Migrate from legacy to headless CMS with Grid Dynamics, Contentstack, and Google Cloud

For many businesses, moving away from familiar but inherently unadaptable legacy suites is challenging. However, eliminating this technical debt one step at a time can bolster your confidence. The best starting point is transitioning from a monolithic CMS to a headless CMS. This shift to a modern content experience can provide you with quick, long-lasting wins with your customers while you transform your legacy backend and build a fully composable ecosystem.

Why should you move to a headless CMS?

Today, the average mid-to-large-sized business has several communication channels, information pages, and products to manage across geographies. Traditional monolithic CMS, tightly coupled with the backend, lack the agility necessary to provide a consistent content experience and restrict build capabilities to the point where solutions often feel bulky and cookie-cutter. In contrast, a headless CMS decouples your front-end experience from the backend, enabling greater content customization and efficiency in deploying your content across all channels and devices in an omnichannel and localized manner. For example, if you decide to introduce wearables as a new channel, a headless CMS ensures consistent content delivery across this new touchpoint without disrupting your existing channels.

Moreover, the API-driven nature of a headless CMS supports seamless integrations with backend tools essential for content creation and management. This connectivity enables you to leverage customer data and AI-driven tools for content personalization, further enriching your content strategy.

Moving to a headless CMS unlocks powerful capabilities, but success requires experienced co-innovation partners who understand your content delivery challenges and can guide you to the right outcome. That’s where the MACH Alliance dream team—Contentstack, Google Cloud, and Grid Dynamics—comes in.

In this blog, we will explore how each partner contributes to headless CMS migration, accelerating time to market, and ensuring a future-proof and optimized content experience through seamless collaboration.

Contentstack EDGE: An adaptive DXP built for the AI era

Recognized as a Visionary in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™, Contentstack EDGE is more than just a headless CMS. It is an adaptive digital experience platform (DXP) built on a microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native, and headless architecture. This enables content modelers to create dynamic and personalized digital experiences by assembling pre-built content blocks and components without relying on development teams. This modular approach allows for greater flexibility, faster content delivery, and easier adaptation to evolving customer needs.

To push the boundaries of digital experience management, Contentstack recently introduced Contentstack EDGE—an adaptive digital experience platform (DXP) built specifically for the AI era. EDGE combines Contentstack’s headless CMS, a real-time customer data platform (CDP), and AI-powered automation to help businesses create more personalized, engaging, and omnichannel customer experiences at scale, unlocking powerful capabilities:

• Intelligent content management: Automate content creation, management, and distribution with brand-aware AI and real-time analytics, ensuring every interaction reflects your brand voice, values, and audience needs.
• Real-time first-party data activation: Eliminate data silos and leverage real-time insights to build dynamic audience profiles, enabling 1:1 personalized experiences across every touchpoint and customer journey stage.
• Adaptive brand experiences: Deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time with AI-powered hyper-personalization and automation, ensuring consistent, relevant, and engaging brand interactions.

AI-driven content creation grounded in brand data

Contentstack supports content creation at scale using its AI Assistant for real-time translations, summaries, and idea generation directly within the authoring experience. This helps save custom actions for reuse and improve AI prompts by leveraging the tool’s context of your platform content. Businesses can choose their preferred connectors to automate content generation workflows.

Contentstack’s AI Assistant works in tandem with Brand Kit and Knowledge Vault to ensure that AI-generated content stays on-brand, contextually relevant, and aligned with business objectives by leveraging critical company information, including brand-related documents, data, and content.

• Consistent brand voice: AI-generated content adheres to your brand’s established tone and messaging, ensuring uniformity across all platforms.
• Efficient content scaling: Automate trusted content creation workflows with Automate, reducing manual effort while maintaining quality.
• AI-driven personalization: Use configurable Voice Profiles to fine-tune content tone and messaging based on audience preferences.

