KPS3 Went to New York for Sanity Everything. This Is What We Learned.

Last month, we went to New York to attend the Sanity Everything conference, and it delivered.

Why does that matter to us? Sanity powers a major portion of the websites we've built over the last few years. So whenever their team gathers to roll out major updates, we make sure to pay close attention.

In short, they're launching a sh*t load of new features.

What got announced

The full list lives on Sanity's recap page. Here's the short version, plus why we care about each one.

• Knowledge Bases (beta): Turns an organization's content into a set of facts organized by topic, allowing AI agents to look up information and deliver consistent answers every time. This is a game-changer because most content issues root back to consistency, and having a single, machine-readable source of truth is crucial for large-scale sites.
• Workflows (beta): Allows teams to define custom editorial stages and automate movement between them, including AI agents that review drafts against style guides before human review. Since almost every team's approval process currently relies on memory or spreadsheets, embedding it straight into the CMS makes perfect sense.
• Content Variants (closed beta): Enables managing different versions of a document for distinct audiences right within the editor. It delivers personalization and A/B testing without duplicating content or building complex parallel systems… something we've wanted for years.
• Durable Functions (coming soon): Manages multi-step publishing pipelines that reliably handle rate limits, retries, and failed API calls. It finally provides a reliable home for the unglamorous background processes that tend to break late at night.
• Blueprints-first setup (coming soon): Defines your entire Sanity infrastructure in a single versioned file, so every environment is set up the same way and every change goes through review before deploying. Having infrastructure that can be diffed, reviewed, and rolled back means far fewer surprises.
• Project Horizon (experimental): A shared workspace where people and AI agents collaborate on tasks, turning conversations directly into actionable work items. While it's still early days, if it hits the mark, it could redefine what working inside a CMS actually feels like.
• Resonance (coming soon): Models target audiences, reads content through their perspective, and highlights content gaps and priorities. This felt like the most exciting announcement—it's essentially like having a content strategist built directly into the platform.

Looking at the common thread across these updates, none of them focus solely on the editor itself. Instead, they address the entire operational ecosystem around content: review cycles, quality checks, audience targeting, and team-agent coordination. Those are the real day-to-day challenges content teams face, and it's reassuring to build on a platform focused on solving them.

Renown Health was on stage

Sanity runs a program called Pioneers, a small group of practitioners recognized for building real AI content systems on the platform. Renown Health was featured as one of them.

Think about that for a second. Renown —an academic health system from Reno, Nevada, on a stage in New York alongside the people defining what AI-driven content operations look like. Healthcare isn't where most people expect to see this happen first. The compliance stakes are higher, the content is more sensitive, and the tolerance for getting it wrong is close to zero. Renown is doing it anyway, carefully, and doing it well. Watching them get recognized for that was the best part of the week.

So what's actually changing?

A few takeaways that weren't on any slide.

Is the editor still the product? Increasingly, no, not for everyone. Sanity is expanding its footprint beyond Studio, and the App SDK is becoming a big part of how it plans to help organizations manage content at scale. Canvas, the content agent, and other new capabilities are coming to the SDK, so teams can build editorial workflows around how they actually work. My hope is that this also opens the door for smaller organizations to get the full value of headless content and send it to every touchpoint they have, not just their website.

Are agents users now? Yes. Workflows, Horizon, Knowledge Bases. Each one treats an AI agent as a participant in the system, with clear limits on what it can touch and a human in the loop. Sanity made that a design decision rather than an add-on, and I think that's the right call.

Which brings up the question we get asked most: how is this different from WordPress or any other traditional CMS?

WordPress alone runs a huge share of the web, and for a lot of organizations a traditional CMS is still the right answer. But they were built around a page. The editor is the product, content lives inside the layout, and everything new arrives as a plugin or module that sits on top. You can do structured content in a traditional CMS. You just fight it the whole way.

Sanity started from the opposite assumption. Content is data. It lives in one place, it doesn't know or care what page it ends up on, and the presentation layer is whatever you build. For a long time that felt like a developer preference. Nice architecture, hard to explain to a marketing director. What this week made clear is that the AI era is the payoff for that decision. Try handing an agent a page out of a traditional CMS and asking it to check the facts. Now hand it a Knowledge Base. An approval workflow needs a structured document to wrap around, and a blob of HTML inside a layout doesn't give it one. The platforms that separated content from presentation ten years ago are the ones that can add agents to the workflow today without rebuilding.

So is the modern CMS even a content management system anymore? Kind of. It's turned into a content operations layer, and the management part is now the least interesting thing it does.

Want to talk Sanity?

We've been on this platform long enough to have opinions, and what got announced this month is going to change how content teams work whether or not anyone asked. On Sanity and trying to figure out what any of this means for your site? Somewhere else and wondering whether it's time to move? Hit me up at kevin@kps3.com. I'm not going to pitch you. We're still working through what half of this means ourselves, and those tend to be the best conversations.