Xperience by Kentico open on a workstation at dusk, showing an AIRA content review and a customer journey. Partly generated by Gemini.

What Kentico's Agentic Marketing Suite actually does in 2026

Kentico's marketing describes it as a virtual team of specialised agents, there to help you move faster with fewer tools and less busy work. Bold pitch. Every DXP vendor is chasing some version of it right now.

Andy Thompson

06 August 2026

11 minute read

Luminary has been building on Xperience by Kentico since before 'agentic' was a word anyone used in a sales deck, and I've had a front-row seat as Kentico's AI story went from a helpful chatbot to a proper suite of named agents with their own jobs. Earlier this year I spent a week inside Kentico's offices in Brno at the MVP Summit, stress testing this stuff in the room with the product teams who build it. Here's the coffee version.

In plain terms: the Agentic Marketing Suite is a set of specialised AI agents, built into Xperience by Kentico, each doing one specific marketing job well rather than being one generalist assistant that does everything passably. But the agents are only half the story. The other half, the half this post is really about, is what they're plugged into.

One quick note on scope

Kentico actually runs two separate AI tracks: AIRA for marketers, inside the Xperience admin interface, and KentiCopilot for developers, inside their IDE, connecting tools like Claude, GitHub Copilot and Cursor to a real Xperience project via MCP servers. I've written about that whole AI strategy separately. This post is about the marketing side: the Agentic Marketing Suite, and the marketing automation machinery underneath it that makes the agents worth having. If you're after the developer side, that's a different post.

First, update your mental model of Xperience

If your picture of Xperience by Kentico was formed around its launch, it's badly out of date, and this matters for everything that follows.

XbyK started life as a ground-up rebuild of Kentico's CMS: modern, fast, and honest about what it didn't have yet. In its early days the marketing automation story was thin, and plenty of people filed it away as 'nice CMS, come back later for the DXP bits'.

Later is now. The last couple of years of consistent monthly Refreshes have quietly built out the full marketing stack, natively, in the one platform:

  • A visual Automation Builder: multi-step processes with triggers, conditional splits, wait steps and contact field updates, the genuine drip-and-nurture machinery, not a glorified autoresponder. And as of the July Refresh, a complete set of extension points: custom triggers, conditions and actions, so a developer can teach automation to react to any business event you can name, from a high-value order to a renewal date.
  • Customer Journeys: a Journey Builder where you define the stages toward a goal, and Xperience visualises the funnel and the drop-offs between stages from real behavioural data.
  • A visual Email Builder with widget-level personalisation, so the same email renders differently per contact group without duplicating the email.
  • A native customer data layer: contact management, activity tracking across channels (including cross-site tracking on sites Xperience didn't build), rule-based contact groups, and, more recently, configurable identity resolution and audience segmentation that merge contacts, members and customers into a single profile.
  • Page Builder personalisation tied to those same contact groups, and you can flick between variants in the builder to see each one in context.
  • A dedicated Campaigns app that ties briefs, assets and linked customer journeys together in one place.

None of that list is AI. That's the point. It's the DXP substrate, and it all arrived before or alongside the agents. Which brings us to why the agents are actually interesting.

What the Agentic Marketing Suite actually does

What's known as AIRA today has roots going back to 2023, when Kentico first shipped AI email drafting, well before the assistant had a name. Through 2025 it took shape as a proper in-product helper: image tagging, translations, content refinement. Handy, but not yet what I would call an agent.

Starting in February 2026, that changed. Across three consecutive Refreshes, Kentico shipped the Agentic Marketing Suite: four named agents with defined jobs.

  • Content Strategist audits your content against your Content Strategy document and hands back a scorecard, with findings ranked by severity, rather than a vague 'looks fine'.
  • Customer Journey Optimization Specialist sits inside your customer journeys and recommends changes in context, not in a separate report nobody opens.
  • SEO & GEO Specialist handles metadata, structure and AI-readability, the stuff that determines whether an AI search engine can even find your page, let alone cite it.
  • Campaign Manager builds a campaign brief from a rough idea, draws on historical briefs and performance data to inform it, and generates a structured performance report once the campaign wraps.
The Agents tab in the AIRA application, listing the four Agentic Marketing Suite agents

Adoption backs up the pitch, at least on the numbers Kentico is willing to publish: they reported customer adoption up 292% in the first half of 2026, with monthly active users up 220%. Vendor numbers, obviously, but they line up with what I'm seeing across our own client base.

