Sanity CEO and co-founder Magnus Hillestad joins Dom Nicastro on the Digital Experience Show to make the case that content management has outgrown its marketing-only roots. Hillestad explains why he avoids industry buzzwords like "experiences" and "headless CMS," why legacy platforms are struggling to keep up, and how Sanity's approach to content as machine-readable, real-time infrastructure is fueling a surge of new users, developers and, increasingly, AI agents.
The conversation also digs into AEO and what actually helps brands get cited by AI engines, why velocity is the number one reason companies leave monolithic platforms, and what Hillestad expects 2026 to bring as agent orchestration becomes a bigger part of how content gets built and managed. He closes with the origin story behind the Sanity name itself.
Host
Guest
Dom Nicastro
Magnus Hillestad
Inside Our Conversation
Table of Contents
- The Content Problem Isn't a Marketing Problem
- On AEO, There's No Silver Bullet
- Building for Agents, Not Just Marketers
- What to Call the Next Era of CMS
The Gist
- Customer and dollar momentum. Sanity closed an $85 million Series C roughly a year ago and has seen new-user signups climb from 20,000 a month in December to an expected 50,000 around May of this year.
- Evolving content management needs. Hillestad argues legacy digital experience platforms and headless CMS tools were built for marketing teams, not for the broader content operations businesses now need.
- The emergence of the agents. He says 2026 will be the year of agent orchestration, with content platforms serving as the backend agents read from and write to.
Editor's note: Listen to this show on the go in audio podcast form on CX Decoded.
Magnus Hillestad, CEO and co-founder of Sanity, thinks the content management industry has been asking the wrong question for years — and he's not shy about saying so.
In this interview with CMSWire on The Digital Experience show by CMSWire TV, Hillestad laid out his case for why legacy CMS platforms are struggling to keep pace, why he avoids much of the industry's own vocabulary and what he thinks businesses actually need from their content infrastructure now that AI agents are entering the picture.
The Content Problem Isn't a Marketing Problem
Hillestad's pitch starts with a complaint about the industry he's in.
"The content problem is not an isolated marketing problem," he said, arguing that CMS platforms have spent years boxed in as marketing-centric tools. He's not a fan of the vocabulary that came with it, either — including "headless CMS." "I think headless CMS is a very reductive term," he said. "It's really just about providing APIs to JavaScript builds, which is limited innovation. Good, but limited innovation."
He's similarly allergic to "experiences." Sanity calls itself a content operating system instead, a distinction Hillestad said matters because content operations spans far more than marketing sites — a point that shows up in Sanity's customer list, which includes Morning Brew, Axios, Politico, Semaphore and Complex, all of whom use the platform to power everything from newsletters to events to commerce.
Why Companies Are Leaving Monoliths
Migration off legacy systems comes down to one thing, Hillestad said: "Velocity," and the ability to build and automate business logic without waiting on a vendor's predefined workflow. A majority of Sanity's customers migrate from monolithic platforms, though a growing share now come from other headless CMS tools that still limit customization and agentic use.
| Old Model | Sanity's Pitch |
|---|---|
| Marketing-centric, point-and-click workflows | Freestyle content model tied to actual business logic |
| Page-based publishing | Structured, machine-readable content distributed anywhere |
| Built for web managers | Built for developers, non-developers and AI agents alike |
On AEO, There's No Silver Bullet
Where publishers should be investing as answer-engine optimization reshapes discovery isn't one thing, Hillestad said.
"Agents in AEO are still reading websites," meaning fundamentals like crawlability still matter. He separated the problem into two parts — what a company says about itself, and what everyone else says about it — noting that Sanity itself buys software to track external citations.
"It's partly as SEO always was about getting your fundamentals right and how you're delivering," he said, warning that generative engine optimization rules will keep shifting as LLM providers respond to people gaming the system, the same as we've seen with SEO.
The Harder Question for Media
For publishers specifically, Hillestad was candid about the tension: once an LLM cites a journalist's writing directly, "it kind of in many cases takes away the need" for the reader to visit the original. His advice wasn't a fix so much as a reframe — media companies need products beyond the article itself, from events to data products to newsletters. "The 74's main traffic is on their email newsletters," he said, describing it as a model few would have predicted.
Building for Agents, Not Just Marketers
The fastest-growing part of Sanity's business is agentic use: developers, and increasingly non-developers, using Sanity's APIs and MCP server to let AI tools build and manage content directly. "We passed more than a million people on the platform, 100,000 monthly active users," Hillestad said, describing signups climbing from 20,000 new users in December to an expected 50,000 in May (the time of our interview).
Weighed against bigger, more established names — Adobe, Sitecore, Optimizely — Hillestad declined to take the bait. "We're obsessed with our customers and not with our competitors," he said.
What to Call the Next Era of CMS
Asked what an analyst firm might name the category Sanity is trying to build, Hillestad passed on the chance to coin a term. "I'm glad I'm not with Gartner and IDC and Forrester to name that," he said.
