Partner Operations & AI Automation Manager

Acquia announces partnership with Vercel to bring headless Drupal experiences to JavaScript front ends. Acquia today announced a technology alliance with Vercel that pairs Drupal's governed content backend with modern JavaScript frontends Boston, MA, September 28, 2026 - Acquia today announced a technology alliance with Vercel that pairs Drupal's governed content backend with modern JavaScript frontends. Through the open source Drupal Canvas project, joint customers can build and deploy headless Drupal experiences on Next.js, Nuxt, Astro, or TanStack Start, hosted on Vercel. Drupal Canvas is an open source project built by the Drupal community, and it is what connects Drupal's structured content to a headless frontend. Acquia makes Drupal Canvas available through Acquia Source, its agentic content platform, in two ways: Acquia Source CMS, delivered as a service (SaaS), and Acquia Cloud Platform, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS). The integration is available starting today on Acquia Source CMS and Acquia Cloud Platform. Enterprises that want both governed content management and a modern frontend framework have typically had to choose one over the other. A traditional Drupal implementation gives content teams visual editing, structured content, and enterprise governance, but leaves front-end developers working against a backend-driven stack. A headless, developer-first CMS enables engineering teams to own the frontend, but content teams give up governance and structure they depend on. The alliance removes that trade-off, so a single Drupal instance can serve as the system of record for both a traditional coupled site and a headless frontend, without duplicating the content model. "Agencies running Drupal and JavaScript practices should not have to choose between governance and developer experience," said Ryan Studer, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Acquia. "This partnership brings options to agencies to use Drupal Canvas, on infrastructure they already trust, without asking developers to abandon the frameworks they build in every day." In the new architecture, Acquia Cloud Platform hosts and manages the Drupal backend, and Vercel hosts the headless frontend. Developers scaffold a working frontend with a single command, npx @drupal-canvas/create, connect it to Canvas for live preview, and deploy it to Vercel. Because Drupal Canvas ships as an open source project, there is no separate license fee for the integration. It requires an active Acquia Source CMS or Cloud Platform instance with Canvas enabled and a Node.js environment. This alliance reflects a strong existing ecosystem of delivery partners already building across both platforms. JAKALA, a longtime Acquia partner known for its Drupal depth, is such a partner. "Our clients kept asking for Drupal's governance with the frameworks their developers already use. JAKALA pushed to bring Drupal back into the headless conversation and helped bring the Acquia and Vercel teams together to make that possible. Now Drupal is a first-class option for headless delivery, and we can offer clients best-of-breed solutions on both sides of the stack," said Ray Saltini, Senior Director, CX Solutions and Partnerships at JAKALA. About Acquia. Acquia is the agentic content platform that marketers love and IT trusts. Marketers, developers, and AI agents build sites, manage assets, and optimize content together on a platform that takes security and compliance as seriously as IT does. Built on the open flexibility of Drupal, Acquia Source unites content, digital asset management, and optimization in a single digital command center. Governments, universities, and Fortune 500 brands choose Acquia to scale AI without adding risk. Founded in 2007 by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert, Acquia remains the project's leading corporate contributor. Drupal powers about a quarter of the Fortune 100, and its open foundation lets organizations consolidate sprawling multi-site portfolios, avoid single-vendor lock-in, and adopt new AI capabilities as they emerge. Acquia is headquartered in Boston. About Vercel. Vercel is an agentic infrastructure for every app and agent. Acquia is the platform where humans and agents build software together. About jakala. JAKALA is a global data, AI, and experiences company that helps enterprises turn technology choices into measurable growth. Headquartered in Milan with offices in 20 countries, JAKALA combines strategy, technology, creativity, and operations, and operates as a benefit company. A 19-year Acquia partner, eight-time Acquia Engage Site of the Year winner, and Vercel Gold Solutions Partner since 2021, JAKALA builds composable digital experiences that serve both marketers and developers. Learn more at jakala.com.