Why 'agentic DXP' isn't just a buzzword mashup

Here's the framing I keep coming back to: an agent is only as useful as what it can see and touch.

A chatbot bolted onto a brochure-site CMS can draft copy. Fine. But it can't tell you that your nurture sequence is leaking contacts at stage three, because there's no journey data to read. It can't recommend a segment-specific email variant, because there's no segmentation engine to act on. The intelligence has nothing to be intelligent about.

This is what makes the XbyK setup genuinely different from 'CMS plus AI features'. The Customer Journey Optimization Specialist isn't guessing at your funnel; it's reading the actual stage-by-stage drop-off data the Journey Builder already collects. The Campaign Manager isn't producing a generic brief template; it's connected to the Campaigns app where your real briefs, assets and journeys live. AIRA's content generation and translation both run through your configured tone-of-voice guidelines, so on-brand isn't a hope, it's a setting. And every one of those outputs can feed straight into the Automation Builder, the Email Builder and Page Builder personalisation, because it's all one platform, one contact record, one data layer.

A customer journey in Xperience by Kentico showing drop-off between funnel stages

One small detail captures the whole idea. When Kentico shipped those new custom triggers and conditions, the examples in their own screenshots were generated by AI agents from simple prompts, in minutes. Agents building the machinery that agents will later operate.

Agentic, and a DXP. Each half makes the other one worth more. That compounding is the thing the category label 'agentic DXP' is actually trying to name, and XbyK is one of the few platforms where both halves are real today rather than one being a roadmap slide.

What's genuinely good

The bit I think gets undersold: there's no activation project here. If you're on a current Xperience by Kentico release, AIRA's features are active by default, not a module you request or a switch buried in a support ticket. Every licence includes a complimentary monthly credit allocation, on any tier, with no setup required, and unused credits roll over for a few months, so a quiet month isn't a wasted one. You're not starting from zero and negotiating a pilot. You're starting from 'it's already there, go and use it'.

The tier question only matters for the machinery, not the agents. The agents themselves ship with every licence; it's the Advanced tier, where most of our clients already sit, that carries the Automation Builder, Customer Journeys, Campaigns and widget personalisation, the DXP substrate that gives agents like the Customer Journey Optimization Specialist something real to work on.

The governance is properly built in too, not bolted on. Every agent runs on role-based permissions, nothing publishes or touches live content unless you've explicitly allowed it, and every action is logged and attributable. Credit usage is visible by feature in the AIRA app, and admins can export the last 90 days as a CSV. That's more transparency than plenty of vendors offer for a first-generation agent product.

The fine print

A vendor's press release would typically skip these bits, so let's not.

'Included' doesn't mean 'unlimited'. The complimentary allocation is plenty to get going, but different jobs consume very different amounts; refining a sentence is trivial, drafting a whole page isn't. Use it seriously and you'll graduate to a paid credit package, at which point it needs a budget owner, the same as any other AI tool in your stack. No surprise there, just don't let the invoice be the first person to notice.

Some capability is always mid-flight. That's the nature of a platform shipping monthly, and it cuts both ways: marketing automation extensibility and content locking were both half-finished when I started writing this, and the July Refresh completed both. The one gap worth planning around is native experimentation. Proper A/B testing with statistical significance isn't in the product yet, and while it's on Kentico's roadmap it isn't in the imminent releases, so if conversion testing matters to you, you're pairing Xperience with a dedicated tool for that piece in the meantime.

The agents will keep changing, and that's the deal. Kentico marks several of them as preview, which sounds more cautious than it is. In practice it means they're in active development: new agents keep arriving, the existing ones keep getting sharper, and behaviour can shift between Refreshes as they're tuned. That's the trade you make for this pace, and I'd take it every time. The only practical implication is that if you're documenting a process around one agent's exact output, expect to revisit the documentation occasionally.

Governance defaults are safe, but not invisible. The permission model is genuinely good, but it's still a model someone has to look at and confirm, not something to assume is correctly configured for your organisation just because it shipped switched on.

