At Digital Experience Assembly (DXA) 2025, Alex Shyba, CTO and Co-founder of Uniform, unveiled a vision for digital experience platforms that transcends traditional approaches. His demonstration showcased how component-based architecture fundamentally reshapes what's possible in digital customer engagement.

"The future of digital experiences isn't about monolithic platforms—it's about composable architectures that empower teams to blend capabilities from diverse sources into seamless customer experiences," Shyba emphasized during his keynote. This transition represents a fundamental market shift, with Gartner forecasting that by 2026, more than 70% of enterprises will move away from traditional DXP suites in favor of modular, composable approaches.

Organizations implementing Uniform report a dramatic acceleration in time to market for new initiatives. Marketing teams can respond to market changes in days rather than months, while technical debt decreases as components update individually without triggering system-wide changes.

The approach dissolves traditional boundaries between technical and marketing teams by creating a common language and shared toolset. Marketers gain autonomy while developers focus on building high-value components rather than implementing repetitive elements, addressing a persistent organizational challenge in digital experience delivery.

Shyba's demonstration revealed how component reusability creates strategic business value beyond technical efficiency. When components move effortlessly between contexts—from websites to mobile apps to conversational interfaces—the return on development investment multiplies dramatically.

During a revealing moment, Shyba showed how components could flow between different projects and brands, automatically adapting to each destination's visual identity. This capability transforms integration timelines from months to days for organizations managing multiple brands or considering acquisitions.

Component inheritance operates as a sophisticated design system that automatically maintains brand consistency. When components move between projects, they instantly adopt the destination's styling rules, enabling changes to propagate across all digital properties simultaneously during rebranding initiatives.

Digital leaders have long struggled with a seemingly irreconcilable tension: providing creative freedom while maintaining brand consistency and technical integrity. Shyba demonstrated how component-based architecture resolves this through contextual governance.

"Think about it as freedom within a framework," Shyba explained, showing how templates could restrict available components to those appropriate for specific contexts. This approach creates guardrails without stifling creativity. Marketing teams gain autonomy to create experiences independently, while technical teams maintain control over the underlying architecture.

The governance model enables organizations to maintain consistent customer experiences across touchpoints even as different teams contribute to the digital ecosystem, creating brand coherence without the bottlenecks typically associated with centralized control.

Rather than implementing a general-purpose AI assistant, Uniform has developed specialized agents optimized for specific domains within the digital experience workflow.

"Specialization allows each agent to excel in its domain rather than creating a generic AI assistant that's adequate at everything but exceptional at nothing," Shyba explained while demonstrating two AI agents: Sage for content creation and SEO, and Scout for analytics and conversion optimization.

These agents' ability to perform concrete platform actions rather than merely generating suggestions distinguishes them. During the demonstration, Scout automatically identified an opportunity to personalize content for coffee enthusiasts, created the personalized variant, and implemented the targeting rules without manual intervention. This evolution from passive tools to active collaborators represents a significant advancement in how AI enhances digital workflows.

Personalization has historically required significant technical infrastructure and specialized expertise. Shyba's demonstration revealed an approach that democratizes these capabilities.

"Enrichments are used for behavioral personalization," Shyba explained. "Think about it as tags for your content. This allows Uniform to personalize based on interest and intent detected by consumers visiting this content." This approach eliminates many technical barriers that have limited personalization adoption, operating without external customer data platforms for basic scenarios.

The cross-channel capabilities were particularly impressive. When a user expressed interest in coffee beans through a conversational shopping assistant, that preference immediately influenced product recommendations on the website, ensuring consistent experiences regardless of how customers engage and addressing the fragmentation that often plagues omnichannel efforts.

Digital experiences have grown wildly complex in recent years. For today's organizations, understanding how various components relate to one another isn't just nice to have—it's become essential for effective management and risk control. Midway through his talk, Shyba wowed the audience with a demo of Uniform's dependency visualization tools, which bring these hidden connections into the light.

"Wouldn't it be awesome to understand all these dependencies, including internal and external content?" he asked, pausing dramatically. The audience leaned forward as he unveiled a striking visualization showing how components connect with their underlying data sources. What made this particularly impressive wasn't just mapping relationships within Uniform itself, but how it extended to track connections across third-party systems. Shyba referred to this holistic view as "the digital supply chain"—a term that resonated with many in attendance.

This kind of visibility is game-changing for businesses with complicated digital ecosystems. It completely flips change management from a reactive scramble to a proactive discipline. Teams can spot ripple effects before they cause problems, not after the fact. In industries heavy with regulations, these tools pay even bigger dividends—they automatically document data lineage throughout user experiences, cutting down compliance headaches while strengthening governance. Several financial services executives were seen furiously taking notes during this part of the presentation.

Shyba showed how the same product recommendation component could appear within a traditional website and a conversational shopping assistant in a striking demonstration. "Here you can see, we're blending generative UI and traditional web UI together," he noted.

By reusing the same components across all touchpoints, teams avoid duplicate work and keep branding consistent. Customers then enjoy seamless journeys on a website, mobile app, or chatting with a bot because context carries over naturally. In today’s world, where people flip between screens and interfaces, this unified approach gives organizations a real edge in delivering cohesive experiences.

Shyba's presentation outlined several practical considerations for executives evaluating digital experience platforms. Moving to component-based architecture demands more than new technology—it requires significant organizational changes. Teams across marketing, design, and development will need different skills and workflows to extract the full value from this architectural approach.

Governance planning should precede implementation rather than follow it. By establishing clear guidelines from the outset, organizations can prevent the fragmentation and inconsistency that sometimes accompany increased flexibility.

Organizations should approach component-based architecture as a journey rather than a destination. The modular nature enables incremental implementation, allowing teams to migrate specific capabilities while maintaining existing systems, reducing risk while accelerating time-to-value.

Shyba's presentation at DXA 2025 transcended typical product showcases, instead painting a compelling vision for the evolution of digital experiences in response to shifting market dynamics. Through practical demonstrations, he illustrated how component-based architecture tackles longstanding business challenges while unlocking entirely new capabilities, effectively providing a strategic compass for organizations charting their course through today's intricate digital terrain.

For leaders, the takeaway couldn’t be simpler: Uniform isn’t offering just another incremental tech upgrade—it’s redefining how companies envision, build, and manage customer interactions from end to end. Organizations that embrace this architecture early will unlock unique capabilities and tangible competitive advantages as the market grows ever more digital.

Wrapping up his presentation to enthusiastic applause, Shyba reflected on the breadth of innovation displayed: "We've shown a lot today. This showcases the latest capabilities that talented people at Uniform have been working on." For forward-thinking business leaders in attendance, these capabilities represented something far more significant than mere technological advancement—they offered a glimpse into an emerging paradigm for digital experience creation that promises unprecedented agility, cross-channel consistency, and market effectiveness in an increasingly complex competitive landscape.

Watch Alex’s full presentation here.