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Humans vs. AI: A people leader's take on what stays human. At /GoLive, Pantheon's inaugural conference, I joined a panel on The New Age of the Web, alongside Stephanie Cohen, Chief Strategy Officer at Cloudflare, and Matthew Duncan, former Head of Future of Work and AI at Microsoft, moderated by Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic. Pantheon looked at how AI agents are reshaping the web, and what that means for the companies and people who build it. I brought the people lens to the conversation, focusing on what happens to work, to managers, and to judgment when AI takes on more of what Pantheon do every day. That put me in the hot seat for the question on everyone's mind: Is AI going to take my job? Nick put it to me in terms of hiring. If AI is changing this fast, how can Pantheon be certain humans will still be involved in the hiring process? Might it become entirely automated? My honest answer was yes, it's plausible. Some companies will make that call. But for people leaders, the real question isn't how to stop AI from taking jobs. It's choosing, intentionally, which decisions stay with humans, and ensuring your people are ready to make them. As AI technology accelerates, more companies will have access to the same models and tools. So why should a customer choose your organization over a competitor? My answer is that it increasingly comes down to how your people shape your product and customer experience. How they think, how they decide, how they treat customers, and how they know when something doesn't look right. As I said on stage, "Trust and judgment and that relationship and personality are the moat of what makes you, you. I think people crave that." Here's how leaders can make people a true differentiator in this new era. Redesign work around what is uniquely human, not just productivity. AI should take more execution off people's plates. It should not take away judgment, development, relationships, or accountability. When AI joins a workflow or handles the first contact with a customer, people gain capacity to contribute where it matters most: in places where their sound judgment and taste will influence the customer outcome. That raises the bar for talent. The work Pantheon do changes, and so do the skills it takes to do it well. So how do you design these new workflows? At Pantheon, one of its values is Customers First, which is why I believe work should be designed around customer outcomes. Start with the outcome and work backwards. What are Pantheon trying to solve for its customers? Then work with the people closest to the work and build the optimal workflow with them, rather than deciding for them. Map the tasks, the decisions, the handoffs, and the points where things break down. People should stay accountable for decisions that are high-stakes or hard to reverse, especially when they affect customers, employees, security, or the company's reputation. "Human in the loop" has become a reassuring phrase. But a person clicking "Approve" on most of the AI-generated output only creates the appearance of control. On the Pantheon People team, Pantheon did this by mapping the candidate and employee experience from their first contact with recruiting through onboarding. Pantheon asked a simple question: where does human connection really change the experience, and where is the work mostly coordination or repetition? That showed Pantheon where AI could help with scheduling, summaries, and first drafts, and where a recruiter or manager still needs to own the conversation, the judgment, and the relationship. One decision Pantheon made was keeping the final hiring call with managers. As I shared on the panel, "We still want hiring managers to exercise their judgment and taste and know what's best for the team." The manager becomes more important, not less. When Nick asked how you ensure people working with AI follow the right rules and don't cut corners, my answer came back to leaders and managers. Managers have to "create the environment where people feel like they can raise their hand and question things." If AI takes on more execution, including the routine work people used to learn through, then managers must deliberately develop the judgment that work used to teach. Someone has to decide when to trust the system, when to challenge it, and when to stop it. That skill doesn't come on its own. At its recent Lead Summit for a cohort of Pantheon managers, Pantheon focused on a simple principle: coach, don't solve. Ask before answering. Slow down on the reality of a situation. Give the problem back to the employee. Those behaviors matter even more when AI can produce an answer instantly. The goal is not just a faster answer. It's a stronger person and a better decision. Human judgment becomes the real advantage when there isn't one obvious answer, when context, taste, and tradeoffs matter. As I put it on stage, AI is "really good at surfacing a lot of options, but it's not always good at knowing what's right for the given situation." AI changes the job, not just the toolset. It isn't enough to tell people to use AI. As I said on the panel, a lot of organizations took the approach of "Okay, go use AI, go!" and were met with "Okay, but what do I do?" Leaders need to work with their teams to make the why, and the work itself, clear. Start by naming where AI has changed the actual job. This matters more because of where the bottleneck has moved. Its 2026 State of the Web report surveyed 1,000 marketing, engineering, and IT and security leaders across the U.S., U.K., and DACH. It found that AI has made it faster to create content, code, and policy, but validation has become