Clankers and content operations

[Music] Hello nextJS Conf. Uh those who are watching online, hello internet. And uh to those in our sanity slack, hello water cooler. I'm here to talk about content operations in the age of AI generated content. So when it comes to creating content, the scales have been tipped into the favor of people who don't care about wasting your time. When we create content without context,

we know these tools don't know your audience. They don't learn. They don't get any better. And AI tools, as they're currently sold, do a really good job of convincing you that you human are not good enough to do the thing. You can't write an email on your own. You can't write a blog post on your own. You can't write meeting notes on your own. You can't be human without the help of AI. You're just a sack of meat that

needs AI's help. And I don't think this is right. I think AI is awesome, right? It gets a superpower. It's a technology upgrade better than any that I've ever seen in my career. I'm not a doomer. It's just that I think that you're awesome, too. And that's what I want to look at today. I've got a demo I'm going to show in a moment using the AI SDK, NexJS 16, API routes, and all of this along with sanity. So all of us get to determine what's the future going to look like because we've got tools that look like they came and were given to us from the

future, right? But we've got them now. So we get to decide what does now look like and that's in our hands. What would we like to do with that? Uh so Hollywood's given us visions of the future for years and we get to choose what what do we want now to look like? There's all sorts of different visions of the future and I know our CTO is very fond of a particular vision of the future that looks something like this. And that's what I think that working with AI can be like, particularly when we're creating content, right? We don't just have to uh let the machines take over and completely seed control, but we're still

in control. Still got our hands on the joysticks there. We can take on uh whatever's greater than us and take it on with absolute confidence. So before we get to the demo, let's just set the table. What's actually first of all, who am I? I'm Simeon. Hello. Uh I'm an educator at at Sanity and we've been at NextJS conference for a number of years, which is excellent. Sanity is a content operating system. If you've heard of Sanity, you probably heard of it as a content management system. And that's fine if you want to call us that. I've heard people out at the booth today saying, "Oh, Sanity, they're a CMS." That's fine. But we'll get to unpack why

we're a bit more than that soon as well. And as I said, we've been at NextJS Conf now for like uh the last 5 years, I think. Um really been close to this community. We issue a lot of packages, templates, guidance. Our engineers work directly with Versel's engineers to make sure that you get the very best experience. Sanity is the perfect pair with Nex.js JS for content driven applications and some of the things we've said over the journeys as we talk about structured content. So what's structured content? That means you want to store things based on what they are, not what they look like. And you might be saying, "But Simeon,

one of the great things about AI is that it can take just unstructured junk content and turn it into structured content." That's true, but you'll be able to do much more when you are creating a source of truth that is structured content. And actually means there's never been a better time to migrate into a system that values structured content. We've also talked about content is data for the longest time and uh it's really cool to see as we've got all these new tools and the language has evolved over the journey that um I suppose we could probably change some of this language and it still means the same thing. I

think these days we'd say content is context. So what your company knows and what you store in your data set that's all context that can help the AI generation process. So that's how we sort of set ourselves a little bit apart. But what's a CMS for? What's a content management system for? This has typically been the experience if you work with CMS's in the past is that an author or a content operator, somebody on a content team, they use a CMS and they create a page and they that individual person makes individual pages and when they need to modify those individual pages, they go and make those changes and there's this onetoone relationship between what it looks like