Key takeaways

• Support for Kentico Xperience 13 ends on 31 December 2026. Sites keep running after that, but Kentico stops all support, maintenance and patches from 1 January 2027.
• A Kentico slide at Connection 2026 showed about 60% of its customers now on Xperience by Kentico, and about 10% on Kentico SaaS.
• Kentico's view of AI: agents take the repetitive work, the agency does the difficult work such as integration and migration, and the client still owns the goal, the approval and the decision.
• GPT Group unified 17 sites on Xperience by Kentico. A national campaign that used to be loaded onto 16 sites one at a time now goes live with one approval.
• Kentico named Dapth the winner of the Growth Partner Award at the Kentico Partner Awards 2026.

What was Kentico Connection 2026?

Kentico Connection APAC brought Kentico's team, partners and customers into one room at the Sofitel Sydney Wentworth on 15 October 2026: a keynote, a customer story from GPT Group, a panel on AI, and the Kentico Partner Awards to finish. Ben De Jonge and I were there for Dapth.

We have built our partnership with Kentico over the past decade. Days like this are how we catch up with the team, get across what is coming on the roadmap and bring it home to our team and our clients. This is that update.

Where does AI really help a website team?

I joined Kentico CEO Dominik Pinter and Joe Peschardt from Devotion on a panel called Doing More With the Team You Have: Where AI Really Helps. Kentico's Oldrich Januska moderated, with Andy Thompson from Luminary and Isabella Villani from Exceed Global alongside us.

Here is where I landed. AI is already in the room. It doesn't change the job that matters. Decide what you want the website to achieve. Define the work properly. Have a person who owns the result.

Kentico made the same point in its keynote with a slide called Who does what. Its closing line was "The line moves. It doesn't disappear." Here is how it split the work:

Migration sits with the agency. That is the job we do. And I agree with the rest of it. The client still owns the goal, the approval and the decision. No tool changes that.

What is on Kentico's roadmap?

Kentico said its roadmap is organised around customer outcomes, not a feature list. It grouped the work into four:

• Better experiences and stronger connections.
• Faster builds and happier developers.
• Smarter content, automated at scale.
• Trust that is ready for what is next.

Under those sit the practical things: faster editing with fewer handoffs, the right content for the right visitor, integrations that fit the stack you already have, and governance that scales with you. That is the right way round. Buyers don't want a feature. They want what the feature gets them.

What can you learn from GPT Group's move to Xperience by Kentico?

GPT Group told the room why it stayed with Kentico. It tested the market first. The commercial case stacked up. The interface worked for both its central team and its shopping centre teams. And the surprise was speed: how quickly content now goes from idea to live.

Sally Sayegh, GPT's Digital Marketing Operations Executive, gave the advice I would put on every migration brief: spend the time to understand what the website does for your business today, and what you want it to achieve.

GPT unified 17 sites on Xperience by Kentico. A national campaign used to be loaded onto 16 sites, one at a time. Now it is updated once with shared content and goes live with one approval. Retailers submit their own content through the GPT Connect portal, and James Nguyen from GPT said it changed the job for both admins and retailers.

GPT also shared its results: 31% more organic sessions, 31% more engaged sessions, 16% more users and 18% more offer views. Those are GPT's numbers, shown on the day.

When does Kentico 13 support end, and what does it mean for you?

Support for Kentico Xperience 13 ends on 31 December 2026. Kentico's support lifecycle page says that from 1 January 2027 it stops all support, maintenance and patches, and that any use after that date is at your own risk. Its slide at Connection showed about 60% of its customers now on Xperience by Kentico, and about 10% on Kentico SaaS.

Your site won't switch off on 1 January. It just stops being supported. That is a risk you can plan for, if you start now. Three honest questions show where you stand:

If any answer is "not really", you are not badly run. You have just never been properly supported. GPT's story is the pattern to copy: compare your options, make the commercial case, understand what the site does for you today, then move with a plan. Our Kentico 13 migration page sets out how we run it.

What is coming in Xperience by Kentico?

The panel question was how AI helps teams do more with what they have. Kentico's answer is in the product. AIRA is Kentico's AI built into the platform, with four agents working from your content, campaigns and customer data:

• Content Strategist checks your structure, taxonomy and messaging against your brand standards.
• SEO and GEO Specialist gets every page ready for search engines and AI discovery, with no developer needed.
• Campaign Manager turns campaign data into briefs, reports and next steps.
• Journey Optimization finds where people drop out and what to change.

Kentico released the suite in January 2026 and reports AIRA customer adoption up 292% in the first half of the year. By default, a person approves before anything is published.

For developers there is KentiCopilot. Kentico's line was that it doesn't just suggest code, it helps do the work: it follows best practice, designs and builds content models, authors components and assembles them into pages, checks pages against the original designs, and helps with upgrades through to marketing automations.

My view: tools like this make a good plan faster. They don't replace having one.

What did Dapth win at Kentico Connection 2026?

Kentico named Dapth the winner of the Growth Partner Award at the Kentico Partner Awards 2026. Also announced on the day: Kentico's Site of the Month for September went to two Dapth projects, City of Mandurah and Complete Home Filtration. We wrote up what those two sites have in common separately.

Thank you to Kentico, to City of Mandurah and Complete Home Filtration for trusting us, and to the Dapth team who built both.

The best part of days like this is the people. On the Friday we rounded off the week at Wakehurst Golf Club with the teams from Kentico, Devotion, Luminary and Zeroseven, and the conversations about clients, opportunities and tenders showed we are all facing similar challenges and moving in the right direction. Partners swapping notes openly beats any sales pitch. That is how this market gets better.

If you are still on Kentico 13 or earlier and you don't have a plan yet, talk to us. We will start with what your site does for you today. You can see more of our work on Xperience by Kentico.

About Dapth

Dapth is your Perth digital consultancy, building connected digital systems from websites and intranets to applications, software, ERP and AI tools. For more than 15 years we have helped WA businesses, government agencies and organisations unlock advantages like streamlined workflows, increased efficiency, cost savings, new revenue and more powerful marketing.

We start with your organisation, not the technology: your users, your operations and your objectives. Then we connect everything across four areas:

• Digital Consultancy: Digital strategy, service design and UI and UX design that map how your customers, people and systems should work together, before anything is built.
• Customer Experience: Websites and digital experience platforms on Xperience by Kentico (Kentico Gold Partner), Sitefinity, Umbraco and Payload CMS, plus ecommerce.
• Employee Experience: Intranets and employee portals on Microsoft SharePoint, and workflow automation that takes the double handling out of everyday work.
• Operational Systems: ERP with Odoo as our primary platform (we are an Odoo partner), plus custom software, apps and the integrations that connect them.