Welcome back to the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders, where we've spent another year navigating the ever-evolving kitchen of content operations. As I look back at 2025, I'm reminded of that moment when you realize your "mistaken order" has actually become the signature dish everyone wants.
This year, content operations didn't just mature; it transformed. Let me share what we cooked up, what burned, and what's now on the permanent menu.
The Year AI Agents Left the Kitchen and Joined the Front of House
When I started this blog, AI was the sous chef we were just learning to trust with prep work. In 2025, AI became the maître d', the sommelier, and occasionally, the customer who knew what they wanted before we did.
The Agentic AI Revolution
This wasn't just about ChatGPT writing better metadata descriptions (though it got scary good at that). 2025 was the year of agentic AI. These are autonomous systems that don't just respond to our commands but anticipate needs, make decisions, and execute tasks without constant supervision.
At the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders, we saw this firsthand:
- Metadata agents that automatically enriched Content Hub assets the moment they were uploaded, understanding brand taxonomy without being told
- Workflow orchestration agents that routed content based on context, urgency, and availability, which eliminated manual assignment
- Quality assurance agents that flagged brand inconsistencies, rights management issues, and accessibility problems before assets went live
The data backs this up. According to research from Aprimo and others in the DAM space, 7 out of 10 prospects cited search and findability as their #1 pain point with legacy DAM systems. In 2025, AI agents didn't just improve search; they made it almost telepathic.
But here's what the hype articles missed: The best implementations weren't about replacing humans. They were about amplifying human judgment. The most successful content operations teams used AI agents as sous chefs, not replacements for the head chef.
The Great Convergence: DAM + PIM + Workflow = The Content Operations Kitchen
For years, we've been running separate stations: DAM over here for marketing assets, PIM over there for product content, workflow tools somewhere else entirely. In 2025, the walls finally started coming down.
What Changed: The enterprises I worked with in 2025 stopped asking "Should we buy a DAM or a PIM?" and started asking "How do we orchestrate content across our entire ecosystem?"
This shift was massive. Content operations emerged as a distinct discipline. It's not just a marketing function or an IT project, but a strategic capability with its own leadership, budgets, and career paths.
I have led content operations implementations where:
- Marketing assets from Content Hub fed directly into PIM systems for product launches
- Product data from PIM enriched DAM metadata for better searchability
- Workflow tools orchestrated hand-offs between creative, compliance, legal, and distribution
- Everything talked to everything, and humans could actually find what they needed
The technical term is "content supply chain orchestration." The practical term is "finally being able to find that asset Jenny created three months ago."
React + TypeScript: The New Normal for Content Hub
Remember when Content Hub's transition from Knockout to React felt like ordering in a new language at a foreign restaurant? By the end of 2025, React and TypeScript became the lingua franca of Content Hub customization.
The Journey:
- Q1 2025: Still plenty of confusion. Documentation gaps. Developers asking "Do I really need to learn React for this?"
- Q2 2025: Community catch-up. Tutorials everywhere (including mine). Patterns emerging.
- Q3-Q4 2025: React is just... how we do things now.
We went from "this will take 3 weeks to build" to "let me scaffold that this afternoon."
But (and this is important): The best implementations still required understanding the why behind Content Hub's data model. React made building faster; understanding content operations made building right.
The XM Cloud Awakening (and the "Which Sitecore?" Question)
2025 was the year XM Cloud went from "interesting option" to "serious contender." This was especially true for organizations who wanted composable architecture without composable chaos.
But it also created the great existential question for Sitecore practitioners: "Am I a Content Hub person or an XM Cloud person?"
Plot twist: The answer is increasingly "both, plus you need to understand how they integrate."
The most sophisticated implementations I saw in 2025 used:
- XM Cloud for website content management and experience composition
- Content Hub for DAM, creative operations, and multi-channel asset distribution
- Integration layers that made them work together seamlessly
Sitecore's agentic vision started making sense when you saw this orchestration in action. Content Hub became the central repository for approved brand assets, while XM Cloud consumed those assets for web experiences. AI agents managed the sync, versioning, and rights management.
The organizations that figured this out early won 2025.
Personal Milestone: From Developer to Advisor
This year, I made a conscious shift in my own practice. I moved from being the person who builds Content Hub implementations to being the person who architects content operations strategies.
