Publishers have long been told their content and first-party data are their most valuable assets. And, as the agentic AI craze takes hold, publishers have been inundated with advice on how to adapt these assets for AI solutions.
But what does it mean from a practical standpoint for publishers to prepare their content and data for the AI era? For TIME, it meant a long overdue overhaul of its content management system (CMS).
On Thursday, TIME announced a switch from WordPress to Contentstack, an enterprise CMS. TIME spent four months this year migrating its more than 100 years’ worth of content to the new CMS to make it more easily digestible by TIME’s consumer-facing AI tools, as well as third-party solutions, said Michael Mraz, general manager of B2C and chief product officer at TIME.
The CMS migration helped unify TIME’s fragmented content data after years of platform transitions under multiple corporate owners, Mraz said. This unified data foundation enabled TIME to launch its own AI search product, create new interactive experiences on its site and convert its archival content into “markdown” pages that are easily parsed by large language models.
Content infrastructure