None of this is a reason to hold off. If anything it's the opposite: the barrier to starting is lower than almost any other agentic platform I've looked at. The remaining work is making sure you're using it well, not getting permission to use it at all.

Can you actually get value out of it today?

Yes! There's nothing standing between you and it. No integration project, no data warehouse, no new vendor in procurement, no separate login for the team to forget. The only prerequisite is deciding to start.

Here are five things you can do today:

1: Set your tone of voice

One field in the AIRA app. From that point, all generated and translated content runs through your brand voice automatically. I'm sure you've already got your brand voice or editorial guidelines written down somewhere. Paste them in and hit save.

AIRA's content generation tone of voice prompt setting screenshot

2: Run the Content Strategist over your top pages

It checks style compliance, tone and voice alignment against your Content Strategy, ranks what it finds by severity, quotes the offending text and suggests fixes. That's a content audit that used to be a fortnight of someone's time, done before lunch.

It's as easy as opening that page in the CMS, opening the AIRA sidebar, and ask it to review the page against your tone of voice (which you just set 😉).

3: Point the SEO & GEO Specialist at the pages that make you money

Metadata, structure and AI-readability recommendations per page, so you know whether AI search engines can actually find and cite you, not just Google.

4: Brief your next campaign with the Campaign Manager 

It walks you through the brief, connects it to assets and journeys in the Campaigns app, and generates the performance report when the campaign finishes.

5: Map one Customer Journey, and let the CJO Specialist read it

Even a simple four-stage funnel (sign-up → email open → landing page → form) gives the agent real drop-off data to make in-context recommendations against.

A Content Strategist review in AIRA, listing findings by severity with suggested fixes

One honest amplifier, not a blocker: the more of the DXP machinery you're actually using, the more the agents have to work with. Journeys mapped, automations running, segments defined; every one of those is more real data for the agents to reason over. If they're not set up yet, the agents still deliver on content, SEO and campaign briefs from day one, and building out the rest is where the compounding kicks in.

That's the mid-2026 view from actually running this stuff. It'll date quickly, and happily so, because a fair chunk of what's above is still shipping features month by month.

Questions we get asked

Is AIRA the same thing as the Agentic Marketing Suite? 

AIRA is the umbrella brand for Kentico's built-in AI tools for marketers. It includes in-context content generation, tone of voice, a chatbot, and so much more. The Agentic Marketing Suite is AIRA's most capable layer: four named agents with defined jobs, rather than a single general chat assistant.

What makes this an 'agentic DXP' rather than a CMS with AI features? 

The agents operate on real platform machinery: customer journey data, the automation engine, segmentation, email and page personalisation, and the Campaigns app. They're reading and acting on your actual marketing data, not generating generic advice beside it. Both halves, the agents and the DXP underneath, ship natively in the one platform.

Do I need to buy or activate anything to use it? 

No. AIRA's features are active by default on a current Xperience by Kentico release, and every licence includes a complimentary monthly credit allocation, on any tier. The Advanced tier carries the surrounding marketing machinery (Customer Journeys, Campaigns, marketing automation, personalisation), but the agents themselves ship with every licence.

How does the credit system actually work? 

Every AIRA action consumes credits based on the task's type and complexity, drawn from your monthly allocation, and paid packages scale it up when you outgrow the complimentary pool. The AIRA app shows your balance, the next renewal date and usage by feature. Exact allocations and consumption rates are Kentico's to set (and adjust), so check current numbers with Kentico or your partner.

Will an agent ever publish or change something live without me? 

Not unless you explicitly allow it. Default behaviour requires human review, every action is logged and attributable, and role-based permissions govern what each agent can touch, the same way you'd manage a human team member's access.

Is this generally available, or still rolling out? 

The Agentic Marketing Suite is shipping in production, as is the marketing automation stack it runs on, so you can use it today. Several agents are marked as preview in Kentico's documentation, which means they're in active development rather than unavailable: expect them to improve, and expect more agents to join them, Refresh by Refresh.

It's time to upgrade to Xperience by Kentico!

Kentico 13, and earlier versions of the platform, are approaching end of support - which means it's time to think about switching to Xperience by Kentico.

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