Feature
The Gist
- Customer-first architecture: A customer-centric design ensures your DX stack supports meaningful, personalized interactions at every touchpoint.
- Modularity is key: A composable and microservices-based stack provides the agility needed to adapt quickly to market changes and customer demands.
- Future-proof with AI and ML: Integrating AI and machine learning enhances personalization, predictive analytics and automation.
As we approach 2025, the digital experience (DX) environment is evolving faster than ever, causing businesses to rethink and rebuild their technological foundations. Architecting a future-ready DX stack isn't just about adopting the latest technologies — it's about creating an agile, scalable infrastructure that can adapt to emerging trends and shifting customer expectations.
In this article, we explore how to design a DX stack that not only meets today's demands but also positions a business for success in the years ahead.
Introduction to the 2025 Digital Landscape
Customer-centricity in business today drives both innovation and adaptation.
Jim Compton, director of change management, Tech, at Lionbridge, a translation and localization solutions provider, told CMSWire that customer-centrism will always win the day as it employs the most important technology of all: practiced empathy.
"If a company genuinely cares about the best interests of their customers and is obsessively committed to serving them as individuals, that company’s tech stack will naturally reflect and support those values," said Compton.
Today's consumers demand hyper-personalized interactions across all digital channels, pushing businesses to not only adopt new technologies but also rethink their foundational infrastructures. In this type of environment, a robust DX stack becomes essential for delivering the engaging experiences that differentiate companies from one another.
Core Components of a Future-Ready DX Stack
When businesses begin to approach the idea of creating a future-ready DX stack, there are a vast number of options and variables to consider.
Sumeet Gupta, leader of FTI Consulting’s digital and AI transformation practice, told CMSWire that the essential needs will vary by the business and the industry sector.
"We don’t recommend businesses buy anything based on features or components,” said Gupta. “They should understand what their full customer journey is, the touchpoints where they interact with the customer and the moments that really matter to those customers and make a material difference from them in their engagement with the business.”
Gupta suggested that once brands understand this journey properly, and the economic value they as a business can derive from improving those customer moments, they must architect the product and service experience and the underlying stack to service those needs.
“In other words, building a personalized customer-centric experience whatever that may be for a company’s unique business is the only essential component and a cornerstone for building competitive advantage," Gupta said.
Related Article: Mastering the Digital Experience Tech Stack for 2025
DX Stacks and Cloud Computing Readiness
That said, a cloud-native infrastructure is an essential element of a future-ready DX stack, offering scalability and flexibility to adjust resources rapidly as demands change. Using cloud services ensures consistent performance and the ability to handle traffic spikes without traditional hardware limitations.
Conor Egan, VP of product at Contentstack, a headless CMS provider, told CMSWire that cloud-native solutions are designed to leverage the scalability of cloud infrastructure, enhancing resilience and flexibility within the cloud environment. Three cloud deployment models are often used:
- Public Clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP): Cost-effective with virtually limitless scalability, sharing resources while maintaining data isolation.
- Private Clouds: Dedicated environments for one organization, providing greater control and enhanced security — ideal for industries with strict compliance requirements.
- Hybrid Clouds: Combine public and private elements, balancing scalability and security to optimize workloads based on specific needs.
Microservices, APIs and Composability
Adopting a microservices architecture breaks applications into independent services that can be developed, deployed and scaled separately, enhancing agility and allowing teams to work concurrently. This modularity supports continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), leading to faster releases and easier maintenance.
An API-first design is also essential for modernizing the DX stack, particularly when integrated into a composable architecture. By prioritizing robust APIs, businesses ensure that services are accessible, modular and can communicate effectively. This approach not only promotes integration and interoperability across various platforms but also enables businesses to connect with third-party services.
Sara Faatz, director of technology, community relations at Progress, a software development company, told CMSWire that the only way to architect a future-ready DX stack is to take a composable and modular approach to development and have a solid API strategy.
"With that, regardless of what actual components you integrate, you will have flexibility and scalability built into your foundation,” said Faatz. “Making changes and modernizing becomes exponentially easier when you don’t have to re-imagine your tech stack with every innovation."
