The website used to be a project with a clear owner. Marketing ran it. IT kept the lights on. Most of what mattered for an organization’s digital presence happened on a homepage and a handful of landing pages, and one team usually controlled the system behind it.
That model has quietly come apart. Digital content now moves across social channels, email, mobile apps, customer portals, commerce pages, intranets, and even digital signage. At the same time, AI has moved into the workflow, more teams are sharing the same platforms, and the tools used to create, approve, govern, and publish content are no longer neatly contained inside a traditional content management system (CMS).
To understand how digital content management is changing, Liferay partnered with the third-party survey platform Pollfish on the 2026 Liferay Digital Content Management Report to survey 500 U.S. adults employed full-time who manage or oversee digital content for their organization, including website, app, portal, and digital channel content.
Key findings of the Liferay 2026 Digital Content Management Survey
-
Content has moved beyond the website. 63% of content managers create or manage content for channels beyond a website, most commonly social media (49%), email (40%), and mobile apps (28%). 60% of organizations have three or more teams using the same primary content tool.
-
AI is in 86% of content stacks, but only 14% of teams trust it to publish without human review. Another 8% are piloting AI features. Asked about autonomous publishing, just 14% completely trust AI to do so without human review.
-
78% switch between multiple tools to finish a single content task. 22% of those respondents switch tools "very often.”
-
AI-heavy teams are nearly 3x more likely to manage multilingual content. 57% of heavy AI users create content in more than one language, against 20% of non-AI users.
-
The CMS is the destination, not the workspace. Only 7% of content managers draft content in their primary content platform. The other 93% start in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, an asset platform, or a project management tool.
-
Cross-team coordination causes stress. 32% of content managers cite cross-team collaboration and looming deadlines as a top stressor, with "keeping up with new technology" right behind at 30%.
-
Security beats innovation 2-to-1 when content managers evaluate new tools. 27% rank security and trust as the top factor when evaluating new business technology, against 14% who put innovation or AI capabilities first.
"There's no such thing as a marketing-only CMS anymore. The primary content tool in most companies is shared across sales, customer experience, IT, HR, and operations, and it pushes content to social, email, mobile, portal, and product surfaces. That's a fundamentally different product than what the category was built around ten years ago. The platforms that recognize the shift will keep their customers. The ones that don't are quietly losing them to a stack of workarounds."
— Bryan Cheung, Chief Marketing Officer, Liferay
The CMS Has Quietly Become an Enterprise Content Hub
63% of digital content managers manage content for channels beyond a website, and 60% of organizations have three or more teams sharing the same primary content tool.
Websites are now just one channel in a much larger content ecosystem. Content managers are increasingly responsible for a broader portfolio of digital surfaces, most commonly social media (49%), email (40%), mobile apps (28%), customer portals (23%), e-commerce or product pages (22%), intranets (18%), and digital signage or kiosks (16%). In fact, 63% now create or manage content for at least one channel beyond a traditional website. The portfolio of surfaces a content team supports has expanded faster than the platforms many teams rely on to manage their work.
Content ownership is also becoming more distributed. For 60% of respondents, the primary content tool is shared among at least three different teams in their organization. For 20%, it is used by five or more teams. Just 15% say their primary content tool is used by only one team. What began as the marketing team’s CMS has become an internal hub for sales, customer experience, IT, HR, operations, and other groups that all need content to move quickly and consistently.
Multilingual content shows how stretched the work has become. 40% of content managers create or manage content in more than one language. Among those respondents, 56% manage three or more languages, and 12% manage six or more. The overlap with AI is especially sharp: 57% of heavy AI users manage multilingual content, compared with 30% of AI-limited users and 20% of non-AI users.
When organizations need to publish across languages, channels, and teams at once, AI starts to look less like an experimental feature and more like a way to keep up. The result is a content function that looks much less like a website publishing operation and much more like an enterprise content hub.
AI is Everywhere, but Trust Hasn’t Caught Up
86% of content managers already use AI features in their content tools, but only 14% completely trust AI to publish content without human review.
AI features have become part of the content stack. 41% of content managers use AI features extensively, another 45% use them in a limited way, and 8% are piloting them. Just 5% have no current AI plans. More than half (55%) say AI assists at least a quarter of their content, and 26% say AI assists more than half.
But adoption has not eliminated the need for oversight. Asked how much they trust AI to autonomously publish content without human review, only 14% completely trust it. Another 26% mostly trust it, while 31% trust it somewhat and 28% do not trust it much or at all. The leading expected use case for AI over the next 24 months is helping editorial teams draft and edit content (41%), not running content autonomously.
The barriers reinforce the same point. 34% of content managers worry about accuracy or quality, 30% want human review and oversight, and 30% cite security or privacy concerns. For most teams, AI is becoming a productivity layer inside the workflow, not a replacement for editorial judgment, governance, or review.
Heavy AI users, however, are moving faster. 31% of them completely trust AI to publish autonomously, compared with just 1% of non-AI or piloting users. That suggests the trust gap is shaped by experience. Teams that have processed meaningful volumes of AI-assisted content are more willing to extend that trust to higher-stakes publishing decisions.
