Digital Transformation & AI
July 22, 2025
10 min read
Some decades ago, websites were just static, informational pages that looked like digital brochures. Today, everything has changed. Digital platforms have evolved into dynamic, intelligent ecosystems. They are no longer limited to simply displaying content. Now, they understand context, adapt in real time, and can even make autonomous decisions.
How is digital transformation reshaping business processes today? And what trends can we expect to see in the web space in the near future? These are the questions explored in the latest episode of the Innovantage podcast, hosted by Sigli CBDO Max Golikov.
In this episode, Max is joined by Dominique De Cooman, Founder, CTO, and co-CEO of Dropsolid, a leading Digital Experience company based in Belgium.
Dominique built his first Web 1.0 site in the early 2000s. A few years later, in 2007, he became active in the Drupal community. This marked the start of a nearly two-decade-long journey in open-source and digital experiences.
Over the years, he witnessed the evolution of simple websites into complex, data-driven enterprise platforms. Now, they are known as Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs). While some view DXPs as a marketing notion, Dominique defines them as enterprise-grade websites designed for scalability and personalization.
In 2015, as his company Dropsolid reached its second year, Dominique transitioned into business operations, taking on roles across sales, marketing, finance, and HR. In other words, he embraced the full spectrum of CEO responsibilities. In his current position, Dominique balances both technical and business leadership.
In the early days of the web, content was added to websites manually using HTML. Later, this process was enhanced by CSS and JavaScript. As websites became more complex, server-side languages like PHP emerged. They enabled the creation of content management systems (CMS) such as Drupal or WordPress. By the mid-2000s, these open-source platforms dominated the market in their niches. WordPress was mainly used by small businesses. Meanwhile, Drupal addressed more complex and enterprise-level needs.
The web space was actively evolving, and the same is true about user expectations. Non-technical users needed easier tools to manage content. This led to the rise of CMS platforms. But the possibility to work with content alone wasn’t enough. Businesses began looking for personalized, data-driven experiences for their users.
This growing demand became a booster for the rise of Digital Experience Platforms. These are more advanced solutions that integrate content management with customer data.
Such a platform allows organizations to deliver tailored content based on user behavior, preferences, and context across multiple channels, including websites, email, mobile apps, and even in-store screens.
While definitions vary, a core feature of any DXP is its data-driven approach. Marketing automation tools and customer segmentation are also sometimes considered to be integral parts of the platform.
Moreover, Gartner also includes cloud services in its broader DXP definition. But as Dominique highlighted, at its core, a DXP always merges content and data to provide personalized digital experiences.
While the low-code/no-code movement is often seen as a marketing trend, the concept may bring real value, especially when applied to web content platforms.
In general, low-code/no-code refers to tools that enable non-technical users to build applications with minimal coding. These capabilities have been present in platforms like Drupal and WordPress for years.
Drupal, in particular, stands out for its robust architecture that supports structured data, entity-based APIs, and flexible content modeling. This makes it well-suited for low-code functionality, even if it doesn’t market itself that way.
While dedicated platforms like Mendix focus entirely on low-code application development outside the CMS world, Drupal integrates similar flexibility within a content-first ecosystem.
Given this, Dominique believes that, partially, the hype around low-code tools is explained by huge marketing efforts of the teams behind them. At the same time, platforms like Drupal have quietly offered these features for years without the label.
Such tools as WordPress and Drupal have long enabled user-friendly content creation without coding. Nevertheless, unlike no-code/low-code platforms, their purpose has always been to simplify web publishing, not to replace the need for custom development entirely.
There are strong business cases for adopting DXPs that can demonstrate how companies can enhance operational efficiency and improve customer experience with such solutions. Personalized, streamlined digital experiences reduce support calls and improve internal workflows. On the content creation side, giving teams the right tools can greatly ensure much higher output quality and speed.
While some critics argue that DXPs are monolithic, expensive, and inflexible, this view is usually based on their knowledge related to older, legacy platforms. Modern, open DXPs are composable and API-driven. As a result, they enable organizations to integrate and swap components as needed. Platforms like Dropsolid’s DXP, based on Drupal, offer modularity without sacrificing structure. This is possible thanks to thousands of plug-ins and modules that users can rely on.
However, there is the other side of the coin as well. A fully composable setup may become overly complex and lead to what is often called a distributed ball of mud. Managing many microservices at once requires deep expertise and consistent vendor coordination. It means it can become a long-term operational burden.
For most enterprises, a DXP offers a golden middle. It provides enough flexibility to adapt, and at the same time, enough structure to scale. DXPs can consolidate digital tools and reduce complexity. With their help, businesses can stay focused on delivering value instead of allocating all their efforts to managing infrastructure.
According to Dominique, the future of Digital Experience Platforms lies in finding the right balance between monolithic stability and microservice flexibility. The vendors that succeed will be those that help organizations strike this balance, and AI will play a pivotal role in this space.
As AI becomes more integrated into enterprise workflows, business leaders are prioritizing projects that both enhance customer experience and drive operational efficiency, while still staying within budget. One challenge is the overwhelming number of data sources most enterprises manage. Quite often, their number can be over 100, and many of them are supported by lightweight SaaS tools.
AI has the potential to replace many of these smaller services. With this technology, it will be easier to consolidate data, content, experience, and infrastructure. This shift in the tech space will ensure that only the strongest platforms will remain and unite the functionality of numerous fragmented tools.
If these layers can communicate effectively, via APIs and frameworks, enterprises will be able to deliver more value with fewer tools, reduced complexity, and tighter budgets.
