Digital transformation initiatives often encounter a troubling paradox: sophisticated technology failing to deliver promised agility. At Digital Experience Assembly (DXA) 2025, Uniform CEO Lars Petersen highlighted this challenge directly.

“Over the last couple of years, brands have wanted to create performant experiences for their customers," Petersen explained. Many have started by selecting a headless CMS, and then they want to connect this to a modern front end."

Months later, the problem emerges: "Your developers have created all the connections between your content types and your modern frontend; they are essentially stuck in code."

This technical dependency creates a vicious cycle where marketers can't implement new ideas without developer intervention. "Everything requires a developer if you want to change a component. If you get a new creative idea, you go to a developer." This creates a perpetual bottleneck for most organizations as market opportunities pass by unaddressed.

The early promise of headless architecture has delivered mixed results. As Petersen noted, we're witnessing "companies that are having a little bit of headless and MACH regret."

This disillusionment stems from a critical oversight. While headless architectures successfully decouple content from presentation, they often fail to consider who creates and optimizes the experiences themselves. Technical flexibility doesn't automatically translate to organizational agility.

Modern composable DXPs address this by shifting from pure technical decoupling to experience-first architecture. "When we architected uniform," Petersen explained, "we had the business and technical insight about how we go faster. How we empower digital teams with different roles to basically create faster and also be more empowered."

The result is a platform that connects technical capabilities directly to business value through four critical dimensions of experience modeling.

Traditional implementation approaches create what Petersen describes as "stop and go" dynamics between business and developers. This technical bottleneck doesn't just slow progress—it fundamentally limits what organizations can imagine and attempt.

Uniform's approach demonstrates how modern experience modeling introduces visual workspaces that transform collaboration. "This is multi-source visual experience editing," Petersen explained. "You have one tab where you can create delightful experiences for your customers. You can preview it, you can make it go live, and it's focused on optimizing the experiences."

This visual workspace allows non-technical users to create new components by combining design system elements. According to Petersen, users can "simply start with a structure, which could be two columns, and then start placing all the other atoms into the structure."

As Petersen noted, Uniform helps "reduce the amount of code you have to do in any project. There's no need for all this glue code between your content types, all the different connected systems, and your front-end modules. All of that can be done in a few clicks."

This capability fundamentally transforms how quickly organizations can respond to market changes, shifting from quarterly release cycles to continuous experience evolution.

Digital experiences now exist across multiple channels and touchpoints. "One of the biggest issues with CMS these days," Petersen explains, "is that most companies are using either a headless setup or more of a visual, headful setup." Each approach creates significant visibility limitations.

With headless approaches, content creators can't see how their work appears across different presentations. "If you're creating an article, you're looking at a preview showing the article detail page. But what about all the other instances of that article? What about all the cards, all the promotions? What about the mobile app?"

Advanced experience modeling solves this with what Petersen calls "entry previews from all headless content entries," showing "exactly how it looks on the detailed page, all the different components that are using this, but also across different channels."

This comprehensive preview system lets teams "see the full picture every time you create a new content entry." The approach extends to connected systems: "You can also use nested editors with third-party data."

This holistic visibility transforms how organizations maintain brand coherence while adapting to channel-specific requirements—a critical capability as customer journeys span multiple touchpoints.

Customer expectations have evolved beyond static personalization. Modern experiences must adapt to actual needs and intentions in real-time.

Petersen described how effective experiences now adapt to three-layered signals: "You have data that is more profile specific," he explained, including "customer type, orders, any affinity for different product categories." This combines with immediate "visitor context" like location and device.

However, the most powerful dimension is what Petersen calls "in-the-moment intent"—what the customer is trying to accomplish right now. "The better you can tap into that data in real time and use that to optimize the experience," Petersen emphasized, "the more relevant experience you can provide to your customers."

This multidimensional approach transforms optimization from static rules to dynamic responsiveness. Organizations can create experiences that feel intuitively helpful rather than mechanically personalized, adapting not just to who customers are but also to what they're trying to accomplish.

"In optimizing every experience," Petersen outlined, "you have different options. You can create curated tests and curated personalization. You can create more programmatic list recommendations." The approach extends to conversational interfaces where you can "stream in the right products, the right content based on in-the-moment intent, profile, and the context of the user."

Petersen outlined a sophisticated maturity model for practical AI in experience modeling, progressing from basic assistance to transformative capabilities.

Most platforms today offer what he calls "Black Box generative AI," where "you can take any content and then you can run it against models that different vendors provide, but you are not in control." This approach provides limited value and raises concerns about brand consistency.

The next evolution is "composable generative AI," which provides more control and context. "This is where context is provided," Petersen explained, including "your own custom LLM with specific brand tone and voice."

The most transformative approach involves specialized AI agents with domain expertise. Uniform's implementation includes AI agents like Scout, "focused on conversion rate optimization," that can "help you understand data and help you optimize the experience." Their second agent, Sage, concentrates on "content and SEO" optimization.

These specialized capabilities transform the experiences and how teams create them, identifying opportunities and handling routine tasks so human creativity can focus on strategic innovation.

The roadmap extends to "governance for what to look at and when" and eventually to "full, autonomous, authentic AI"—a transformative vision for AI and human collaboration on experience creation.

Experience modeling directly impacts business outcomes across critical dimensions. As Petersen emphasized, "the differentiator that we provide through all of this in Uniform is that we help go faster."

By reducing development dependencies, organizations respond to market shifts with unprecedented agility. Marketing teams can launch new campaigns, optimize existing journeys, and test creative concepts without waiting for development cycles, reducing time to market by 3-5x.

Beyond speed, experience modeling drives significant improvements in customer engagement, with organizations typically seeing 15-22% higher conversion rates. Teams implementing visual experience modeling complete significantly more initiatives with the same resources, breaking the tradeoff between quality and throughput.

Perhaps most importantly, advanced experience modeling maintains brand coherence across an expanding ecosystem of touchpoints, ensuring consistent brand expression while adapting to the specific requirements of each channel.

Rather than pursuing "clean slate" replatforming, Petersen advocates for incremental modernization: "Don't do a clean slate, a big replatform replace project—do increments, and modernization. Start with the pieces you already have in place, and then incrementally make those better."

He recommends beginning by "taking a walk in the shoes of your customers. Spend 30 minutes, an hour pretending you are a customer of your brand. How is the experience?" This customer-centered assessment reveals the specific friction points and experience gaps that limit business performance.

From this foundation, organizations can implement targeted experience modeling capabilities that address these gaps. Petersen suggests "doing an AI Innovation Workshop where you can spend half a day to lock down different use cases and try it out as part of the team."

This incremental approach delivers immediate business value while building toward a comprehensive experience modeling capability, creating a virtuous cycle of improvement rather than a disruptive transformation.

As digital ecosystems grow more complex, organizations that thrive will be those that can model, deploy, and optimize experiences without technical barriers. Experience modeling represents the bridge between composable technology and business outcomes.

In Petersen's closing challenge: "Consider what type of architecture and experience you're building towards. Are you building the kid's hobby car, or are you building the car that can also win races?"

The difference isn't just technical sophistication—it's whether your architecture enables the collaborative experience modeling that connects technology to tangible business outcomes. Organizations ensure their technology investments deliver meaningful business value that drives sustainable competitive advantage by focusing on how people create and optimize experiences rather than on platform features alone.

Watch Lars’ presentation and more from DXA 2025 here.