When AI meets humanity: a Driesnote that left a lasting mark

DrupalCon Szeged 2008 was my first. It combined travel, new connections and a packed programme, including the Driesnote. Being among nearly a thousand people with shared enthusiasm for digital development created a powerful sense of purpose. Having attended Adobe events before, this felt different. It marked a turning point.

Many DrupalCons followed. Paris 2009, my first sponsor booth. Munich 2012, announcing what was then Europe’s largest Drupal agency. I focused on Europe, as my work was based there. In 2018, the Drupal Association changed how DrupalCon Europe was organised.

Since then, I have held many leadership roles. Both in digital agencies as well as in Drupal. As a member of the board of directors of the Drupal Association as well serving on the DrupalCon Regional and Global Executive Committees, I feel great responsibility for Drupal. For me, leadership is about enabling others to develop and lead in their own way. Dries Buytaert, as Drupal’s founder, carries that responsibility for a global community and its wider ecosystem.

I have been closely involved in this ecosystem, from board roles to organising events like Drupaljam and the International Splash Awards. It has been professionally and personally rewarding.

Imre Gmelig Meijling

Driesnote

Dries’ Driesnote has been a constant, reflecting progress, challenges and direction. Not every edition has landed equally well. At times, shifts in focus led to uncertainty. Yet the community continues to evolve and stay solid, with new contributors joining each year.

The Driesnote is however an inspirational and motivational foundation across all DrupalCons. Dries includes links to the place or country where he is at. And of course time specific highlights since the last Driesnote are also included. The Driesnote is however, every time, meant to inspire, to lift morale, to boost excitement and give people enough inspiration to take home and last for months to come.

Back to Chicago. Drupal CMS has just reached version 2.0, while artificial intelligence is advancing at a rapid pace. These two areas are now converging through initiatives such as Drupal AI, which focuses on integrating AI capabilities directly into the Drupal platform.

Arguably there are many exciting content management systems out there like Storyblock and Contentful. New technologies like ReactJS and NextJS have attracted a new wave of developers. But no such communities are as longstanding as Drupal. And Drupal CMS has many exciting new features that will blow the competition out of the water. 

Drupal Canvas allows content creators and markets to deliver compelling brand stories fast and as easy as those new kids on the block. Drupal AI allows contentmakers to prompt for the content they need in natural language based on their brandbooks and with the context that AI needs to deliver high quality content tailored to needs. 

Last week’s Driesnote was a hallmark. It was a testimony to Drupal’s resilience and the excitement Drupal brings in the AI age. Drupal celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. The Chicago Driesnote heralded the massive opportunities Drupal has chosen to embrace. It reinvigorated the spirit and the power of the community that is now laser focussed on delivering open source digital content management tools that people are unlikely to outgrow. Here’s what happened that made this Driesnote so special.

Audacious engineering

In the 1850s and 1860s, Chicago undertook an audacious engineering feat to lift its downtown area 4 to 14 feet to install a proper sewer system and alleviate drainage issues. Thousands of buildings, including huge hotels and business blocks, were raised simultaneously on hydraulic jackscrews, often with occupants inside, effectively transforming a swampy city into a modern, higher-grade metropolis. That wasn’t done overnight. And while it was going in, business went on as usual. That is an incredible feat and hard to wrap your head around. Likewise, Drupal has rebuilt its foundations too, a few times so, over the course of 25 years. 

Dries shared a personal story from his dormitory to becoming a dad, defending his thesis and releasing the first versions of Drupal. All the while starting Acquia and leading the project forward. Under all this pressure, he one day collapsed in the street. He had physically passed out in the middle of the day, while walking his dog, from the pressure of keeping it all together. 

His mother had asked him: “This Drupal thing, is that really for you?”. For a while Dries considered to let go of the things that were pressuring the most, including Drupal. He considered working for a bank. His dormitory stationary, his matrix poster and his 2 monitors would be on a desk. He would then wear a chequered pullover, as illustrated by his AI-generated slide, picturing Dries in this possible future.

He decided that would not be enough for him. He wanted to see Drupal take off. He asked for help. Which is sometimes one of the hardest things to do for people. Dries knew where he wanted to go. He went to ask leaders he admired for help including Tim O Reilly, Chris Dobina, Martin Mickos (MySQL) and Linus Torvalds. He didn’t expect anyone would respond to his call. To Dries’s surprise he got an extensive reply back from Linus, with many insights and useful suggestions. 

That’s when Dries became an accidental leader. His PhD hadn’t prepared him to learn how to manage people, how to lead an open source organization, or how to do fundraising. This was all uncharted territory. His journey resonates with me. And likely with many of us, who have become accidental leaders. Because we have rolled into it by being passionate about Drupal and willing to help others. Which is not to say it will not give you sleepless nights. What to say to people to inspire, what to do to lead. But getting help along the way, at some point is what we should face and learn to do.

The ones that help us

Dries asked the 1.300 people that were in the room to take ten seconds and think about all the people that have helped each one of us. Everyone felt the moment of silence, of gratitude for the names of people popping up in our heads. Of the moments of hardship, of despair, of celebration and of growth, in some way with the help of those other people.

The emotions in the massive continental room of Hilton Honors Chicago were tangible. Dries looked at his watch and stopped the clock. He had to take a brief moment himself when he continued. I have not experienced a Driesnote so personal and touching this one. 

As a result of the things he learned, Dries now makes a habit of asking himself two questions to start the day: “What big problem can I solve?” and “Who can I ask for help?”.

The stable triangle

With everyone’s senses tuned to full reception, Dries dived into the developments around Drupal, AI and the impact this has on the Drupal project. 

