Kentico adds AI award in Site of the Year 2026 reset

Kentico has opened its Site of the Year 2026 competition, adding a new Best Use of AI category.

It has also reworked the awards structure, cutting industry categories from 10 to six and adding four cross-sector bonus awards: Best SaaS Project, Best Multichannel Project, Best Upgrade Project and Best Migration Project.

The changes reflect how Kentico wants to present work created by customers and partners using its Xperience by Kentico digital experience platform. Rather than treating commerce as a standalone class, projects will now be judged within the industries they serve.

The six vertical categories are Government, Associations & Education; Sport, Entertainment, Travel & Tourism; Financial Services; Healthcare; Industrial Manufacturing; and B2B & Consumer Brands.

The revised model is intended to reflect how digital projects are now delivered, particularly as organisations combine website, commerce, migration and AI work within the same programme.

Awards reset

The new AI award is the clearest sign of that shift. Kentico said it recognises partner work using agentic and generative AI in live deployments, tying the competition more closely to a broader industry push to demonstrate commercial AI use beyond pilot projects.

Kentico has been building AI features into its products, including Xperience by Kentico, AIRA and its Agentic Marketing Suite. The suite now includes four specialised agents, which it says operate as a virtual marketing team.

For digital experience vendors, awards programmes often serve a dual role: recognising implementation work by agencies and customers while signalling which product areas a supplier wants to emphasise, whether SaaS, migration from rival systems or multichannel publishing.

In Kentico's case, the revised categories suggest a stronger focus on projects involving platform change as much as front-end design. That includes in-place upgrades, migrations from other content management platforms and SaaS roll-outs, each of which now has its own route to recognition.

A project can win both a vertical category and one or more bonus awards, allowing Kentico to highlight several aspects of a single implementation.

Kentico outlined the rationale for the new structure in a brief statement.

"Awards programs should be a mirror of where the industry is actually moving, not where it was two years ago," said Petr Klouda, VP of Strategic Partnerships at Kentico. "Agentic AI is no longer experimental; it is in production, shipping real outcomes for real customers. With Site of the Year 2026, we are putting that work on the leaderboard, alongside the SaaS, migration, and consolidation projects that are reshaping how organizations operate. The partners and customers building this future deserve to be recognized for it."

Earlier entries

Kentico pointed to early qualifying projects as examples of the work the new structure is designed to capture. Under the competition model, any project that wins Site of the Month during the year is automatically eligible for Site of the Year.

One came from Integra LifeSciences, which rebuilt its corporate web presence on Xperience by Kentico as a SaaS deployment. BizStream delivered the project after the medical technology company faced a deadline created by the planned end of life of its previous content management system.

Kentico said the migration gave Integra a new cloud-based foundation and improved the authoring environment for content teams while supporting global stakeholder communications. It presented the project as a likely fit for the Best SaaS Project award.

Another example was Tesco Mobile Ireland, which moved from a custom eCommerce system to Xperience by Kentico. Delivered by Granite, the project included a phone comparison tool, a bundled checkout flow for add-ons and prepaid top-up functions.

That example highlights another feature of the revised model. Ecommerce work remains central to many submissions, but it will no longer sit in its own category and instead will be judged within the relevant industry group.

Global field

The previous edition drew submissions from North America, EMEA and APAC, with winners spanning financial services, education, healthcare, government, manufacturing and nonprofit organisations. Winners included LeShuttle Freight, Translink, MND Energie, ROC van Amsterdam & Flevoland, Bob W., Oppenheimer, Cleveland Metroparks, LivaNova, Pierret and the American Society of Landscape Architects.

That breadth matters because Kentico's partner network and customer base span multiple regions and industries. A more consolidated structure may make it easier to compare projects that combine content management, customer journeys and platform replacement work rather than fit neatly into older sector- or function-based categories.

The update also reflects a wider trend across enterprise software suppliers, many of which are reshaping customer recognition schemes to match the language driving buying decisions. AI, SaaS delivery, migration risk and channel consolidation have become central themes in digital experience spending as organisations review legacy systems and seek fewer overlapping tools.

For Kentico, the competition offers a way to showcase those projects through partner and customer work already in the market. The 2025 edition recognised 10 category winners and 20 honourable mentions under the previous structure.