Legacy platforms formed the backbone of ecommerce and were groundbreaking in their era, but Contentstack is focused on the future. The headless CMS vendor believes those older systems no longer meet today’s needs. Instead, ecommerce now requires agility, dynamic experiences, and meaningful AI-driven personalization—all possible only with modern commerce solutions.

Composable.com recently sat down with Gurdeep Dhillon, CMO of Contentstack, to discuss why businesses need to equip themselves with the right tools to thrive in today’s digital landscape, how they’re helping businesses to pivot from outdated technology and embrace an adaptable future, and what their new "Retire the Legacy" initiative has to do with it all.

Moving from Legacy to a Composable Future

Contentstack’s vision for the future is rooted in MACH architecture, which enables modular, customizable digital ecosystems. According to Dhillon, legacy systems like Sitecore, WordPress, and Adobe were built for a different era— what he describes as “build-once and let it ride digital experiences.” These platforms were ideal for static, single-build websites, but they lack the agility and scalability needed to meet the modern demand for real-time personalization and cross-channel consistency.

“The problem is, when you want to do more dynamic, personalized experiences, the legacy stuff doesn't really work, not at scale,” says Dhillon.

By contrast, composable platforms enable brands to build ecosystems that can grow and shift with business needs. Rather than requiring an overhaul of an entire system to make adjustments, a modular setup allows for adaptable integration of various technologies— allowing businesses to be agile while preserving continuity and minimizing disruption.

“There is no doubt in the customer's mind now. They know that at some point they're going to need to modernize,” Dhillon explains.

The AI-Driven Shift in Customer Engagement

Contentstack’s focus goes beyond flexibility alone. The company sees AI as central to the future of digital experience management. “In the next 3-5 years, what if 80% of your web traffic is AI agents and not humans? And what if the job of the CMS is to personalize for humans and also optimize for AI? That's a totally different paradigm than where we're at today, and that's the future we're building for,” he says.

This means that content management systems must be able to serve two audiences simultaneously—human customers and AI agents—by optimizing for both personalization and machine-readability.

To achieve this, Contentstack has integrated brand-aware AI functionality directly into its platform. With AI-enabled personalization, brands can deliver tailored experiences across touchpoints and provide content optimized not just for SEO, but for new AI-driven search algorithms as well.

Dhillon points out that while some legacy solutions are now offering AI capabilities in their platforms, the AI has often been applied in bolted-on ways. “The legacies have AI solutions that they've built kind of on top of their existing stack, but they're not integrated into the CMS natively, and they're not as brand aware as companies need them to be to feel good about adopting them at scale,” he says.

Contentstack’s AI-powered Brand Kit, by contrast, built AI into the core of the product, which means it can incorporate a brand’s voice, messaging, and customer data directly into workflows, enabling organizations to deliver consistent, scalable content that maintains brand authenticity.

https://composable.com/insights/the-future-of-tech-embracing-modular-commerce-and-ai-driven-personalization