For more than 20 years, our ecosystem has rested on a stable triangle: the platform, the agencies that bring Drupal into the real world, and the community that sustains it. This foundation has been remarkably resilient through wave after wave of technological change. But as AI disrupts all three sides simultaneously, we find ourselves in uncharted territory. Driesnote explores exactly how Drupal is rising to meet this moment.

AI

The industry is changing in Drupal's favor. We can now use AI to prototype fast and Drupal with AI to build systems that last. 

Making a beautiful frontend is now far easier. It can literally be done in minutes. Today, this will give many people a feeling of awe but will also give some discomfort. Dries calls upon us to hold on to both feelings. Looking beyond the marvels, content today is often hardcoded by AI, not embedded in structure, like a CMS does. It also lacks governance, compliance and scalability.

The balance between speed and substance is one we must find. Dries underscores AI that belongs in Drupal should be for content creators, not for developers. Tools like Claude move so fast already, this is not where Drupal needs to be competitive. Great content takes a team of content creators, designers, brand experts, developers and SEO and GEO specialists. You need all of these real people. But what would happen if the whole team shows up at the same, instantly. AI does that.

Context Control Center

The Context Control Center is a gamechanger for Drupal, released as beta at DrupalCon Chicago 2026. It will be a differentiator by storing institutional knowledge for websites, apps and digital platforms. But every AI tool that touches your website will benefit  from it too. Context Control Center (CCC in short) will allow content editors to ‘teach’ Drupal about context for content. It will allow you for example to include a brand strategy and language or region-context. All AI operating within Drupal will base its actions on that contextual understanding.

With CCC, you can define clear KPIs that enable the platform to assess one or multiple websites against metrics such as traffic, conversion rates, and digital accessibility standards. It evaluates performance in a structured way, helping content managers focus their efforts where they will have the greatest impact.

The platform provides a prioritised set of recommended actions to improve content quality, ensure alignment with brand guidelines, enhance accessibility, and support stronger conversion outcomes in line with defined KPIs.

For organisations managing hundreds or thousands of pages across multiple sites, this approach can significantly reduce the time required for auditing and optimisation, turning what would typically take days or weeks into a more manageable and continuous process.

Where most content is put together without these fallbacks or it’s rushed because of deadlines, it usually is out there, but missing the target. It fails quietly. CCC will allow websites to watch themselves and offer the humans operating it clear and fast ways to improve. 

The Drupal AI Initiative working on CCC and many other developments are more coordinated than ever before, which is also a great milestone for Drupal. It proves Drupal’s solid CMS’ foundations are ready for the AI era and in fact, is embracing it. It makes Drupal extremely accessible for the enterprise and mid market.

1xINTERNET plays a leading role in the development of Drupal AI and CCC. Dr. Christoph Breidert and Artem Dmitriiev led a practical workshop in which participants learned how to install the Drupal AI module, automate content workflows, and build retrieval augmented generation (RAG) search experiences. The session also created space for attendees to raise detailed questions and explore real use cases. He is a member of the Drupal AI leadership team, serving as Product Manager for Drupal AI.

Also Paul Johnson was on site, as one of the driving forces behind the scenes of open source AI. He has been actively engaging with Drupal leadership, helping to shape ongoing discussions around the future direction of marketing. Joined by fellow leaders from the Drupal AI Initiative he presented at the AI Summit, where he contributed a perspective on AI marketing. Paul is co-organizing the Drupal AI summit in New York City that's coming up in May.

Artem Dmitriiev is involved in many contributions to Drupal. He is exchanging ideas with lead developers at DrupalCon Chicago and involved in architectural decisions for the upcoming roadmap of AI in Drupal.

Product

At DrupalCon Chicago, Drupal CMS 2.1 was launched. Drupal CMS is the ready-to-use CMS with Drupal AI pre-configured. It’s tagline states: easier than ever to start, impossible to outgrow. Drupal Core is the alternative version of Drupal (Drupal CMS is based on it) with 11 as its current version. Development in Core is also not standing still. Its latest release now has 50% less database queries for uncached pages. Then the Drupal Marketplace, offering designers, developers and service provides a way to sell templates now holds 11 templates, six months after its inception at DrupalCon Vienna 2025.

Drupal agencies

The Marketplace is an important instrument for Drupal to drive business to the agencies that use Drupal to create websites with it. In many cases they provide time for people to contribute to the open source ecosystem, the creators and the makers. 

Nowadays, AI is commoditizing production. The time to develop code can be decreased, sometimes by tenfold. Therefore it is not production but creativity and strategy where the value is being added. You will need people to do it. Expertise is not being replaced, but it’s being amplified. The value chain is moving from building to defining strategy. Organisations who will get this right, with the use of AI, will outlive the ones that don’t. 

Marketing

Dries concludes by announcing yet another initiative. While having a great product is great, it’s not enough. It also needs a great story. The Drupal Growth Initiative calls upon the Drupal community to do what it can do best: collaborate in making a difference for Drupal. Like Drupal CMS and the Drupal Market Place, both recent achievements were done in mere months, Dries calls upon the community of agencies and professionals to support the Drupal Growth Initiative and support Drupal’s marketing efforts in global joint effort. 1xINTERNET is leading this for Drupal AI. Agencies and people alike can step up and contribute time and skills to highlight the wonderful Drupal showcases and stories that are out there.

Ready to leverage your content with AI? 

Watch the Driesnote yourself to see more about the exciting developments for content editors and marketers. Do you want to know what Drupal AI can do for your website? Drop us a line and we’ll be happy to show you what we’ve been up to.