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Jon Whitter is Head of Development at Cantarus and a three-time Umbraco MVP. Here, he shares his reflections on another memorable Codegarden and why the event continues to be one of the highlights of the Umbraco calendar.
Like pretty much every technology conference in 2026, AI was everywhere at Codegarden.
Every keynote, every vendor and seemingly every conversation eventually found its way back to AI. Normally, that’s the point where I start mentally preparing myself for a week of buzzwords, over-promises and demos that look great on stage but fall apart the moment you try to use them in the real world.
Instead, I left Codegarden feeling genuinely excited about where Umbraco is heading.
The moment it all clicked for me came during Matt Brailsford’s session on AI in Umbraco. Starting with nothing more than a podcast recording, Matt demonstrated a workflow that transcribed the audio, generated a release article, pulled speaker information from external systems, enriched the content with metadata and social profiles, and then assembled everything into a finished content item.
Combined with Umbraco Automate, the entire process could be triggered simply by uploading the podcast.
What impressed me wasn’t that AI could generate content. Plenty of tools can already do that.
What impressed me was how the workflow combined organisational knowledge, external systems, automation and AI into something genuinely useful. It wasn’t a gimmick. It wasn’t AI for the sake of having AI. It was solving a real problem.
For many organisations, that’s exactly where the challenge sits today. The question is no longer whether AI can generate content – we already know it can. The real challenge is how AI works alongside existing systems, governance frameworks and organisational knowledge in a way that delivers genuine value.
That theme surfaced repeatedly throughout the week.
It's been many years since Codegarden was last hosted in Copenhagen rather than Odense, and I have to admit it was nice to see the event return to the capital.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a soft spot for Odense. After all, it has been home to Codegarden for many years. But being in Copenhagen brought a different energy to the event and gave many attendees the chance to experience a different side of Denmark. It also gave me the opportunity to finally visit Warpigs, which several members of the community had been recommending to me for years. Thankfully, it lived up to expectations.
Before Codegarden officially kicked off, I attended the Umbraco MVP Summit. As always, it was one of the highlights of the week.
One and a half days of open and honest discussions between community members and Umbraco HQ, covering everything from product direction and community initiatives through to some of the wider challenges facing the industry. These conversations are one of the reasons I value the summit so highly. They’re not marketing sessions. They’re not carefully scripted presentations. They’re genuine discussions about how we continue to improve the platform and community together.
There was even a session from Richard Campbell explaining why putting data centres in space is a terrible idea. Which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be every bit as entertaining as it sounds.
The summit set the tone for the rest of the week. The conversations weren’t about chasing trends. They were about solving problems and making thoughtful decisions about where the platform should go next.
AI is everywhere right now. Whether you’re attending conferences, reading product announcements or simply opening LinkedIn, somebody is trying to convince you that AI will revolutionise absolutely everything.
What stood out to me at Codegarden wasn’t that Umbraco is investing heavily in AI. I’d have been more surprised if they weren’t.
What stood out was how deliberately they are approaching it.
Rather than treating AI as a shiny feature bolted onto the side of the CMS, Umbraco seems to be building a platform that allows organisations to decide how AI fits into their world rather than forcing them into someone else’s.
Throughout the week, a consistent message emerged. Choice matters. Organisations should be able to choose the providers they trust, the models they want to use and the workflows that fit their governance, security and business requirements.
That might not sound as exciting as some of the headline-grabbing announcements we’re seeing elsewhere, but it’s infinitely more useful.
For organisations, particularly larger organisations, control matters. Governance matters. Knowing where your data is going matters. Being able to change direction in the future without rebuilding half your platform matters.
What I found particularly refreshing was that Umbraco doesn’t seem interested in building AI for the sake of saying it has AI. Every feature and demo shown throughout the week felt grounded in solving real editorial and developer problems.
Even better, they’re continuing to involve community teams, advisory boards and external contributors in shaping that direction. The result feels less like a race to keep up with competitors and more like a carefully considered vision for what AI should actually mean within a modern CMS.
In my opinion, that puts them ahead of many competitors who seem more focused on shipping AI features than thinking about how organisations will actually use them.
One of the themes that kept surfacing throughout the week wasn’t actually AI. It was composability.
The more sessions I attended and the more conversations I had, the more it became apparent that many of the announcements shared the same underlying philosophy.
Build an open foundation. Connect the best tools for the job. Allow organisations to evolve over time.
Whether the discussion was about AI, Automate, Compose or content delivery, the direction felt remarkably consistent. Rather than forcing organisations into a single tightly controlled ecosystem, Umbraco continues to embrace the idea that different organisations have different needs, different systems and different ways of working. That’s one of the reasons Matt’s demo resonated with me so strongly.
The real power wasn’t the AI itself. It was the orchestration of content, systems, data and organisational knowledge working together to create something genuinely useful.
That orchestration layer is often the missing piece in many digital platforms. Most organisations already have content platforms, CRMs, analytics tools, marketing systems and AI services. The challenge isn’t getting access to more technology – it’s getting existing technology to work together effectively.
That broader story was present throughout Codegarden and, for me, remains one of Umbraco’s biggest strengths.
Matt’s session was the perfect example of this approach in practice.
The workflow started with a podcast recording. From there, the system transcribed the audio, generated a release article, looked up previous articles for consistency, retrieved speaker information from external systems, pulled in social profiles and supporting metadata, and assembled everything into a complete content item.
The important detail here is that the AI wasn’t working in isolation. It was drawing on organisational knowledge. It was connecting to existing systems. It was using trusted sources of information.
