Magnolia NEXT 2026 recap

When we opened the doors to Magnolia NEXT, we welcomed around 300 customers, partners, and industry leaders into a record-hot Basel. Over two packed days, the heat outside was matched only by the energy inside. Looking back across all the conversations, keynotes, and deep dives, I can confidently say: it was worth every single degree!

Whether you joined us in Basel or couldn't make it this year, we want to ensure you don't miss out on the major product announcements, strategic insights, and community stories shared at NEXT. Here is your executive summary of what was revealed.

To set the stage, Chuck Gahun, VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester, delivered a standout keynote on rebuilding content engines for the Agentic Era. Chuck emphasized moving beyond basic AI experimentation to create resilient content strategies where AI agents seamlessly augment human workflows — a message that perfectly anchored everything we unveiled over the two days.

We unveiled powerful new capabilities designed to give content and marketing teams a boost in execution, while providing tech teams with architectural flexibility and enterprise governance.

AI at Magnolia is evolving beyond simple copy assistance into governed, collaborative Agentic AI. Designed to act as an extension of your digital teams, Magnolia AI Agents work alongside you across the content lifecycle — from campaign planning and content generation to localization and ongoing optimization.

For example, you get a daily, data-driven action plan that flags traffic drops (Analyze SEO), suggests fixes (Prioritize Content), and instantly takes you exactly where you need to act. A highlight is also the Doc-to-Page feature, which takes an existing document and turns it into a ready-to-review Magnolia page: content mapped to your structure, components chosen, layout assembled. Content authors review and publish instead of rebuilding by hand.

See AI agents in your content workflows: From Vision to Workflow – The Magnolia Agent in Daily Operations.

Watch the under-the-hood developer breakdown here: AI Accelerator - Agentic Release.

Agentic AI capabilities are available for Magnolia 6.4 and onwards. As active support for Magnolia 6.2 and 6.3 concludes in September 2026, Magnolia 6.4 represents our gold standard — and the mandatory foundation for all modern capabilities, including AI. We strongly encourage all teams to plan their updates to unlock these feature sets.

To help you deliver relevant, high-performing digital experiences faster, we announced new add-ons directly integrated into the Magnolia platform:

See how you can leverage ai12z to help your brand show up and stand out in AI search (AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT) in this session: How AI is Reshaping Discovery, Websites, and Personalization.

Inside the Cloud Cockpit, new self-service tools give you even better environment visibility. The Insights App delivers real-time Fastly CDN analytics, while the Log Viewer and JCR Browser simplify troubleshooting. You can also handle resilience directly in the Cockpit, using integrated Backup & Restore for three recovery scenarios.

On the infrastructure front, expanded hybrid, managed, sovereign, and China cloud options simplify on-premises connectivity and local compliance. You can leverage managed capabilities like the External Imaging Service to boost on-prem performance and load speeds. Behind the scenes, automated custom operators ensure smooth, low-maintenance scaling as we actively migrate from Ingress to Gateway API.

Explore the full Cloud updates: The Future of Magnolia DX Cloud

Looking ahead, we shared our roadmap for a fully cloud-native, API-first, and AI-driven architecture. This next evolution focuses on evolving our content modeling capabilities, streamlining extensibility, and modernizing the authoring UI.

As part of this vision, attendees got an exclusive preview of our brand new visual editor — designed to give content authors a seamless, context-aware editing environment while preserving developer flexibility behind the scenes.

Catch the full Product Keynote & Announcements: product keynote video in Academy.

(If you're a Magnolia client or partner, you can request an Academy login here.)

While product innovation took center stage, Magnolia NEXT was at least equally about our vibrant community. The true highlight of the event was seeing our customers and partners take the stage to share how they solve complex digital challenges, establish best practices, and drive business value with Magnolia.

A huge thank you to the speakers and teams from Emmi Group, Frost Bank, Life.Church, Rentokil Initial, and Union Investment for opening up their playbooks and sharing their journeys with us. Their stories offered invaluable peer-to-peer lessons on scale, localization, speed-to-market, and digital transformation.

Catch up on customer and partner sessions in the video gallery.

Magnolia NEXT was a powerful reminder of what makes this community special: a shared commitment to building better digital experiences through smart technology, strong architecture, and creative collaboration.

We invite you to explore the session recordings, check out the new AI capabilities, and reach out to our Customer Success Management team if you'd like to discuss what version 6.4, agentic AI and our new add-ons can do for your organization.

See you at the next one!