AI Agents for Sales and Marketing SaaS: How One CTO Is Building Agentic CMS Workflows Now

The biggest lie in the AI conversation right now is that it’s coming for writers. It’s not. It’s coming for the 25-button workflows your editorial team clicks through every time they publish a piece of content — and the SaaS CTOs who understand that distinction are already building the replacement.

Trey Connell, CTO and President of ePublishing, has spent 20+ years building software for B2B and B2C publishers. He’s led the company through a strategic acquisition (Multip, 2023), a full platform integration cycle, and now a deliberate pivot toward agentic AI content workflows. His vantage point sits at the exact intersection where AI agents for sales and marketing SaaS are about to collapse legacy CMS paradigms — and he’s not theorizing. He’s shipping it.

What follows is a breakdown of every tactical insight from that conversation: the frameworks Trey’s team uses to build defensible SaaS positioning, why first-party data alignment is now the foundational revenue lever for publishers, and how prompt-based content workflows will make today’s CMS interfaces obsolete inside three years.

Key Takeaways

• Agentic AI will replace button-click CMS interfaces within 2–3 years — editorial teams who adopt prompt-based workflows early will achieve 5–10x productivity gains over laggards.
• Unified content + audience data is the only defensible moat for publishing SaaS right now; no other competitor in ePublishing’s space combines CMS with subscriber data management in a single platform.
• AI in editorial is not about replacing writers — it’s about three distinct use cases: ideation/inspiration, SEO and search integration, and public-facing AI-powered reader experiences.
• Print revenue is resurgent in specific market segments — driven by consumer demand for tangibility and distraction-free experiences, not nostalgia — forcing publishers to operate both digital and print channels simultaneously.
• Content marketing has displaced trade shows as the primary net-new customer acquisition channel for B2B publishing software, but only when content is validated against current customer success metrics first.
• Strategic acquisitions beat feature roadmaps for closing platform gaps — ePublishing’s 2023 Multip acquisition created a positioning advantage no organic development sprint could have replicated as quickly.
• First-party data alignment is the post-cookie growth foundation — publishers who unify subscriber behavior with editorial decisions will out-convert and out-retain competitors still running disconnected tech stacks.

Deep Dive: What Agentic AI Actually Means for SaaS Product and GTM

From Custom Dev Shops to Integrated SaaS Platforms — Why the Market Finally Caught Up

Twenty years ago, the publishing technology market ran on bespoke relationships. Publishers hired boutique development shops to build custom solutions because no platform was mature enough to serve their specific needs at scale. Trey watched that shift happen in real time.

“Early on we were more of a custom development shop… publishers were looking for more — SaaS wasn’t really a big thing 20 years ago in the publishing space at least. It was more boutique, custom development that publishers wanted. I think over the years that’s evolved as software platforms have matured.”

The implication for any SaaS founder reading this: market readiness is not a fixed state. The same customers who rejected a platform model in 2005 became the buyers who demanded it by 2015. The question is whether you’re building for where buyer sophistication is or where it’s going. For publishing, the answer in 2026 is unambiguous — integrated SaaS platforms that unify content management with subscriber data are table stakes. Boutique custom shops have lost the positioning argument.

The Three AI Use Cases Publishers Are Actually Deploying

Before addressing what’s next with agentic workflows, it’s worth grounding the conversation in what publishers are actually doing with AI today — because the popular narrative is wrong.

The fear in most editorial rooms is binary: AI writes everything, or AI threatens nothing. Trey’s observation from the field splits the reality into three distinct adoption patterns:

1. Content ideation and inspiration — Using AI tools to break writer’s block, generate angle options, or stress-test a thesis before committing to it. This is the most widely adopted use case and the least threatening to editorial quality.
2. SEO and search integration — Optimizing content for search intent, identifying keyword gaps, and generating structured data. As search engines themselves integrate AI, publishers are using AI to remain discoverable within those new surfaces.
3. Public-facing AI experiences — Building reader-facing features like AI-powered search or content recommendation engines. ePublishing’s own “Ask My Brand” product sits in this category.