This meant:
- Learning to present to CMOs and CTOs, not just dev teams
- Thinking in business outcomes, not just technical features
- Understanding change management as much as change tracking in Git
- Reading business strategy books instead of just technical documentation
My "Mastering Sitecore Content Hub DAM" book emerged from this shift. It wasn't just a technical manual; it was a bridge between technology capabilities and business needs.
The reception confirmed what I suspected: The market doesn't need more developers who can write React components for Content Hub. It needs architects who can design content operations that actually work for real organizations with real constraints.
What Didn't Go According to Plan (The Burnt Dishes)
Let's be honest about the orders we got wrong:
1. AI Hallucination Reality Check Early in the year, I was bullish on AI doing more autonomous content creation. By mid-year, after seeing several "creative" interpretations of brand guidelines, I learned that guardrails aren't optional. They're essential.
AI agents work brilliantly within well-defined constraints. Give them too much creative freedom, and you get assets that are technically correct but strategically wrong.
2. The Integration Tax Every "seamless integration" took 3x longer than promised. Whether it was connecting Content Hub to PIM systems, syncing with e-commerce platforms, or feeding marketing automation tools, the result was the same: the demo was always smooth, but the implementation was always complex.
The lesson: Budget for integration time realistically. If the vendor says 2 weeks, plan for 6-8.
What's on the Menu for 2026 (Preview)
As we head into 2026, here's what I see coming:
1. Agentic AI Goes Mainstream What we experimented with in 2025 becomes table stakes in 2026. Organizations that don't have AI agents handling metadata, workflow routing, and quality assurance will be noticeably behind.
2. Content Operations as a C-Suite Role We'll see more "Chief Content Officer" and "VP of Content Operations" titles. These won't be rebranded marketing leaders, but strategic roles focused on the entire content supply chain.
3. Composability Clarity The MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless) architecture hype will mature into practical patterns. Organizations will stop debating whether to go composable and start understanding how to compose effectively.
4. The Data Foundation Imperative As AI agents become more sophisticated, organizations will realize their data quality is the limiting factor. 2026 will be the year of metadata governance, taxonomy refinement, and content model maturation.
(More detailed predictions in my next post!)
Lessons from the Kitchen: What 2025 Taught Me
Lesson 1: Technical Depth + Strategic Breadth = Career Leverage The most valuable skill in 2025 wasn't knowing React or understanding Content Hub's API. It was being able to translate technical capabilities into business outcomes. Learn the technology deeply. But also learn to speak CEO.
Lesson 2: Community Compounds Every blog post I wrote, every tutorial I shared, every coffee chat I had... they compounded. Opportunities came from people I helped two years ago. Ideas came from conversations I had in Slack channels. Build in public. Help generously. It comes back multiplied.
Lesson 3: AI is a Power Tool, Not a Replacement The best content operations teams used AI to do more of what humans are uniquely good at: strategy, creativity, judgment. The worst tried to replace human judgment with AI and got mediocrity at scale. Use AI to eliminate toil so humans can focus on what matters.
Lesson 4: Integration > Innovation The newest AI model or latest platform feature matters less than how well your systems work together. Boring integration work often creates more value than exciting new capabilities.
Lesson 5: Experience Beats Certification I talked to many hiring managers in 2025. They all said the same thing: "Show me what you've built. Show me problems you've solved. Show me business impact." Certifications are good. Portfolio is better.
Thank You for Dining with Us
To everyone who read this blog, listened to my podcast, used my Chrome extension, asked questions in comments, or reached out for advice: thank you.
The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders exists because the Sitecore Content Hub community needed a place where we could learn from mistakes, share discoveries, and figure out this content operations thing together.
In 2025, we went from "how do I build a React component?" to "how do I architect an enterprise content operations platform?" That's progress.
In 2026, we'll go further. Stay tuned for my predictions post coming next week.
Until then, keep your metadata clean, your workflows sensible, and your AI agents on a leash.
Bon appétit, Roel van Roozendaal Chef de Cuisine, Restaurant of Mistaken Orders
P.S. If you found this valuable, subscribe to my newsletter where I share weekly insights on Content Operations, Sitecore Content Hub, and the intersection of AI and DAM. And if you have a content operations challenge you're wrestling with, reach out... I love a good culinary puzzle.
P.P.S. What was your biggest content operations lesson in 2025? Drop it in the comments. I read every one.