How Contentstack Interprets the Shift Beyond Traditional CMS Models: Interview with Vasu Kothamasu

Insights from Contentstack’s global engineering leader on modernising content systems, integrating data, and navigating the transition to composable DXPs.

Enterprises across sectors are reassessing the systems they use to manage and deliver digital experiences as customer expectations shift toward faster, more personalised interactions across channels. Traditional content management systems, which were originally built for single-site publishing, are increasingly strained in environments that require frequent updates, multi-country rollouts, and integration with customer data platforms.

This has contributed to the wider adoption of composable and headless architectures, where organisations use modular, API-driven components instead of single, integrated suites. It is also influenced by the growing role of first-party data, the need for adaptable content workflows, and the introduction of AI into operational processes. As a result, the digital experience market is transitioning from static content delivery toward systems that can support more fluid and context-aware interactions.

Within this broader market shift, Contentstack, a company operating in the content and digital-experience infrastructure space—has been expanding its capabilities over the past year.

Some of the company’s recent developments include:

• A data-layer expansion through the acquisition of Lytics, a customer data platform that provides real-time audience profiles and behavioural insights.
• Updates to its orchestration layer, known as Contentstack EDGE, which integrates content delivery, performance, and personalisation components.
• The introduction of AI-driven features aimed at assisting with content workflows, data interpretation, and automation.
• Talent and ecosystem initiatives, including developer programs in India and partnerships with implementation firms focused on enterprise migrations from older CMS systems.

The industry has shown a trend where content platforms increasingly incorporate data and automation capabilities to support more adaptable digital-experience architectures.

To understand how companies in this segment approach platform development, team structure, and product direction, AsiaTechDaily spoke with Vasu Kothamasu, Senior Vice President and Global Engineering Head at Contentstack.

Kothamasu oversees the company’s engineering organisation, which works across distributed teams and multiple product lines. With experience in cloud transitions and enterprise software development, he offers perspective on how engineering practices are adapting as digital-experience requirements evolve.

You’ve led high-performance, globally distributed engineering teams for over two decades. What are some key principles that guide your approach to building and scaling such teams at Contentstack?

After leading global engineering teams for over two decades, I’ve learned that scaling high-performance teams come down to a few core principles. First, balance the 4Ps—Product, Process, Productivity, and People. When they work in harmony, teams move fast with clarity. Second, focus on talent density. A smaller team of exceptional, highly engaged engineers will always outperform a large average one. Nurture the talent, differentiate the high-performance engineers, challenge them with audacious goals and create an environment to achieve those goals.  Third, build a culture of continuous, self-directed learning, because in an AI-first world, learning is a real competitive advantage. Fourth, empower teams with autonomy and clarity of purpose & Goal, not layers of control. And finally, embrace AI as a force multiplier. It doesn’t replace talent; it amplifies it. Put these together, and distributed teams become unstoppable.

Having led Software AG’s cloud transition and now scaling engineering at Contentstack, what mindset shifts are essential for engineering teams to stay innovative and customer-focused during periods of rapid change?

Navigating rapid change requires engineering teams to adopt a growth-oriented, customer-obsessed mindset that blends technical agility with strategic empathy. Instead of focusing solely on speed or efficiency, teams should anchor their decisions in understanding evolving customer needs and market dynamics. This involves moving from a “build first” mentality to a “listen, validate, then build” approach, supported by strong data-driven experimentation and close collaboration with product and customer success teams. Leaders must foster a culture where there is psychological safety for experimentation, learning from failure is celebrated, and innovation is seen as a continuous, collective effort rather than a top-down directive. By cultivating curiosity, accountability, and purpose, engineering teams can remain resilient and consistently deliver meaningful, customer-centred innovation.

Contentstack has emerged as a key player in the composable digital experience movement. From your perspective, what’s the larger mission behind Contentstack — and how is it redefining what enterprises expect from a DXP?

At Contentstack, our mission is to help brands break free from the constraints of legacy systems and embrace what’s next in digital experience. What began as a headless CMS empowering businesses with the agility to manage content across every channel has evolved into the foundation for truly composable digital experiences. It is a journey from a single product to a Digital Experience Platform with hosting platform, marketplace, automate, Brandkit, Personalise, CDP. and the Agentic OS. A defining milestone in that journey was the acquisition of Lytics, a real-time customer data platform that enables enterprises to move beyond content management toward deep audience understanding and real-time personalisation at scale. This fusion of content and intelligence allows brands to deliver meaningful, context-aware experiences that adapt to each user’s needs instantly and seamlessly.

What truly differentiates Contentstack is our commitment to being AI-native, composable, enterprise-ready, and customer-obsessed. We’re not just a vendor; we’re a long-term partner. Through our “Care Without Compromise” philosophy, we guide customers at every stage, from our AI Accelerator program that helps teams operationalise AI in 30 days to our MACH-certified partner ecosystem that ensures success from day one. With multi-cloud support across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, we give enterprises the freedom to innovate without lock-in. Our modular, best-of-breed architecture is designed for flexibility, speed, and scalability, which is why global leaders like MongoDB, Mattel, and Alaska Airlines trust Contentstack to future-proof their digital strategies and continuously deliver extraordinary, data-driven experiences.

The recently launched Contentstack EDGE is being described as an “adaptive digital experience platform.” What makes it adaptive — and how does it meet the evolving needs of enterprise customers in today’s AI-driven world?

Contentstack EDGE is adaptive because it seamlessly integrates performance, scalability, and intelligence to help enterprises deliver real-time, AI-driven personalisation across every channel and touchpoint. It empowers brands to orchestrate digital experiences that automatically respond to user behaviour, context, and preferences—creating a truly dynamic, omnichannel journey. With its availability in the AI Agents and Tools category on AWS Marketplace, enterprises can now easily discover, purchase, and deploy Contentstack EDGE within their existing cloud environments. This simplifies procurement and accelerates AI-powered automation and agentic workflow development, allowing organisations to innovate faster and with greater efficiency.