A composable architecture allows companies to combine best-in-class services and tools. API gateways and management platforms further support this ecosystem by monitoring performance, controlling access and analyzing usage.
Egan reiterated the importance of composable systems for personalization, improved performance and easy third-party integrations.
"For example, with personalization, businesses can integrate AI-driven engines, enabling them to tailor shopping experiences across different customer segments," said Egan. "A composable architecture also allows businesses to improve their performance by scaling individual segments like search or checkout as needed, speeding up the site during busy times."
Implementing advanced data management solutions is crucial for harnessing big data and real-time analytics. Platforms such as Apache Kafka and Apache Spark process large datasets in real time, providing immediate insights for informed decision-making. This enables businesses to react swiftly to changing customer behaviors and market trends.
Artificial Intelligence Integrations Into the DX Stack
Egan suggested that to ensure that a company’s infrastructure is meeting evolving customer expectations, the business must be open to embracing new technologies and integrating the most up-to-date systems into its tech stack. Integrating AI and ML into the DX stack enhances capabilities such as personalization, predictive analytics and intelligent automation. AI algorithms analyze customer data to deliver personalized content and recommendations, improving engagement and conversion rates. ML models detect patterns and trends, enabling businesses to anticipate customer needs and tailor offerings accordingly.
AI-driven automation tools, including Intelligent Process Automation (IPA), streamline repetitive tasks such as data entry and customer support interactions, reducing errors.
Gupta said if your business is increasingly using AI-driven personalization, the experience layer must be designed in a granular way to allow for dynamic interface adaptability across all channels.
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“The API layer must be able to support AI-driven workloads and in the future autonomous AI agents in a well-orchestrated, low latency manner,” said Gupta. “Lastly, deploying any kind of AI utility is critically dependent on a mature enterprise data layer that provides ready access to accurate data that often needs to be stitched across multiple application systems.”
In addition to these layers, Gupta said building a shared services AI foundation is important for quick reuse and deployment of new AI use cases and agents across products.
“Architecting in this layered, modular way allows for separation of concerns, delivery agility, scalability and extensibility in the future,” said Gupta. “Deploying IoT and edge computing require additional considerations around a) ingesting and processing high-frequency data streams and b) bandwidth needs for the specific edge/IoT use case and h/w deployed.”
Related Article: Will Contentful's Acquisition of Ninetailed Disrupt DX Software Market?
Strategies for Architecting the 2025 DX Stack
The first step in building a future-ready DX stack is to thoroughly evaluate one’s current infrastructure. This comprehensive assessment involves analyzing existing technologies, systems and processes to identify strengths, weaknesses and gaps. By understanding where the current infrastructure falls short, one can prioritize areas that need improvement or modernization.
Aligning Objectives with Business Goals
Setting clear objectives aligned with business goals is crucial. Define what one aims to achieve with the new DX stack — enhancing customer experience, improving scalability, increasing efficiency or encouraging innovation. These objectives will guide the decision-making process and ensure that every component of the DX stack contributes to overarching business strategies. Having measurable goals also allows a brand to track progress and demonstrate the value of its investments.
Designing a Customer-Centric DX Stack
A successful DX stack is built around the needs and expectations of customers. Prioritize customer-centric design by mapping out the customer journey to understand how users interact with the brand’s products or services across various touchpoints. This insight helps brands identify pain points, opportunities for improvement and areas where technology can enhance the user experience.
“Humans use software,” said Faatz. “They are the ones engaging with your digital experience. If you do not take a customer-centric approach to designing your stack, you are leaving money on the table.”
Incorporating UX/UI Best Practices
Implementing UX/UI best practices is also essential for creating engaging and intuitive interfaces. Brands should focus on accessibility, responsiveness and personalization to cater to diverse user preferences and devices, in addition to regularly gathering customer feedback and using analytics to inform design decisions. By building the DX stack around the customer, a brand not only improves satisfaction but also builds loyalty and drives growth.
Leveraging DevOps and Agile for Continuous Improvement
Embracing DevOps and Agile methodologies creates a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement. DevOps breaks down silos between development and operations teams, encouraging them to work together throughout the software development lifecycle. This collaboration leads to faster deployment times, reduced errors and more reliable releases.