Built-in personalization through Contentstack Personalize

Beyond content creation, Contentstack’s CMS features the industry’s first edge-optimized personalization and testing engine. Designed for ease and engineered for speed, it enhances content delivery to specific audience segments using the following key features:

• Tailor content using customer data: Leverages customer data to directly inform the content authoring process and target the right content to the right audience consistently.
• Edge-based delivery: Serves content closer to the user, significantly reducing latency and ensuring a glitch-free experience.
• Built-in variants: Allows customization of content, visuals, and offers based on user characteristics such as location, preferences, or behavior. This complements a sophisticated multilingual content capability that allows you to create and publish entries in over 200 languages.
• Data-driven optimization: Enables experimenting with different content versions to identify what best resonates with the audience, and provides valuable A/B testing insights.

Google Cloud: Providing a reliable infrastructure for global content delivery

In early 2024, Contentstack and Google Cloud entered a new partnership expanding Contentstack’s hosting capabilities to include one of the world’s leading cloud platforms, giving businesses more choices for scalable, secure hosting solutions. Leveraging Google Cloud’s global infrastructure, Contentstack provides users with reliable content management and delivery capabilities that are optimized for high performance at scale. Contentstack is now available through the Google Cloud Marketplace, streamlining the discovery and procurement process for Google Cloud users.

Contentstack AI Assistant with Google Vertex AI

Beyond infrastructure, this partnership brings advanced AI capabilities to Contentstack through Google Vertex AI. As a fully managed AI platform, Vertex AI simplifies the process of building, training, and deploying generative AI models, giving businesses access to over 150 foundation models, including Google Gemini models for Contentstack’s AI Assistant.

This AI integration also opens the door for businesses to develop their own customer support AI tools. Since Contentstack serves as a robust knowledge base housing FAQs and help-site content, AI-powered assistants can use this data to provide context-rich, real-time responses through conversational Q&A interfaces. These AI agents can also identify knowledge gaps and offer insights to continuously improve content and customer engagement.

Accelerating AI integration with Google Connectors

To accelerate the implementation of AI tools, Contentstack offers Google Connectors that help businesses automate content operations.

• Google Vertex Connector: Leverage Google Vertex AI within Automate workflows for content generation, operational tasks, and more.
• Google PubSub Connector: Implement real-time messaging, data exchanges, and event-driven automation within Automate workflows.

By combining Contentstack’s headless CMS, Google Cloud’s global infrastructure, and Vertex AI’s advanced AI capabilities, businesses can achieve faster content delivery, intelligent automation, and a more personalized customer experience—at scale.

Contentstack’s integration with Google Vertex AI Search for Commerce

Contentstack has announced a strategic partnership with Google Vertex AI Search for Commerce to reimagine how businesses approach customer-centric search experiences. This collaboration integrates Contentstack EDGE with Google’s advanced AI capabilities, enabling businesses to deliver highly personalized, data-driven content and search results. By leveraging Google Vertex AI Search for Commerce, companies can enhance their e-commerce platforms with natural language search, enriched catalog data, and fine-tuned relevance, ultimately improving customer engagement and driving conversions.

Grid Dynamics: Enabling headless CMS migration and AI integration

You’ve chosen Contentstack on Google Cloud for a headless CMS on a reliable, scalable infrastructure. Now, you need the engineering expertise to integrate it seamlessly into your stack, connect it with your data and backend, and do it in a way that maximizes ROI and accelerates time to market. To get this right, you need a trusted solution integrator—and Grid Dynamics is uniquely positioned to fulfill this role as a preferred partner for Contentstack and a premier partner for Google Cloud.

Award-winning CMS migration for ASICS Digital

Grid Dynamics won the 2024 Contentstack Experience Award for Most Innovative Project by enabling ASICS Digital, a global sports brand to rapidly deliver personalized digital experiences. When ASICS Digital struggled with an outdated CMS characterized by a fragmented system and inefficient workflows that impeded their ability to deliver seamless digital experiences, Grid Dynamics leveraged Contentstack’s headless CMS architecture to unify the company’s content management under a single, flexible platform, leading to:

• 50% reduction in time-to-market for new content
• 50% increase in production deployment frequency
• 20% reduction in annual content management operational costs
• 15% improvement in content consistency across multiple regions
• 10% increase in website traffic
• 5% decrease in bounce rates
• 7% improvement in conversion rates
• 30% improvement in content creation and publishing efficiency

Contentstack Headless CMS Starter kit

Like ASICS Digital, you too can reduce the long-standing technical debt inherent in your legacy tech stacks. What if you could do it in 70% less time without needing to develop things from scratch? The question isn’t “Is this the right solution for me?”; it’s “How soon can we launch?”