“When they think AI and publishing, someone will think well that’s going to take my job or it’s about writing stories right — like we don’t actually write anymore, we’re just going to let AI generate things. That’s sort of that perception. Some of them use AI tools to provide inspiration for what they’re going to write about or how they’re going to write, just to sort of get that break the ice, writer’s block, or just ideation.”

This is the critical nuance for AI agents for sales and marketing SaaS buyers evaluating editorial tools: the ROI isn’t in generative content at scale. It’s in reducing cognitive overhead at the top of the editorial funnel and reducing friction at the bottom through automation.

Why Agentic CMS Is the Next Platform Disruption

Here’s where Trey moves from describing the present to forecasting the infrastructure shift that will define the next three years of publishing SaaS.

Current CMS workflows are button-click architectures. To publish a piece of content with proper metadata, tagging, distribution rules, and personalization parameters, an editor might execute 15–25 discrete UI interactions. Every one of those steps is a failure point, a training cost, and a bottleneck.

Agentic AI collapses that interaction model.

“I think that typing a prompt to tell the system what you want to do or accomplish is going to be much more common than clicking buttons — 25 selections in a row to achieve an outcome. Agent-based content management is going to be a thing we’re looking at very closely. The natural next step is to take that to the next level with agentic capabilities — let it start making choices. Let it start helping produce not only better content but better experiences for the reader.”

The parallel Trey draws is instructive: developer productivity. Engineers using Claude or ChatGPT as a pair programmer routinely report 5–10x output improvements on specific tasks. Trey expects editorial teams to experience the same transformation — not because AI is writing the content, but because the operational overhead of managing content workflows drops by an order of magnitude.

This is the Agentic CMS Workflow Evolution framework in practice:

• Step 1: Integrate LLM capabilities into the existing CMS (ePublishing’s Continuum platform)
• Step 2: Replace 5–25 sequential button clicks with single prompt-based instructions
• Step 3: Enable the AI to make autonomous choices on content production, distribution, and optimization
• Step 4: Maintain editorial oversight while increasing workflow speed 5–10x

For any SaaS CTO evaluating their product roadmap: this is not a 5-year vision, it’s a 2–3 year competitive reality. The teams shipping prompt-based CMS interactions today will have the case studies, the switching costs, and the customer lock-in before most product orgs finish their first sprint planning meeting on the topic.

The Unified Content + Audience Data Architecture — The Moat No Competitor Has Closed

Strategic acquisitions rarely work as cleanly as they’re pitched. The ePublishing-Multip integration story is an exception worth studying because it was designed to solve a specific market gap, not to add a vanity feature or hit an ARR multiple.

The gap: no publishing SaaS provider was combining CMS capabilities with a robust subscriber and audience data management layer in a single platform. Publishers were duct-taping together their editorial tools with separate CDPs, creating data silos that prevented the kind of first-party personalization that drives subscriber conversion and retention.

“We’re an integrator at our deepest roots. We went through that with bringing on Multip back in 2023. We spent 2023 and last year combining companies, integrating our flagship products to now come out with one holistic platform for publishers. There’s not anyone else out there doing that in that space with both aligning content management and audience and subscriber management.”

The Unified Content + Audience Data Architecture framework this creates has four operational layers:

1. Consolidate content production workflows with subscriber data collection in a privacy-compliant manner
2. Enable data-driven personalization at content recommendation and delivery layers
3. Establish conversion funnels from anonymous visitor to known subscriber through technology enablement
4. Use first-party data to inform editorial strategy and content personalization at the topic and format level

“The future of content management does involve all of that first-party data. Really, at the end of the day, it all becomes one ecosystem — or it should. That’s what we believe the market needs. That’s what we believe will make publishers increase their revenue and their subscriber [base], to have that content align with their first-party rich data.”

In a post-third-party-cookie environment, this isn’t a competitive advantage — it’s a survival requirement. Publishers who can’t connect what a subscriber reads with what they buy, renew, or churn on are flying blind on their highest-value customer relationships.

Why Print Is Back and What It Tells You About Product Positioning

This insight reads as counterintuitive until you sit with it: print revenue is growing again in specific market segments, and it has nothing to do with demographic nostalgia.

