fidzu : cms

In mid-January 2026 a group of business leaders in the Drupal space came together to discuss strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and more for Drupal in the coming months and years at the Drupal Pivot event in Gent, Belgium.

We gathered at a simply amazing venue: Winter Circus that welcomed us in and had all the right spaces for the conference; I must applaud the sound isolation of the meeting rooms, as soon as the doors were closed you simply couldn't hear the outside at all, it was amazing!

The conference itself had an unconference structure and so we defined the topics that we wanted to talk about and collaboratively designed the agenda. This took a lot of time and I was a bit annoyed that we were spending so much time planning and not actually talking about the problems and solutions, but on reflection I think that this was actually a great way to feel out the general 'state of the room' and get everyone sort of on the same page for the discussions to come.

Well done to Kristof Van Tomme for wrangling us all and encouraging us to share, it took a little while, but we got the hang of it.

Day 1: sessions

AI Hype vs. Reality

I actually proposed this session, as I often hear about all the amazing things you can do with AI, but I've not come across many people actually using AI in production.

In the session we had plenty of valid, real-world use cases, they were:

• Free text search terms => facets
  • Turning unstructured queries into selections for a standard faceted search.
• Pattern recognition (abuse / moderation)
  • Flagging forum posts that need human review.
• Chatbots
  • Adding a chatbot mainly because clients expect "AI".
• PDF => structured HTML
  • Taking huge amounts of PDFs and converting them to HTML, as a starting point for human review and final tweaks.
• Alt text generation for images
  • Reported as genuinely better and more consistent than humans. And better than not having it.
• AI-assisted coding
  • Mentioned, but with caveats: can be great, sometimes not.
• Hallucinations
  • Not really a use-case, but this was recognised as an ongoing problem that still needs mitigation.
• Translation
  • Especially for regulatory "tick-box" requirements.
  • "Better than nothing", minimal effort, compliance-focused.
• Safeguarding pattern recognition
  • Identifying potential safeguarding issues (e.g. on an au pair platform) and flagging for further human review

Business models - What's working and what's not

Again this was a session that I had proposed, because I was curious coming into the event to know what business models were strained, and which were broken and which still had legs. I wanted to hear from the actual people on the ground, rather than simply general thoughts and musings 'from a friend' etc.

The general mood that I gleaned was that for small agencies, there's some cautious optimism that they'll either weather the storm or that they'll be small and nimble enough to survive. Larger agencies however seemed much more worried and were struggling to make their business model work.

The business models that seem to be working are:

• Long-term maintenance contracts
• Smaller, repeatable projects
• Productised offerings
• Diverse streams of revenue

Whereas the takeaway for me was that if you're a large agency that relies on selling large, bespoke projects where you come in and do a bunch of work on a time and materials basis, then the market for such projects simply isn't there any more.

Another observation was that many agencies specialise in one vertical or type of work only, or only have one revenue stream. In fact, this was pushed as a strategy going forward, find your niche and really push into it! However, it sort of seems that some agencies have maybe rather backed themselves into a corner doing that.

ComputerMinds has a decent diversity of business models, we don't chase the incredibly high margins of a product model, but we do have a product. We have a stream of large (for us) projects that come in and provide decent bumps in revenue, and we also have a good number of very long-standing relationships with our clients, lots going back almost 20 years. This is a firm foundation for ComputerMinds to weather out any storm.

Drupal for small agencies

We spent a long time doing introductions! Which was nice to get to know people, but did mean that the session itself didn't discuss all that much I felt.

Anyway we discussed what counts as a 'small' project and why you might want to do that in Drupal, or not. Theming was brought up a major pain point with Drupal, since there aren't off-the-shelf themes that can be plugged in easily, though it was noted that Dripyard themes look like a promising way to resolve that in the Drupal space.

Another interesting idea that came up during this session was that European companies should get a tiny foothold in the US, with simple client facing roles, and get work with US Government agencies and then do the actual development work in Europe.

Drupal Inside™

(Not actually a trademark yet!)

In this session it was proposed that the community define and enforce a standard of what having 'Drupal Inside' means. This is a higher bar than simply being based on Drupal, so would include things like using responsible AI tools, having regulatory compliance, being built by Drupal Certified Partners and maybe other things.

One key point that took the room, and me, a long time to realise was that this wasn't talking about the end websites being marked up as 'Drupal Inside' but instead, the products that those are built on. So if you have an intranet distribution for example, you'd market that as 'Drupal Inside' and then people making purchasing decisions can look for solutions that carry the 'Drupal Inside' mark. So a company that has ended up with a Drupal website that they like might look for a 'Drupal Inside' CRM, DXP, DAM, etc.

The name probably needs some work, because Intel probably own a trademark or something :)

End of Day 1: Portuguese tart

I grabbed a quick evening meal of a posh kebab + extras from Barouche Vooruit in Gent and oh my word was it spectacularly tasty! The kebab itself was super tasty and had just the right amount of spice for me, but the meal came with a simply superb Portuguese tart that I'm still thinking about over a week later.

Simply one of the tastiest things I've ever eaten.

Well done Gent, I will have to return soon if only to have another.

Day 2

We did a bit more planning for the day again, unconference style, and ran over again, oops.

AI in Drupal

I spent almost all of the morning in a session about AI and Drupal, like most things AI it gobbled up the next session that was booked in the same room, but it was super interesting.

It was super interesting to get lots of informed views of how AI fits into Drupal, and how it's all changing all the time. It seems like Drupal is well placed to be controlled/configured by AI, but maybe isn't the right place to be host to all the AI. As in, have AI agents take business requirements and turn that into YAML config files for Drupal to consume and use, but don't run that AI agent within the Drupal site itself. This makes a lot of sense, and I guess this could make Drupal simply another tool an AI Agent could reach out to use to approach a particular problem.

There was much discussion about the business models of the future and value based pricing etc. and in truth no one really knows how this stuff is going to pan out.

We touched on mental health of people using AI, and we noted that the development cycles with AI can be so rewarding and so fast, that it can actually be very addictive. If you're just taking a few steps into agentic AI coding, make sure you plan in breaks and try not to go too fast, or maybe a bit like going on a long hike: tell a friend where you're going and when to expect you back, so they can go looking for you if you get lost.

We also discussed the leadership of AI in the Drupal space, and how actually, there's plenty of room for leaders. The AI initiative is doing its thing, but there's plenty of scope for people to do other things too, just crack on and blaze a trail, there's plenty of room.

One interesting area that was brought up was that if (or maybe when) AI changes how businesses fundamentally function that's going to take a lot of time and effort to make that transition, and as the tech industry goes through that we're well placed to learn all the tricks, make some of the mistakes, and then become the business consultants of the future and tell other industries how to use AI best.

Wrap-up

We then had a final session wrapping up giving our takeaways from the conference and thanking everyone involved etc. It really was a great conference and my summary here doesn't really do it any justice at all. I will definitely be attending future Drupal Pivot conferences.

My action

We were encouraged to commit to a specific action off the back of the conference, and I think as a lead engineer rather than a pure business owner I'm going to try to push into the AI and Drupal stuff and try to blog/vlog more about it and thus provide a bit more leadership around using agentic AI to get Drupal sites built and maintained.