How to make AI work for everyone with visual headless CMS, Preston So | EvolveDigital Toronto 2026
Summary
Preston So, Chief Commercial Officer at React Bricks, delivered a session at EvolveDigital Toronto 2026 arguing that visual headless CMS is the architecture best positioned to make AI work effectively for all stakeholders — developers, content editors, and designers — simultaneously. He opened by polling the audience to establish that the room contained a mix of content practitioners and developers, framing the central challenge: these two groups have historically been unable to speak the same language within a single CMS, and AI's emergence adds further complexity rather than automatically resolving it.
So traced the history of the CMS from monolithic systems (WordPress, Drupal) through the rise of headless CMSs like Contentful and Sanity — which gave developers freedom but left content editors doing glorified data entry via dry form fields — and through the rise of visual site builders like Wix, Webflow, and Squarespace, which restored visual control for editors but ceded developer flexibility. He described the current moment as a re-democratization of content management, with a new category he calls visual headless CMS attempting to provide both headless developer ergonomics and in-context, WYSIWYG-style visual editing for content teams.
React Bricks, the company he represents (led by CTO and founder Matteo Frana), is positioned within this category. Its core atomic unit is the 'brick' — analogous to Drupal blocks or React components — which encapsulates props-driven configurability in a way that respects design systems while giving editors in-context visual manipulation. So argued this component model is important precisely because it gives AI a structured, bounded interface to generate within, preventing hallucination and maintaining design fidelity.
So articulated a critique of how most CMSs implement AI today: as piecemeal features — text generation here, image generation there, page layout generation elsewhere — rather than as a coherent, end-to-end capability. He referenced Matt Biilmann (CEO of Netlify) coining the term 'agent experience' (AX) as a necessary new dimension alongside developer experience (DX) and user experience (UX). He stressed that AI needs clear structure, boundaries, and a human in the loop, not free-form generation.
He then ran a live demo of React Bricks v5, generating a full page about visiting Toronto from a single prompt. The AI produced a complete page layout, populated it with text and image assets, all of which remained visually editable inline. He also referenced upcoming features: an A/B and multivariate testing feature launching within weeks, and an MCP server for developers to fine-grain control AI behavior, due in approximately one month. When asked about brand voice and AI context, he pointed to emerging standards: the routes.md convention for describing page structure in Markdown, and llm.txt files, as shared context layers that let AI, developers, and editors operate from the same knowledge base.
In the Q&A, So addressed React Bricks' competitive positioning: not competing with Wix or Webflow (which serve SMBs and no-code users), but targeting enterprise organizations with large content and developer teams, competing more directly with Uniform and Sanity in the visual headless space.
Key Takeaways
- •Visual headless CMS resolves the longstanding tension between developer control (headless architecture) and content editor autonomy (visual editing) — organizations should evaluate platforms that offer both rather than compromising on one.
- •AI features in most CMSs today are piecemeal (text here, image there); true AI integration requires a coherent end-to-end architecture where AI operates within the same component model developers and editors use.
- •The component/brick/block is the key atomic unit for making AI-generated content maintainable — it gives AI a structured, bounded context that prevents hallucination and keeps output aligned with design systems.
- •Agent experience (AX) is now a required design consideration alongside developer experience (DX) and user experience (UX) — organizations should audit their CMS for how well it accommodates AI agents.
- •AI replacing the CMS entirely creates a long-tail maintainability problem — generated content must remain visually editable and iteratively modifiable, not locked in opaque AI output.
- •LLM.txt and routes.md files are practical, emerging standards for giving AI the shared context (brand voice, page structure, content relationships) it needs to generate on-brand content without repeated prompting.
- •A human-in-the-loop is non-negotiable in AI-driven content workflows — automation should augment, not replace, editorial review and approval.
- •MCP servers are becoming a developer-facing mechanism for fine-grained AI control within CMS platforms — teams evaluating CMS vendors should ask about MCP support.
- •Enterprise content teams should distinguish between visual site builders (Wix, Webflow — SMB/no-code) and visual headless CMSs (React Bricks, Uniform, Sanity — enterprise, developer-led) when making platform decisions.
Transcript
Well, I think we're going we're going to get slowly started. I mean, it's the first session of the day anyways. I mean, there's there'll be people still coming in, I assume. Um, so my name is Simon. Few of those few of you already know me uh a little bit. I'm uh I'm probably going to assume I'm the AV guy, but I'm not just the A guy. I'm a collector of technology working with evolving web. Um, and it's my pleasure to introduce Preston today. personally has been a long friend of the evolving web ...