the shared bottleneck across all three functions. Roughly four in five leaders in every group, including 78% of engineering leaders, say manual validation is getting in the way of scaling AI. AI can produce an answer faster than an organization can determine whether it's right. Engineers aren't only writing code anymore. They're also reviewing and fixing AI-generated code and building controls to make AI coding safe. That's three different kinds of work, each with different skills and development needs, and much of it is new to the role. Leaders should make that new work visible and clarify what AI owns, what the person owns, and what good performance looks like now. They also need to ensure employees still have meaningful ways to learn, such as reviewing work and taking on more responsibility over time. The manager's role is to turn changing expectations into development, giving people chances to practice the new work and recognizing sound judgment, not just speed or output. Faster change needs more change management, not less. AI is helping Pantheon make decisions faster and rethink how work gets done. That doesn't eliminate the need for change management. It increases it. When people don't understand why a change is happening, what it means for them, or who is accountable, they fill in the gaps, usually with the worst-case scenario. The durable advantage is to bring people along and embrace the change as the work evolves. Where to start encouraging AI adoption. Pick one piece of work your team does every week. Ask the people doing it what's frustrating, repetitive, or getting in the way. Then redesign it together. Ask what AI should take off their plates, what people still need to own, and what they might lose if you automate too much. Spell out who makes each decision and who is accountable. And pay attention to whether people feel more capable and more enabled to do meaningful work. In 90 days, success shouldn't just be hours saved. It should be stronger judgment and people who feel more confident about how they contribute. The technology will keep getting better and more widely available. What it won't do on its own is build the judgment, trust, and culture that make an organization worth doing business with. That moat is still built by leaders, and it may be the most important work Pantheon has. Topics: * Jody Swartz Senior Vice President, People

Pantheon launches P1, an ai-native CMS and web operations platform. OCT 6, 2026 The new agentic composition and work stream layer lets humans and AI agents co-manage content, integrations and full fleet web ops. The gist. * Flexible AI-human collaboration. Pantheon P1 empowers human and AI agent teams to jointly manage content and web operations across a range of interfaces, from traditional UIs to an embedded agent named "Zappy" to MCP integration in Claude, ChatGPT and other MCP-compatible agent frameworks. * Component-based architecture. Web property owners, developers, operators and editors use Next.js / React components as the foundation for experiences, integration and standardization. * Web team empowerment. Digital leaders can improve velocity, enable broader team participation and accelerate web operations by bringing a kind of sactioned vibe coding operation to their stakeholders and operators. MIAMI - Pantheon launched P1, its agentic content and web operations platform, at the company's GoLive conference in Miami at Loews Hotel on Oct. 6. According to Pantheon's SVP of Product, Chris Yates, P1 is an AI-native web composition and management layer that both is, and is not, what one would traditionally call a content management system. P1 differs from a CMS in that it was designed from the start to empower high velocity human and AI agent collaboration on both content and code within a shared set of operational and brand guardrails. Pantheon... Beyond Drupal, beyond wordpress. According to Pantheon leadership, P1 aims to help organizations use AI to improve web ops velocity, collaboration and transparency without introducing fragmentation, security risks, brand inconsistency or accountability gaps. The P1 platform is a new CMS in that it can serve as the primary content repository, but it can also happily pull content from any API source, including existing WordPress or Drupal instances, PIMs, Google Docs or any platform that has an appropriate API. P1 includes its own front-end authoring and content management environment and renders front-end experiences built as Next.js applications. Pantheon said it developed the P1 roadmap over two years, concluding that legacy PHP-based CMS architectures were unsuitable for the asynchronous, long-running and human/agent collaborative work streams that modern teams now require. Pantheon's core web ops evolution. Though somewhat dwarfed by the P1 unveil, Pantheon has moved to expand its historic, core WebOps platform beyond WordPress and Drupal, with managed Next.js hosting reaching general availability in April and a host of core platform improvements announced at GoLive Miami, oriented around streamlining larger scale site fleet management. The April Next.js release delivered a managed container runtime on Google Cloud Run with global CDN, persistent caching, HTTP Streaming and Git-based Dev/Test/Live workflows - unifying modern frontends with legacy CMS stacks under a single pipeline. The company's AI integrations extend through its Content Publisher tooling, which launched in public preview in September 2025 and enables teams to publish from Google Docs to Drupal, WordPress or Next.js sites in near real time. By February, Pantheon placed a Content Publisher MCP Server into public beta, allowing AI agents such as Claude and ChatGPT to orchestrate