Elizabeth Maxson reveals how AI-driven composable content empowers marketers to scale personalization and spark creativity in 2025.
In a marketing landscape reshaped by artificial intelligence and composable content platforms, Elizabeth Maxson, Chief Marketing Officer at Contentful, offers a compelling vision for the future of enterprise marketing. As companies pivot away from traditional monolithic systems, Contentful is helping brands harness agility, scale, and personalization through its innovative approach to content orchestration.
In this exclusive interview, Maxson explores how marketers can strategically leverage AI to close the personalization gap, rethink customer experience in an age of zero-click search, and balance data-driven insights with creative risk-taking. With real-world examples from leading enterprises, she reveals how composable CMS and AI are not just tools but essential drivers of marketing innovation and operational resilience in 2025.
Full interview;
What’s the biggest advantage for marketers embracing composability and AI-driven personalization in 2025?
The biggest strategic advantage is agility without compromise. Composable platforms allow marketers to orchestrate content across multiple channels and geographies, while AI tools help deliver personalization at scale. We just released a new research report based on surveys and interviews with hundreds of senior marketing leaders, and we found that while 89% of marketing teams are using AI, only 25% are applying it to audience segmentation and personalization.
Contentful blends composability and AI so that marketers can close that gap. Our platform helps marketers adapt quickly, reuse modular content, and consistently and confidently deliver personalized experiences at enterprise scale.
How should marketing teams adapt customer experience strategies to stay visible in the era of zero-click search and AI discovery?
Even in the era of AI-powered discovery and zero-click search, marketing fundamentals haven’t changed: we’re still in the business of telling stories that resonate and build trust. What has changed is how customers discover and engage with those stories. Search engines and LLMs now surface answers directly, which means our content needs to be more structured, conversational, and optimized for generative engine discovery. The good news is that strong SEO fundamentals — clear structure, relevant keywords, and consistent updates — already give brands a strong foundation. From there, it’s about adapting for AI discovery by using our customers’ language and leaning into the insights only our brand can provide.
At the same time, we need to evolve how we define success. Traditional traffic metrics will decline, but the customers who arrive are more qualified because they’ve already done their research in AI results — and they’re converting at higher rates. That means the KPIs that matter most are conversion, pipeline impact, and share of voice within AI and search results. Tracking branded searches and direct traffic also helps us understand whether our efforts are creating demand across channels.
So the strategy is threefold: first, ensure solid SEO fundamentals; second, keep leaning into what only our brand can uniquely provide — insights, perspectives, and storytelling; and third, measure success through impact and visibility rather than raw traffic. That’s how we stay discoverable, trusted, and differentiated in the age of AI discovery.
How do you balance data-driven decisions with fostering creative risk-taking in marketing teams?
We call this evidence-based creativity, and it’s a must-have skill set for modern marketers. Our findings show that data analysis and interpretation are now the top-ranked skills for marketers. This tells us that marketers are expected to be both creative and analytical. For me, it’s about giving data and creativity equal weight. I encourage my teams to use data as a compass, not as a constraint. Data allows us to see what’s resonating, but creativity sparks ideas people remember. I want my teams to take creative risks while validating ideas through testing frameworks, such as A/B testing, and customer feedback loops. This balance ensures campaigns are imaginative and anchored in measurable outcomes.
How does Contentful’s AI integration ensure scalable, accurate personalization in multi-language and regulated industries?
AI-powered personalization is only as effective as the guardrails around it. Our regional data found that 58% of EMEA marketers test AI selectively with a defined plan, and nearly a third emphasize governance skills like brand voice, compliance, and quality standards. At Contentful, we’ve built composability and native AI into the platform so teams can scale personalization across languages and markets while ensuring consistency, compliance, and brand integrity. For example, Biogen, a leading biotechnology company, uses our platform to unify its content strategy and has dramatically streamlined translation workflows to support roughly 1500 pages published per year, across 30 languages. Tools like Contentful are critical in regulated industries where accuracy isn’t optional, and teams need to publish faster, more consistently, and at scale.
How do headless CMS and composable architectures help enterprises deliver omnichannel experiences with AR, video, and conversational AI?
Headless and composable systems are the foundation for meeting audiences across new formats. By separating content from the front end, marketers can create once and deploy everywhere. For example, a marketer can design a single piece of content and deploy it across different channels such as AR and video (and whatever else comes next!) without reinventing the wheel every time. This approach helps brands adopt new platforms faster without worrying about creating inconsistencies in the customer experience.
How does Contentful ensure quality and trust in AI-generated content, and what guardrails should marketers use?
AI is valuable not just because of speed but because it gives marketers the freedom to focus on tasks only humans can do. Our research shows that 42% of marketers define campaign success by content quality and consistency, which tells us that trust and creativity can’t be outsourced to machines. We recommend giving AI clear guardrails while keeping humans at the center of judgment and reviews. Marketers are already tackling the issue, with 45% of organizations offering AI training. At Contentful, we encourage teams to use AI as a creative accelerator for drafting, generating options, or testing variations, while keeping humans in the loop to make the final judgment on quality, compliance, and brand voice.
