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This year’s Digiday Technology Awards finalists reflect an industry adapting to a rapidly changing digital landscape, with AI-ready infrastructure, first-party data, privacy and operational efficiency emerging as defining priorities. 

Across publishing, commerce and advertising, technology leaders are rethinking the systems that underpin digital experiences and finding new ways to make those systems more responsive to both evolving consumer behavior and the demands of AI-driven discovery.

WordPress earned a finalist spot in the Best Content Management System category for its WordPress VIP platform. The platform is helping organizations rethink the role of the CMS as AI reshapes how audiences discover information. In partnership with Pew Research Center, WordPress VIP transformed Pew’s CMS into infrastructure designed for machine readability and attribution, making its research easier for AI systems to discover and interpret. The work demonstrated how the CMS is evolving beyond a publishing tool into a strategic foundation for AI-driven discovery, development and content operations.

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Publishers aren’t the only parties impacted by a ramp-up of traffic from AI scrapers, agents and common-or-garden bots. But while some marketers consider the AI influx a net benefit, others are having to rebuild their digital marketing strategies to keep out bad bots.

Together, automated agents and bots now account for more than half of all web requests, according to Cloudflare. For media companies concerned their content is being scraped and regurgitated by LLM tools, that’s a development without much upside. At some brands it’s seen as a plus.

“We’re less interested in blocking automated traffic than in classifying it,” said Chad Keller, co-founder of Mellow Sleep, a direct-to-consumer pillow brand. “AI assistants are already sending us traffic that converts several times better than our site average. The blunt instrument of blocking every non-human agent would cost us more than it saves.”

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