New report reveals the CMS has evolved into an enterprise content hub as teams manage more channels, tools, and AI-assisted workflows

The modern CMS is no longer just a website publishing tool. Liferay, a leading provider of Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs), released new research showing that digital content management has become a broader enterprise function as teams coordinate content across channels, departments, languages, and AI-assisted workflows.

The 2026 Liferay Digital Content Management Survey, conducted via the third-party platform Pollfish, polled 500 U.S. adults employed full-time who manage or oversee digital content for their organization. The report explores how content teams are adapting as digital content expands across more channels, more internal teams, more tools, and more AI-enabled workflows.

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Key findings include:

• Content has moved beyond the website. 63% of content managers create or manage content for channels beyond a website. 60% of organizations have three or more teams using the same primary content tool.
• AI is in 86% of content stacks. But when asked about autonomous publishing, just 14% completely trust AI to do so without human review.
• 78% switch between multiple tools to finish a single content task. 22% of those respondents switch tools “very often.”
• AI-heavy teams are nearly 3x more likely to manage multilingual content. 57% of heavy AI users create content in more than one language, against 20% of non-AI users.
• The CMS is the destination, not the workspace. Only 7% of content managers draft content in their primary content platform.
• Cross-team coordination is just as stressful as deadlines. 32% of content managers cite cross-team collaboration and looming deadlines as a top stressor, with “keeping up with new technology” right behind at 30%.
• Security beats innovation 2-to-1 when content managers evaluate new tools. 27% rank security and trust as the top factor when evaluating new business technology, against 14% who put innovation or AI capabilities first.

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“There’s no such thing as a marketing-only CMS anymore,” said Bryan Cheung, Co-founder and CMO at Liferay. “The primary content tool in most companies is shared by sales, customer experience, IT, HR, and operations, and it’s pushing content to social, email, mobile, portal, and product surfaces. That’s a fundamentally different landscape than what existed when the category was first created. The platforms that recognize the shift are going to keep their customers. The ones that don’t are quietly losing them to a stack of workarounds.”

The report signals a new phase of digital content management where content platforms must support not only publishing, but also cross-team coordination, governance, multilingual content, AI oversight, and tighter integration across a workflow that no longer fits inside a single platform.