CX Decoded Podcast
July 8, 2026
SEASON 5, EPISODE 9
On this episode of CX Decoded, Sanity CEO and co-founder Magnus Hillestad joins Dom Nicastro to unpack why he thinks the CMS industry has been solving the wrong problem for a decade. Hillestad explains why content needs to be treated as core business infrastructure rather than a marketing feature, why terms like "headless CMS" undersell what companies actually need, and how real-time, machine-readable content is becoming a requirement now that AI agents are reading, writing and distributing it alongside humans.
Hillestad also breaks down what he's seeing in AEO, why velocity is the top reason companies leave legacy platforms, and what he expects from 2026 as agent orchestration becomes a bigger part of how content operations get built. The episode closes with the surprising story behind the Sanity name.
Inside Our Conversation
Magnus Hillestad, CEO and co-founder of Sanity, joined CX Decoded to explain why he thinks content management has been aimed at the wrong problem for years, and what changes now that AI agents are entering the picture.
Content as Infrastructure, Not a Feature
Hillestad's core argument is architectural. Businesses need software that models their own logic, not a vendor's predefined workflow. "You should have software that shapes your business logic," he said, adding that separating content from design is what actually lets a company distribute the same content across channels without rebuilding it each time. "Design is a rendering concern, while content is the actual thing you want to store," he said, pointing to a map as the simplest example: store the geolocation and zoom level, not a static image.
Agents Need the Same Things Developers Do
Asked what's changed fastest, Hillestad pointed to who's actually using the platform. Developers, and increasingly non-developers, are building with Sanity's APIs and MCP server to let AI tools manage content directly.
"That's exactly the same thing as agents need," he said, describing skills, command-line interfaces and structured feedback loops as now essential, not optional. He said Sanity's own MCP server now includes a tool for agents to report friction back to the team automatically.