Agile methodologies emphasize flexibility, iterative development and responsiveness to change. By adopting Agile practices, teams can adapt quickly to evolving requirements and customer feedback. Implementing CI/CD pipelines automates the testing and deployment processes, ensuring that new features and updates are delivered efficiently and consistently. Together, DevOps and Agile methodologies enhance a brand's ability to swiftly innovate and respond to market demands.
Investing in Talent and Skill Development
The success of a DX stack hinges on the expertise of a brand’s team. Investing in talent and skill development is essential to keep pace with emerging technologies. Businesses must provide training and professional development opportunities for existing staff to learn new technologies, tools and methodologies relevant to the current digital environment and more specifically, components of the 2025 DX stack.
Overcoming Challenges in DX Stack Modernization
One of the primary obstacles in DX stack modernization is dealing with legacy components that carry technical debt and hinder innovation. These outdated systems are often deeply embedded in business operations, making them difficult to replace or integrate with newer technologies. Integration, in particular, poses a significant challenge, as legacy systems often lack the flexibility needed to seamlessly connect with modern platforms.
To manage these challenges, brands can gradually phase out legacy components by prioritizing those that pose the most significant limitations or risks. This step-by-step approach minimizes disruption and allows for testing and adjustments along the way.
Addressing Integration Challenges in the DX Stack
Compton said that integration remains a unique challenge, even in the context of supportive technologies such as integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) and distributed system monitoring.
“Systems are typically only as strong as the weakest link, and component providers may not be equally mature when it comes to interoperability,” said Compton. “It’s therefore mission-critical to choose partners who are philosophically aligned on the fundaments of interoperability, API access, open standards and global orientation.”
Additionally, middleware solutions or developing APIs can enable legacy systems to communicate with new technologies, though integration can still be complicated. Implementing an API layer, for instance, may allow a legacy CRM system to interface with modern cloud-based services, facilitating data sharing and process automation without requiring a complete system overhaul. However, ensuring smooth integration between systems remains a key hurdle that businesses must address to fully modernize their DX stack.
Securing Budget and Organizational Support for DX Stack Modernization
Budget limitations are often a significant challenge in DX stack modernization, but securing investment hinges on demonstrating clear value to stakeholders. To build a compelling business case, it's important to highlight how modernization will generate long-term benefits such as revenue growth, increased efficiency or cost reductions. Supporting the case with data and financial projections can help show that the long-term gains outweigh the initial expenses.
Securing organizational support is crucial for the success of DX stack modernization. Building consensus across all levels requires clear communication of the benefits, both for the company’s strategic goals and for individual departments. Demonstrating how modernization efforts will improve outcomes — such as improved customer satisfaction rates or faster product development — can help to alleviate potential resistance.
Engaging stakeholders early by involving key team members in the planning process and soliciting their input builds a sense of ownership. This collaborative approach not only promotes alignment but also helps ensure a smoother transition by reducing resistance to change.
Tackling User Adoption Issues in the DX Stack
Asif Rehmani, CEO at VisualSP, a digital adoption platform provider, told CMSWire that the biggest challenge in digital transformation isn’t the tech itself, it is making sure people know how to use it effectively.
"One thing I see often is businesses investing heavily in their digital transformation stack, but they underestimate how hard it can be to get users to actually adopt the new tools,” said Rehmani, who is a CMSWire Contributor. “Without buy-in, all that investment goes to waste. We can’t talk about a future-ready DX stack without addressing the elephant in the room: user adoption.”
Rehmani emphasized that you can have the most advanced tools, but if they’re not easy for people to integrate into their workflows, they won’t get used.
Jason Seeba, CMO of Session AI, an in-session AI platform provider, told CMSWire that as more businesses integrate AI into their DX stack, they must ensure that they are able to employ the latest models to stay current and meet customer expectations.
“It’s critical that companies are aware of the state of AI and the regular improvements in models, and are easily able to compare services among competing brands,” said Seeba. “Switching costs are low. If customers see that your competitor’s AI solutions are more advanced and more capable than yours, they will adjust their behavior accordingly.”