More AI Has Not Meant Fewer Tools
78% of content managers switch between multiple tools or systems to complete a single content task. Among heavy AI users, 31% switch "very often."
Content work is tool-jumping work. 22% of content managers switch tools "very often" to complete a single content task, 21% "often," and 35% "sometimes." Only 22% rarely or never switch. For many teams, a single content task can involve a CMS, Google Docs, Microsoft Word, a project management platform, an analytics tool, a translation tool, and a digital asset library before anything is published.
Adding AI to the workflow not only doesn't reduce switching, but makes it more common. Heavy AI users are more likely to switch tools very often, at 31%, compared with 17% of AI-limited users and 10% of non-AI or piloting users. A drafting assistant may live in one system, localization in another, compliance review in a third, and publishing in the CMS. The more AI tools a team uses, the more places the workflow may need to be stitched back together.
This fragmentation shows up in the data. 24% of respondents cite too many tools or platforms as a top source of day-to-day stress and 25% cite too many manual processes. Among IT and development respondents, 40% point to cross-team coordination as their biggest stressor, the highest of any role.
The finding complicates one of the common promises around AI. For content teams, AI may make individual steps faster, but it does not automatically make the end-to-end workflow simpler. Without strong integration, AI can become just one more layer teams have to manage.
The CMS Is the Destination, Not the Drafting Room
Only 7% of digital content managers say their primary content platform is where they create draft content.
The CMS is now expected to handle social, email, mobile, portal, and translated content for multiple teams, but one place it’s still underused is as a drafting environment. Asked where they primarily create content for their website or digital properties, content managers named Microsoft Word (33%), Google Docs (21%), a digital asset or content marketing platform (19%), and a project or work management tool (18%) far more often than a CMS (7%).
This isn't a verdict on CMSs. It's a sign that most were built as publishing systems first and writing environments second. For 93% of teams, content takes its first form somewhere else and then gets migrated into the platform that handles publishing and governance. Every handoff creates room for context, formatting, metadata, brand standards, and any AI work done in drafting to get lost.
For teams responsible for organic search, those handoffs can also make it harder to manage metadata, content structure, and optimization steps consistently. As content moves across more tools before publication, SEO becomes another workflow requirement that depends on stronger governance inside the publishing process.
And it isn't just non-AI users who haven't moved on. 28% of heavy AI users still draft in Word. Even among heavy AI users, only 6% draft in a CMS. When they do reach for a purpose-built tool, it's a digital asset platform or content marketing platform (23%), not the CMS that ultimately publishes the work.
A platform expected to operate as an enterprise content hub is still often treated like the final stop in someone else’s workflow. For teams managing more channels, languages, approvals, and AI-assisted content, that gap between where content is created and where content is governed is becoming harder to ignore.
Teams Trust Their CMS. They Don’t Trust Everything Around It
70% of content managers are very or extremely confident in their primary content tool's security and governance, but they tie cross-team coordination and tight deadlines as their top day-to-day stressors at 32% each.
Content managers are not broadly skeptical of their primary platforms. 70% are very or extremely confident in their primary content tool's security and governance and 68% are very or extremely confident in its ability to protect user data. The pain is in the workflow around it.
Asked about the biggest source of day-to-day stress, content managers tied two answers at 32%: cross-team coordination and tight deadlines. Keeping up with new technology follows closely at 30%, while too many manual processes (25%) and too many tools or platforms (24%) round out the next tier. The top stressors all point to friction between people, systems, and processes.
When it comes to buying and evaluating new business technology, content managers put security and trust first (27%), then ease of use (20%), cost (17%), and integration with existing systems (15%). Innovation and AI capabilities rank fifth at 14%. Scalability ranks last at 7%. The biggest barrier to adopting a new tool is concerns about security and compliance (23%), followed by cost (22%) and difficulty integrating with existing systems (20%).
The message for technology providers is direct: innovation alone is not the strongest opening argument. Content managers are already living with more channels, more stakeholders, more tools, and more AI. What they need most is a secure, trusted system that reduces workflow complexity instead of adding another layer to manage.
What the Data Signals for the Future of Content Management
Together, the findings point to a clear shift in what organizations expect from content platforms. The CMS is increasingly where teams, channels, languages, AI tools, governance standards, and publishing workflows converge.
That shift creates a gap between how many platforms were originally designed and how content teams now work. Content managers are publishing across more surfaces, coordinating with more internal teams, relying on AI more often, and yet still draft much of their work outside their system of record. They are confident in the security of their platforms, but are less confident in the workflows around them.
For content leaders, the next phase of digital content management will be defined by integration, governance, and usability as much as by AI. The strongest platforms will not simply add new features, but reduce the number of places work gets lost, make human review easier to maintain, and help teams manage content as an enterprise function.
"Over the next few years, winning content teams will be defined by how well they solve the seams: between writing and publishing, between teams, between languages, between human review and machine output. That's where content work actually breaks down today, and that's where the next generation of platforms has to focus."
— Bryan Cheung, Chief Marketing Officer, Liferay
Survey methodology
The Liferay 2026 Digital Content Management Survey was conducted in early 2026 via Pollfish among 500 U.S. adults employed full-time who manage or oversee digital content for their organization. Respondents actively manage or oversee website, app, portal, or digital channel content.
