CMS Companies Using AI To Optimize, Not Innovate … Arguably At Their Peril
February 27, 2025 by Dave Haynes
Content partners invidis have an interesting post up this morning – translated from German – that reflects how digital signage CMS and solutions companies are applying AI to their businesses. In short, companies are mostly using it to optimize what they already do and offer, as opposed to innovating.
The company’s most recent quarterly Digital Signage Business Climate Index (DBCI), an online survey, asked responding companies how they use AI and what drives that usage.
The answer: Most digital signage providers currently use AI as an efficiency driver rather than an innovation driver. The development of new features is only mentioned as a secondary motivation. The real driver is time savings, followed by cost savings.
Similarly, the main areas of application are tasks that have to be done anyway – and can now be done much faster with AI: the creation of content (content creation), software development (coding) and the adaptation of content (content adaptation). AI is therefore primarily used to optimize internal processes and make them more efficient.
Interestingly, the pressure to implement does not come from customers: only one in ten market participants who took part in the DBCI reported corresponding customer requests. The transformation is therefore driven more by the companies themselves than by market demand.
That’s definitely what I hear. Invidis poses the slightly-scolding question “Where Is The Innovation?” for the story. But I think this approach makes a bunch of short-term sense, though I have been disappointed by a few demos that didn’t seem to amount to much more than being able to say: “See! We use AI! Awesome, right? Right???”
Being able to do work faster and more accurately makes sense, as does reducing time and costs for original content. The AI creative thing, though, remains a Handle With Care task. When it works, it tends to get results that would perhaps be described as “serviceable” or “good enough.” I’ve not seen a lot of great, though certainly the underlying images and video-gen tools have progressed dramatically in their capabilities over the past 18 months.
What invidis is getting at, and what I have been saying lately to people who ask, is that SaaS software businesses should be looking at AI as an existential threat, because AI coding can do a lot of the work to create agents that sit on top of platforms, and do very specific work and offer very specific, precision-defined functionality.
What that might mean in real-world terms is that a company that has a service counter with changing offers – or an event venue with changing shows by time and date – could write or have quickly coded an agent that just does what’s needed for that task. So it could not do everything a general purpose digital signage CMS can do, but the client doesn’t want to pay a recurring fee for 100% of the capabilities when it is using 5%. So it could park an agent on a device and network management platform, and take a pass on paying monthlies on a third-party CMS.
A quick Google search reveals no end of posts and news articles exploring the threat to SaaS businesses – generally, definitely not just digital signage. Like this one …
I hear more and more about big companies with in-house IT resources doing exploratory calls with CMS companies, when it was kinda sorta obvious they were doing the calls mostly to refine ideas on writing their own. I sat in on a call with a big QSR chain that said it was assessing third-party software options, and concluded, yeah, they’re going to do their own.
Here’s how invidis frames this:
More innovative and at the same time more complex applications are still in their infancy: AI-supported network management, use as a cyber security tool or the automatic creation of playlists are still rarely or not very mature. But this is precisely where the transformative potential of AI lies.
One future perspective, for example, is network management through Agentic AI – an AI that uses large language models and reasoning frameworks to take on tasks independently. Deutsche Telekom has now embarked on such a project with its RAM Guardian Agent. The AI agent based on Gemini 2 is intended to serve as the first step towards autonomous, self-healing mobile networks.
Telekom will present its AI agent together with Google Cloud at the Mobile World Congress in early March. Similar AI agents could also make digital signage networks smarter, safer and more autonomous in the future.
From my perspective, if a company goes to market with a CMS solution that’s mainly just framed as general and ready to apply to numerous use-cases, that’s a problem.
It’s so true that a lot of companies seem to be using AI more for optimization and efficiency rather than pushing innovation, which could be a short-term solution at best. The focus on saving time and reducing costs is understandable, but I agree with you that there’s a bit of a risk here in terms of missing out on truly innovative, transformative solutions that could redefine the industry.