content workflows directly. The company also joined the Drupal AI initiative as a Gold member in October 2025. Pantheon's strategic arc culminated in September with the unveiling of Agentic Fleet Management, introducing fleet-level traffic insights, a Site Administrator role and a next-generation CDN with bot protection. Supporting State of the Web 2026 research found roughly 80% of marketing, engineering and IT leaders cite manual validation as the primary barrier to scaling AI. The web ops & CMS platform market. Pantheon joins a host of vendors in the digital experience space who are investing frantically to evolve their platforms for emerging operating models. Webflow launched Source in September, giving marketing teams and AI agents simultaneous, governed access to site code within an agentic workspace. The approach aligns with what Forrester has described as agentic digital experience platforms. These are goal-seeking environments that actively coordinate composable components rather than serving as passive toolkits. Notable news & distinguished data for tomorrow's c-suite. Several vendors have moved governance to the architecture layer: * Sitecore deployed 20 AI agents via Agentic Studio across campaign planning and content migration * Kontent.ai released an agentic CMS targeting governance, compliance and translation automation * WordPress.com expanded Model Context Protocol integration so agents can draft, edit and publish with user approval The model context protocol (MCP) standard is central to this shift, enabling agents to interact in real-time data with these systems, performing tasks at a depth, speed and scale not previously possible, and in some cases, enabling a new kind of agentic marketing and personalization. "You actually have to redesign how work is done inside of a company today. And that's a human shape problem, not a technology problem." - Stephanie Cohen Chief Strategy Officer at Cloudflare, speaking at Pantheon GoLive Pantheon P1 feature breakdown. Pantheon says P1 addresses limitations of legacy headless CMS platforms for AI-driven web operations by bringing together a mature set of what co-founder Josh Koenig described today as Pantheon Primitives combined with a layer of new operating and agentic choreography and emerging capabilities like Next.js hosting and Content Publisher integration with diverse authoring enironments. | Capability | Description | | Component-based architecture | Page-building interface using React components governed by a central design system, organized in a collaborative library and surfaced in the experience designer backoffice UI. | | Multiplayer mode | Real-time collaboration between humans and AI agents with identity management, role based permissions and chat-based human-to-human and human-to-agent collaboration. | | Work stream-based workflows | Work streams form the basis of operational work and support versioning, branching, granular release packaging and minimal clicks to live flow. Notably work stream comprise both content and code, a capability that scant few platforms offer today. | | Native Next.js front-end | P1 front end experiences are packaged as Next.js apps and deployed natively to Pantheon's Next.js infrastructure. | | Agent first, agentic orchestration | AI and humans work in parallel with transparency and accountability. Agentic work can happen interactively in the backoffice UI via the Zappy agent, or via MCP and remote agentic tooling / platforms. Agents can be assigned unique identities in the platform with their own roles and permissions. MCP connections can impersonate a platform user or be assigned a key-based identity with its own permissions. | Pantheon background. Pantheon is a WebOps platform serving cross-functional web teams at enterprises, universities and nonprofits. Founded in 2010 in San Francisco, it has raised several rounds of funding over the years, including $100 million in Series E funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in July 2021. The company offers managed cloud infrastructure, automated deployment workflows and multi-site management for WordPress, Drupal and Next.js. Learning Opportunities Conference Oct 6, 2026 · 6:00PM EDT Conference Oct 6, 2026 · 6:30PM EDT Conference Oct 8, 2026 · 8:00AM EDT Webinar Oct 8, 2026 · 11:00AM PDT Conference Oct 13, 2026 · 9:00AM CDT Webinar Oct 13, 2026 · 9:00AM PDT The company's new P1 platform marks a significant new chapter for Pantheon as it moves further into the operational stack to compete directly with traditional CMS platforms. Have a tip to share with our editorial team? Drop us a line: [email protected] Main image: Dom Nicastro is editor-in-chief of CMSWire and an award-winning journalist with a passion for technology, customer experience and marketing. With more than 20 years of experience, he has written for various publications, like the Gloucester Daily Times and Boston Magazine. He has a proven track record of delivering high-quality, informative, and engaging content to his readers. Dom works tirelessly to stay up-to-date with the latest trends in the industry to provide readers with accurate, trustworthy information to help them make informed decisions. Brice Dunwoodie is the founder and CEO of Simpler Media Group, publisher of CMSWire, Reworked and VKTR. With more than 25 years of enterprise software experience at the intersection of technology, business operations and executive-level strategy, Brice maintains a focus on clarity, evidence-based analysis, visionary thinking and practitioner relevance. His academic background spans California Polytechnic University and the University of Michigan with a focus on psychology, computer science and leadership practices. Featured Research