“In some segments of the industry that still have print, it was this push to go away from print and all of a sudden now we’re back to — well wait a minute, print’s actually making some money again. I think it’s related to this like basic human thing of tangibility. There’s something more valuable about something like distraction-free that you can hold — that is worth a premium. Even the fact that it’s not digital is somehow a premium experience.”

The GTM signal here is not “invest in print.” It’s never let a single-channel assumption drive your entire platform strategy. The publishers who aggressively deprecated print infrastructure in the 2010s are now scrambling to rebuild capabilities they eliminated. The publishers who maintained optionality are capturing the resurgence without emergency capex.

For SaaS founders: which “deprecated” features in your product are your customers quietly asking to resurrect?

Content Marketing as GTM — The Standards That Make It Work

ePublishing’s shift away from trade show-heavy customer acquisition toward content-driven GTM is not a budget reallocation story. It’s a quality standards story.

“I would say this year we’re putting a lot more emphasis on that versus more traditional methods. Like, we used to go to a lot of shows each year… content that is of value and helps — that’s hopefully always our goal. If it works for our current customers and we can prove it out and we see that it adds value, then we know we’ve done something right.”

The Content Marketing GTM vs. Trade Shows framework Trey describes has a specific sequencing requirement that most SaaS marketing teams skip: validate content value through current customer feedback before syndicating it as a growth asset. You’re not publishing content to attract new buyers first — you’re publishing content to serve existing customers, and when that content demonstrably works for them, it becomes your acquisition engine.

This sequencing matters because it forces product-marketing alignment. If your content is genuinely useful to customers who already use your product, it will also be genuinely useful to prospects who are evaluating it. Content built purely for SEO keyword density rarely survives contact with a skeptical buyer who actually knows the space.

About Trey Connell

Trey Connell is the CTO and President of ePublishing, an enterprise software company serving B2B and B2C publishers for over 20 years. He led the company’s 2023 acquisition of Multip and the subsequent integration of two flagship products into a unified content and audience management platform — a combination no competitor in the publishing SaaS space currently replicates. His focus is on agentic AI integration, first-party data architecture, and scaling editorial productivity through prompt-based workflow automation.

Ready to Build an AI-Driven GTM Engine for Your SaaS?

Trey Connell’s roadmap is a masterclass in what defensible SaaS positioning looks like in 2026: unified platform architecture, agentic AI workflows, and content marketing that proves value to existing customers before it chases new ones. If you’re a B2B SaaS founder or GTM leader trying to translate AI product capabilities into pipeline and revenue — not just product press releases — that’s exactly what Rapid Product Growth builds. We work with $2–5M ARR SaaS companies to turn technical differentiation into measurable growth, from content strategy to full-funnel GTM execution.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is agentic AI in content management systems and how does it work?

Agentic AI replaces sequential button-click workflows in a CMS with natural language prompts. Instead of 25 manual UI selections, an editor types a single instruction and the system executes it autonomously — making content production, distribution, and optimization decisions with minimal human intervention.

How do publishers align content management with first-party subscriber data?

Publishers integrate their CMS with a customer data platform (CDP) to connect editorial decisions with subscriber behavior. This unified architecture enables personalized content delivery, converts anonymous visitors to known subscribers, and drives revenue growth without relying on third-party cookies.

How are publishers using generative AI in editorial workflows without replacing writers?

Most publishers use AI for ideation, writer’s block relief, and SEO optimization — not wholesale content generation. The goal is force multiplication: helping editors produce more high-quality work, not eliminating editorial judgment. Agentic CMS tools are projected to deliver 5–10x productivity gains.

Will AI replace SaaS products built on traditional button-click interfaces?

Not immediately — but the trajectory is clear. Prompt-based interfaces are replacing multi-step UI workflows across developer tools and now CMS platforms. SaaS products that don’t integrate agentic capabilities into their core workflow within the next 2–3 years risk being outflanked by competitors that do.

What replaced trade shows as the primary customer acquisition channel for B2B publishing software?

High-quality content marketing — but only when it’s validated against current customer success first. ePublishing’s approach: prove content works for existing customers before using it as a growth asset. This sequencing creates product-marketing alignment and attracts prospects who already trust the methodology.