And as a result, it was producing something far more valuable than a simple AI-generated article.
This wasn’t AI replacing people. It was AI removing repetitive work so people could focus on the parts that actually require human judgement.
That’s a distinction I think the industry sometimes forgets.
While AI understandably grabbed most of the attention, my favourite announcement of the week may actually have been Umbraco Automate.
Currently in beta, Automate introduces a no-code and low-code automation platform directly within Umbraco.
At first glance, it feels similar to tools like Zapier or Microsoft Power Automate. The difference is that it’s built directly into the CMS and understands the content and processes that already exist there.
The possibilities become apparent very quickly.
Need to trigger a workflow when content is published? Automate it.
Need to enrich content using data from an external system? Automate it.
Need to chain together multiple AI actions to categorise, enrich and prepare content for review? Automate it.
Most organisations already have processes that involve three different systems, four spreadsheets and at least one person remembering to do something manually every Friday afternoon.
Automate feels like a genuine attempt to simplify that reality.
What makes it particularly interesting is that it follows the same open philosophy that underpins the wider Umbraco ecosystem. The intention doesn’t appear to be creating a closed automation platform. Instead, it feels like a framework that partners, developers and organisations can extend to suit their own needs.
Another detail that stood out to me was the emphasis on control.
Workflows run within the existing Umbraco environment. Integrations are explicitly configured. Data is only shared where organisations choose to share it.
Perhaps most importantly, human oversight remains part of the process.
AI-generated actions and content can still pass through approval workflows before anything is published. For organisations working through governance, compliance and trust concerns around AI, that’s not a minor detail. It’s often the difference between being able to adopt a technology and not being able to use it at all.
It’s still early days and the platform is currently in beta, but this was one of those announcements where the potential was immediately obvious. I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more about it over the coming year.
As impressive as the product announcements were, Codegarden continues to remind me that Umbraco’s greatest strength is still its community.
Community remains one of the clearest differentiators between Umbraco and many larger enterprise platforms. The willingness to share knowledge, challenge ideas, support one another and genuinely collaborate continues to be one of the reasons the ecosystem remains so strong.
Every year there are memorable talks, exciting announcements and plenty of technical discussions.
What keeps people coming back is the people.
Thursday bingo returned this year with custom sticker printers at every table. Naturally, it didn’t take long before somebody worked out how to use them for purposes beyond their intended design. Thanks Paul.
I also found myself being dragged on stage during the opening of the event. Combined with the black outfits and sunglasses being worn by much of the Umbraco HQ team, I felt somewhere between an extra from Breaking Bad and a rejected character from The Matrix.
Last year, when the Umbraco Manchester team organised Umbraco in the City, we completely failed to leave ourselves enough time to produce any event swag. Lesson learned.
This year we arrived armed with more than 120 stickers. By the end of the first day almost all of them had disappeared, which was fantastic to see and a reminder of how supportive the wider community continues to be.
No Codegarden recap would be complete without mentioning Grey Muir's session. As a fellow Cantarian I might be slightly biased, but they absolutely smashed it.
The session explored how running Dungeons & Dragons campaigns can help developers become better communicators, leaders and problem solvers. It was funny, interactive and genuinely insightful. The room was buzzing throughout and it was clear everyone was having a great time.
The session was such a success that Umbraco’s speaker coach, Adam Montandon, described it as a highlight of his speaker coaching experience, praising the fully interactive adventure complete with wizard hats, pointy ears, magic capes and hidden valleys.
Seeing Grey in their element and seeing the audience reaction was genuinely one of my highlights of the week.
It was also a special year for the Cantarus team more broadly. Kirstie Buchanan was recognised as a first-time Umbraco MVP, Grey received their second MVP award and I was fortunate enough to receive my third.
MVP recognition has always been one of my favourite parts of Codegarden. Not because of the title itself, but because of what it represents. The people who organise events, contribute code, mentor others, answer questions, write blog posts and help make the community what it is.
The Umbraco community has always been built by people willing to give back, and it’s great to see those contributions recognised.
Seeing contributions recognised across development, marketing and community leadership was also a reminder that the ecosystem continues to broaden. The platform’s success has never been built solely on code. It relies on people who educate, advocate, connect communities and help organisations get the most from the platform.
I’ve been attending Codegarden long enough now that every year I leave thinking Umbraco has probably set itself an impossible challenge for the following year.
Then the next Codegarden rolls around and somehow they raise the bar again.
This year it was AI and automation.
Last year it was something else.
The year before that, something different again.
What became increasingly clear throughout the week is that organisations are entering a different phase of digital maturity.
The conversation is no longer about whether to adopt AI. It’s about how AI, automation, content and data can work together within existing digital ecosystems in a way that is secure, governed and genuinely useful.
That was reflected not just in the AI announcements, but across the wider platform. Whether it was Automate, Compose, Cloud, deployment tooling or the continued investment in governance and enterprise capabilities, the direction felt remarkably consistent.
Umbraco is continuing to mature without losing the openness and flexibility that attracted many of us to the platform in the first place.
The platform remains open. It remains composable. It remains community-driven.
More importantly, it remains focused on giving organisations choice and control rather than locking them into somebody else’s vision of how they should work.
In a world where every platform seems to be racing towards the next big thing, that’s becoming increasingly refreshing.
The weather, however, remains as unpredictable as ever. (Umbraco, if you’re reading this, please sort that out before next year).
Learn more about Cantarus' digital offering or get in touch to see how we can help you unlock the full potential of your organisation with Umbraco.