in the next year the discussion about the value of AI the return on investment questions that we receive and that we see in the market is something that we are actively addressing and we will provide numbers and ways for you to understand in an even deeper sense as to how our AI suit is providing value to your teams workflows were already mentioned we have a script based solution to have an even deeper one that is also even more reflected in the user interface is what the goal is here in that item the advanced AI and workforce consolidation of AI you might have thought when you saw the AI suite slide this is a busy slide and it is true there are quite a few assistants by now it grew quarter by quarter basically and as we want to provide a seamless fast and efficient user experience for you when you use the AI suite consolidation is what the team is aiming for here so imagine that the different assistants which have a certain functional overlap will grow stronger together an item that is always on the list but should also always be mentioned is that we continuously improve content creator the slide on the accessibility improvements that I think is a good reflection of what is happening in terms of content creator the visual refresh item is as I see deeply connected with that one as user experience and I mentioned the shorter click paths but also just a clearer design language what does which icon mean for instance is what is going to be included in that item GEO was mentioned as a hot topic and we think it will continue to be one which is why we are aiming for a dedicated assistant today you can already use content assistant analysis and code assistant to cover multiple GEO related use cases we think that a focus on one assistant makes sense and the team is working on that and as we approach the end of next year we will make that project agent that you just saw in action it has awareness of your project in its entirety and it's for instance creating a whole new page very fast for you we think that the project agent is going to make a big splash and we want to provide that in 2026 to you as well wrapping up the year CAS constant improvements same as the improvements to the content creator is always on the team's mind and then as I touched on modisite management 2.0 long long list of very very good feature requests and we will make an informed decision as to what we will tackle on that list if you're interested in reading up and learning more about the items we have a QR code here on the right hand side do scan it it will lead you to a page that breaks down under consideration planned in beta and launched items on the first bird side and it helps you understand what we have planned what is open for you to try out in a beta phase and what was recently launched now with that said we are wrapping up thank you thank you so very much for today's session for staying on for following what we had to say on resolve AI on form centric on the past 12 months and how we see next year if you do have questions don't hesitate to reach out you see my email address here and I'm sure that also Michael are happy to help thank you have a good day bye