Apart from this, Dominique revealed his optimism around the long-term future of open-source CMS platforms like Drupal. Drupal’s robust framework makes it well-suited for AI integration, and companies like Dropsolid are actively contributing to this evolution. For example, one of the co-maintainers of the official Drupal AI module is on the Dropsolid team.
At recent developer events like Drupal Dev Days in Leuven, there was a noticeable surge of excitement around the role of AI in Drupal’s future. This momentum is likely to accelerate in the near future.
For Dropsolid, the past year marked a turning point. Despite strong performance across its services and DXP business, Dominique faced what he described as an existential crisis.
Amid the growing adoption and power of AI, Dominique started thinking about the probability that AI will eventually automate the services that Dropsolid and other similar companies offer today.
These thoughts pushed him to start exploring how to build and host AI capabilities entirely within a company’s own infrastructure. During that work, Dropsolid partnered with Sigli, which is well-known for its deep expertise in AI infrastructure and data engineering.
By late 2024, AI was advancing rapidly. It became clear that the viability of classical services models was increasingly in doubt.
Dropsolid needed to change in order to stay on the market. The team organized internal workshops, hackathons, and consultations with AI startups. Initial skepticism among engineers was gradually replaced with enthusiasm.
As a result, the company was split into two:
What makes the transformation even more compelling is the commitment from within. Dropsolid opened an internal capital round and allowed employees to invest in the AI business. The strong response was a clear signal of internal alignment and a promising sign to external investors.
In large organizations, digital experiences have far-reaching implications beyond user convenience. They directly impact efficiency, cost, and service delivery at scale. This is especially evident in sectors like healthcare, where even marginal improvements can translate into significant gains.
Dominique mentioned an example of the University Hospital of Antwerp, which is one of the largest medical institutions in Belgium. With over 800,000 patient visits annually, even a 1% increase in efficiency can save substantial resources.
Patient journeys typically span various touchpoints: websites where patients research symptoms, appointment systems, electronic patient records, and communication channels. The key challenge lies in integrating these systems to ensure that patients receive accurate information at every step without delays. This not only improves the patient experience but also helps optimize the healthcare process.
From a broader economic perspective, especially in Europe’s publicly funded healthcare systems, shortening the patient journey translates into reduced costs for governments. AI-driven platforms can help patients navigate complex medical systems more efficiently. This helps reduce administrative burdens and enables hospitals to treat more individuals with the same resources.
This concept of intelligent customer journeys is equally transformative in the commercial sector. Dropsolid has worked with enterprises managing complex ecosystems, where guiding users through a purchasing process is a core challenge. Traditional marketing automation and customer data platforms provide rules-based workflows. They are well-structured, but they lack the flexibility to adapt dynamically to real-world behavior and context.
AI-enhanced digital experiences address such issues. They enable real-time guidance based on behavioral patterns, seasonality, external events, and user intent.
For instance, Dropsolid collaborates with the leading publishing group in the Benelux region. The company manages a catalog of over 60,000 titles. By combining a DXP with CDP data, it becomes possible to build intelligent assistants. They can recommend content based on not just reading preferences, but also broader contextual data (like holidays, trends, or individual behavior patterns).
Intelligent digital experiences allow organizations to move beyond manual processes and pre-defined workflows. It means that they can ensure more adaptive and more personalized experiences.
In their discussions, Max and Dominique also talked about AI agents. AI agents are rapidly becoming foundational to the next generation of digital infrastructure. According to Dominique, the future points toward a reality where AI agents are seamlessly embedded into every layer of software, from the experience layer to content management, databases, and even infrastructure.
Intelligent integration platforms (iPaaS), such as n8n, are beginning to compete with frameworks like LangChain. Today, they successfully demonstrate how traditional workflow automation tools are evolving into agent-driven systems. In the future, chained AI agents capable of reasoning and orchestrating are likely to become standard components in software development.
This trend isn’t limited to commercial platforms. In open-source ecosystems like Drupal, there are already frameworks being built to support the development and integration of AI agents at the application level.
At the same time, there is growing interest in hybrid architectures. In such systems, enterprise-level AI agents coexist with distributed, localized agents operating closer to the user interface or experience layer.
This model reflects the way biological nervous systems work: a central nervous system manages core operations, while peripheral nerves handle localized tasks with high precision and speed. In digital systems, this could mean enterprise-wide agents coordinating with smaller, specialized agents embedded at the interface or service level.
However, this doesn’t mean deterministic code is going away. Traditional software logic will continue to play a crucial role. Particularly, it will be useful in well-defined systems where predictability and security are paramount. AI agents will likely augment rather than replace this code.
In the long term, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) may also have chances to become another promising concept. But, as Dominique mentioned, we are not even close to this stage now.
As AI agents become more deeply embedded into enterprise ecosystems, governance and sovereignty over these systems will become absolutely essential.
While the dream of many managers and business owners is to wake up and find an inbox full of productive AI updates like growing conversions, the nightmare scenario is still possible. You could just as easily find that same inbox filled with legal claims because an agent executed a creative but ill-judged campaign that offended users or violated regulations. Autonomous systems without oversight risk exposing organizations to reputational, financial, and legal consequences.
This is why strong governance frameworks must evolve alongside AI capabilities. You cannot simply unleash autonomous agents in a business-critical environment and assume everything will operate as intended. Liability always remains on the organization, not the agent.
The future will belong to those who can combine the strength of robust digital platforms with the agility and intelligence of AI without losing control over the outcomes.
Curious about other tech innovations and their impact on the business world? In the upcoming episodes of the Innovantage podcast, Max and his new guests will continue talking about this and will touch on many other topics. Don’t miss it!
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