Built for the demands of today’s AI-first world, Contentstack EDGE unifies headless CMS, personalisation, brand-aware AI, automation, data insights, and omnichannel orchestration in one adaptive digital experience platform. It enables teams to publish content up to 90% faster while reducing development costs by 70%, turning agility into a measurable business advantage. By simplifying complexity for developers and giving enterprises the flexibility to innovate securely in multi-cloud environments, Contentstack EDGE redefines what a DXP can be, transforming scalability, intelligence, and personalisation into a unified, adaptive foundation for next-generation digital experiences.

With AI, personalisation, and automation becoming core to digital experience, how is Contentstack weaving intelligence into the content layer — not just as a feature, but as a strategy?

At Contentstack, intelligence is not an afterthought, it’s a core strategic pillar that defines how we power the next generation of digital experiences. We believe that the best digital adaptive experiences are only possible when content meets context, which is why AI is deeply embedded in the content layer of our platform. From creation to delivery, our AI-native approach automates workflows, optimises content performance, and enables real-time, data-driven decision-making. Through the integration of Lytics, our real-time customer data platform, enterprises can unify audience insights with content operations to deliver hyper-personalised experiences on a scale. Our Agentic OS helps teams operationalise AI quickly and effectively, ensuring intelligence becomes an active driver of agility, efficiency, and creativity; not just background capability.

Beyond automation and personalisation, Contentstack is pioneering a brand-aware and agent-ready infrastructure that brings intelligence to every layer of content interaction. With our AI-powered Brand Kit, teams can generate content that stays true to organisational voice and identity, ensuring consistency across all touchpoints. We’re also advancing interoperability by exploring standards like MCP, A2A, and ACP, enabling scalable compatibility within agent ecosystems. By combining our composable DXP with Agentic OS, and collaborative agent clusters, we give organisations the ability to orchestrate adaptive, AI-driven digital experiences with unmatched flexibility and speed. In essence, Contentstack is transforming the content layer into an intelligent, self-learning engine that drives continuous innovation and personalised engagement for the enterprise.

Composable and headless architectures are gaining strong traction in Asia-Pacific. What trends are you observing among enterprises and startups in this region that differ from global markets?

In the Asia-Pacific region, we’re seeing enterprises and startups alike move rapidly toward composable and headless architectures as they look to accelerate digital transformation and scale experiences across diverse markets. Unlike many Western markets that evolved gradually from legacy monoliths, APAC organisations are often leapfrogging directly into composable ecosystems driven by mobile-first consumers, multilingual audiences, and the need for hyper-localised experiences. This is especially true in sectors like retail, BFSI, and media, where agility, omnichannel reach, and personalisation are becoming non-negotiable. Many enterprises in the region are also adopting API-first strategies early on, recognising that flexibility and interoperability are key to staying competitive in a fast-changing digital economy.

Another defining trend is the region’s experimentation mindset and speed of adoption. Startups and digital-native brands in APAC are quick to embrace AI-driven automation, low-code tools, and composable DXPs to innovate faster with smaller teams. Meanwhile, larger enterprises are increasingly prioritising governance, scalability, and localisation — blending the agility of startups with enterprise-grade resilience. There’s also a strong emphasis on ecosystem collaboration, with technology partnerships and MACH-certified implementations becoming common. Overall, the APAC market is evolving from being a follower to a front-runner in digital composability, setting new benchmarks for how agility, scalability, and innovation can coexist in high-growth, high-demand environments.

There’s a lot of discussion about “AI washing” in enterprise software. How do you separate meaningful AI innovation from hype — and where does Contentstack stand in that spectrum?

We believe meaningful AI innovation starts with solving real customer problems, not just adding buzzwords to products. “AI washing” happens when technology is marketed as intelligent without delivering measurable value; something we actively avoid by embedding AI where it truly drives outcomes. Our approach is AI-native by design, integrating intelligence into the core of our platform to enhance productivity, personalisation, and decision-making. From Agentic OS automating content workflows and optimising experiences in real time to Brand Kit, every AI capability in Contentstack has a clear, tangible purpose: to make digital experiences faster, smarter, and more human. We measure success not by how much AI we add, but by how much impact it creates for our customers.

Finally, what excites you most about the future of Contentstack and the broader digital experience industry — and what’s the long-term vision you’re personally driven to achieve?

What excites me most about the future is that we’re standing at the edge of a massive shift in how digital experiences are imagined, built, and personalised. AI is no longer an add-on; it’s becoming the engine behind every meaningful interaction. And Contentstack is uniquely positioned to lead this transformation.

We now have the foundation of a truly modern DXP — composable architecture, enterprise-grade scale, and with Data & Insights and Agentic OS, the intelligence layer needed for real-time, hyper-personalised experiences. The industry is moving from content management to experience orchestration, and we’re building the platform that will define that next era.

Personally, my long-term vision is very simple, I want us to build the most intelligent, best user experience, developer-friendly, AI-amplified digital experience platform in the world, one that empowers digital teams to go from idea to impact at unprecedented speed. I want engineering, product, and marketing teams to feel like Contentstack is their unfair advantage.

If we execute this vision, we don’t just compete in the digital experience space — we reshape it. And that’s what inspires me every day.

As organisations continue moving away from tightly coupled systems toward modular, data-connected architectures, engineering strategies and product decisions are playing a larger role in shaping digital-experience platforms. The integration of content, customer data, and automation is becoming more common as companies look for ways to manage growing content volumes, multiple customer touchpoints, and regional variations.