Your DAM is about to get an AI team. Acquia DAM is introducing AI agents that actively work in your asset library - the Curator, Producer, Guardian, and Strategist. Here's what's coming and why it matters. Get the gist Acquia DAM is enhancing digital asset management with AI agents - Curator, Producer, Guardian, and Strategist - that automate organizing, content production, brand protection, and performance analysis. These agents work contextually within a governed platform, ensuring AI-powered efficiency coupled with human oversight. AI-generated content may be inaccurate There's a perception in the market that Acquia DAM has been standing still while competitors race to ship AI features. I want to address that feedback directly - because although Acquia has AI features Acquia has been doubling down on validating on how Marketers can drive meaningful outcomes using Agents in DAM use-cases. Let me tell you what's actually happening. What Acquia has already built. Over the past 18 months, Acquia DAM has shipped a series of capabilities that represent a genuine shift in what the platform can do. Natural Language Search, launched earlier this year, lets your team find any asset by describing what they need in plain language, in any language, without knowing how a file was tagged. Video Creator brings on-brand video production directly into the DAM, with AI scripting, subtitling, and translation built in. Asset Intelligence activates the moment a file enters the system: automatically identifying content, enriching metadata, generating alt text, and surfacing related assets. Nearly 300 integrations connect your content to the tools your teams already use. This is the groundwork for truly AI-powered digital asset management These were all features that helped marketers drive better outcomes in their existing workflows, but it was a deliberate shift to getting the platform ready for what's next. What's coming and why it matters. Acquia is now excited to embrace the paradigm shift with AI Agents. Later this year, Acquia DAM will introduce DAM AI agents: purpose-built AI agents for marketing teams, specialized Digital Teammates that don't just manage your asset library, they actively work inside it on your behalf. Think of it this way: Acquia DAM provides the tools and the governed foundation. You choose the goals. Your Digital Teammates get to work. Acquia is building four of them, each with a distinct role: The Curator keeps your library organized without human intervention. It recognizes visually identical images and prevents library bloat. It looks at an image, identifies SKUs, faces, or locations, and assigns taxonomy codes automatically. The result: a library that stays clean and usable as volume scales, without a dedicated person maintaining it. The Producer accelerates content production. It understands a request like "I need the web version of this" and converts a 50MB TIFF to an optimized WebP automatically. It detects focal points and generates correctly proportioned crops for every channel (Instagram, web, email, etc.) without routing a request back to the creative team. Hours of production work become minutes. The Guardian protects your brand. It flags uploaded content that appears AI-generated for human review. It runs brand compliance checks against your guidelines before assets move into campaigns. It's the safeguard that makes automation trustworthy rather than risky. The Strategist turns your DAM data into decisions. It analyzes asset performance across campaigns, identifies which content is driving results and which is being ignored, and surfaces recommendations for where to invest creative resources next. Instead of exporting reports and building pivot tables, your team gets forward-looking intelligence from the system that holds all the data. Every one of these agents operates as a digital teammate, inheriting all the permissions and governance that you rely on. Acquia also couple this with Human-in-the-Loop governance built in, nothing reaches production without a human approval step. Every action is traceable. You get AI speed without giving up control. How this is different from what competitors are offering The DAM market is moving fast on AI agents right now. What most vendors are shipping are smarter libraries - agents that enrich metadata, tag images, and check brand guidelines within the DAM itself. That's useful. But it stops at the asset boundary. What makes Acquia's approach different is the foundation agents work from, and where they can go. Its agents work from the full context of an asset: not just what it looks like, but its rights status, governance rules, performance history, and campaign association. An agent that only reads the surface of your assets will automate the wrong things confidently. Ours have the complete picture before they act. And because Acquia DAM is part of a connected platform, its agents don't stop when the asset is approved. Through its MCP layer - an open standard that connects AI agents across applications - a DAM agent can pass an approved, rights-cleared asset directly into a web publishing workflow, a governance check, or a site build in Acquia Source. A Web Developer Digital Teammate can take DAM content and build a Source CMS site around it. Your brand assets become the source of truth for your entire content operation, not just your library. No standalone DAM can replicate this. It requires the platform on both sides of the hand-off. The value you get from DAM AI agents depends entirely on the quality of the foundation they work from. Agents need governed metadata, clean rights data, consistent taxonomy, and performance history attached to assets. The organizations that will get the most from this capability are the ones building that foundation now. If you're an existing Acquia DAM customer, this means auditing your metadata structure, confirming your rights and expiration data is current, and making sure your governance workflows are set up to scale. If you're evaluating DAM for the first time, ask every vendor on your shortlist a simple question: when your agents make decisions about my assets, what do they actually know? The answer will tell you a great deal about how much those agents will actually do for you. The bottom line. Acquia DAM is not standing still. Acquia has been building toward this moment deliberately - investing in Acquia DAM's AI foundation, the search intelligence, and the platform connectivity that makes agents genuinely useful rather than just impressive in a demo. Your DAM is about to get a team. The best time to prepare is before they arrive. Ready to get AI-ready? Talk to your Acquia Rep. Vice President, Product Management Innovation, Acquia Source