Grid Dynamics’ Contentstack Headless CMS Starter Kit accelerates your CMS integration by offering proven, reusable components for rapid deployment. The foundations are already laid, best practices are baked in, and the path to a powerful, flexible website is clearly mapped out. The kit is designed to address the following use cases:

• Rapid e-commerce site deployment with personalized recommendations
• Multi-brand content hub for consistent messaging
• Localized product catalogs for global expansion
• Interactive digital lookbooks with shoppable content
• Omnichannel campaign management for seamless customer experiences
• Real-time inventory updates across web and mobile

What’s even better is that Grid Dynamics and Contentstack have teamed up for a “Retire the Legacy” offer, helping new customers de-risk the move to modern digital experience solutions.

Facilitating the right integrations between Contentstack and generative AI 

Beyond CMS migrations, we help businesses leverage AI-powered automation to enhance content operations, personalization, and customer engagement. As a premier partner for Google Cloud, we develop and implement generative AI solutions for enterprises using Vertex AI and Google Gemini. We facilitate seamless integrations between Contentstack and generative AI, enabling brands to leverage customer data for scalable, localized, and personalized content experiences across different geographies. This reflects our eight-year track record of developing cutting-edge AI solutions. Here are some generative AI solutions developed by Grid Dynamics for enhanced digital experiences:

Unlocking AI-augmented experiences

• GenAI Content and Catalog Optimization: Automate manual catalog management processes and transform product data into a rich, engaging experience that attracts and retains customers across channels. Accelerate product onboarding, elevate your commerce capabilities, reduce costs, and drive growth with AI-powered product data extraction and enrichment.
• Merchandising Experience Platform: Take control of your merchandising with advanced search augmentation and rules. Seamlessly manage promotions, attributes, and meanings. Promote brands and partner campaigns effectively. Leverage a composable, extendable platform pre-integrated with leading search engines to accelerate deployment and time-to-market.
• Vertex AI Search for Commerce: Embrace AI-powered natural language search with Google’s Vertex AI Search for Commerce and Grid Dynamics. Delight customers with Google-quality personalized search results using enriched catalogs and ultra-tuned relevance and ranking. Boost conversions and average order value across digital channels.
• AI Focus Groups: Leverage large language models to analyze user-generated content, identify brand messaging, product and customer service improvements, and predict social media campaign performance.
• GenAI Virtual Try-on: Elevate your e-commerce experiences with GenAI: Wow shoppers, speed up inventory updates, and slash production expenses. Leverage hyper-realistic virtual try-ons that enable customers to try before they buy, driving sales and satisfaction while cutting your costs and mitigating product returns.
• Conversational AI: Explore how generative AI, large language models, and natural language processing are redefining human-computer interactions. From enhanced customer service to seamless information retrieval, experience the future of intuitive communication.
• AI for Product Images: Empower your marketing and merchandising teams to automatically generate comprehensive, hyper-local, hyper-personalized product visualizations and promotional materials in seconds, and at virtually zero cost. Provide your customers with unique product personalization capabilities that allow them to create stunning designs based on natural language style, color and design descriptions, and reference images.

Conclusion

Global market shifts demand rapid changes in digital experiences, and your technology ecosystem needs to keep up. Let’s be real—legacy CMS platforms just don’t cut it anymore. They slow you down, limit flexibility, and make scaling a headache. But migrating to a headless CMS doesn’t have to be overwhelming. With Contentstack, Google Cloud, and Grid Dynamics, you get a future-proof solution that delivers content faster, personalizes experiences with AI, and scales seamlessly across all channels.

Remember, this move isn’t just about content—it’s the first step toward complete modernization. Since your content experiences are no longer tied to a rigid back-end, you can gradually upgrade your entire tech stack at your own pace. And the next big step? Shifting to a composable commerce ecosystem.

Read the Better together: Composable commerce and generative AI e-book to see how commercetools can integrate seamlessly with this powerhouse partnership—helping you achieve your omnichannel commerce goals faster and more efficiently.