Drupal and Artificial Intelligence for Personalization

Shashishar Soppin

Posted on July 2, 2019 - 11:53 am

We humans as a species want to create a future, where AI will be acting in every aspect of our lives. AI is getting more capable with cognitive abilities similar to humans and these are getting enhanced on a daily basis, thus solving many challenges which were not possible earlier.

When it comes to enterprise open source CMS, “Drupal” is the first name that comes to any one’s mind. Drupal is making inroads into enterprise CMS in faster pace than what was anticipated. Having said that, Drupal is growing at a larger scale and Drupal 9 will be releasing in June 2020. In parallel Artificial Intelligence is one of the technologies that is creating waves across. Combination of AI and CMS technologies is an area that has a lot of potential and is a great way to deliver the benefits of AI to a larger set of people. Drupal + AI will bring a lot of value addition to any organization,

Be it in the form of “Deriving Insights”
Web personalization
Or a combination of the above two.

On this day of May 19th of Sunday 2019, along with in association of “Valuebound”, hosted a webinar series on “Drupal and AI for Personalization”. Keeping in mind the growing popularity of Drupal and AI together, this event was planned and delivered. Many of coders/contributors may have knowledge of CMS but may have hindrance when Artificial Intelligence is exposed to them. Also, there may be a set of folks who are totally new to both AI and CMS (Drupal). To address all of these types of folks, coders, contributors, this webinar was planned and presented.

During the first session, Me, along with Gokul from ValueBound tried to capture the essence and need of Drupal and AI. Then we spoke about the few essential steps to kickstarting our Drupal + AI journey.

To have the community continue to contribute when Drupal and AI are required, this presentation started with an introduction to the History of AI, followed by definition and various insights explained. I have also introduced Machine Learning and Deep Learning as part of this presentation. In this, I have covered from the basics of neural networks to deep neural networks with explanation and examples.

Note:-Following is the link for the presentation, https://www.slideshare.net/valuebound/drupal-and-artificial-intelligenc…

Drupal provides a variety of features and has edge over other CMS solutions available in the market ranging from the digital experience. Following are the key pointers that were discussed in elaboration.

Digital Experience
Global community and collaboration
Documentation and Web
Innovation and Globalism

By making a bold statement as "AI can emulate human performance by learning from it", I have started a discussion about Drupal and why now is the time to combine and explore AI/ML + Drupal both. During the session, the following pointers were addressed by meeting the expectations of the audience from all walks of life,

Drupal's chat-bot API
Web Personalization and recommendation
Support of multilingual platform
Deriving insights from the content
Meeting dynamic business needs

During this, I have covered various AI possibilities around Drupal CMS with some industry insights. Then touched upon a few real-time AI based use-cases, based on industry sector and domains.

Questions included in this are:

1. What is the enterprise level market share of Drupal in the current scenario?

Drupal is the only player having significant market share in open source CMS for enterprises. Drupal almost covers-up 24-30% of enterprise CMS market share as compared to other competitors.

2. How Drupal handles multilingual capabilities and support?

Drupal supports multilingual capabilities by exposing various API’s to work on translation, Locale, Content translation and internationalization. Starting from Drupal-7, support of various languages has taken-up on priority and addressed with API exposure.