Kontent.ai delivers zero-outage content during championship-weekend traffic spikes with Fastly

Key results

• Zero outages or customer complaints during championship-weekend traffic spikes, despite millions of viewers hitting the platform.

• Automatically mitigates entire classes of attacks at the edge with Next-Gen WAF.

• Consolidated delivery and security onto one platform, freeing engineering to focus on the core roadmap.

• More than 60 enterprise customers are actively using Agentic CMS, generating over 90,000 AI-powered actions only in the last 30 days.

• Agentic CMS can free up approximately 14,900 hours of repetitive work annually and deliver an estimated 28x return on AI credit costs, based on Kontent.ai’s benchmark ROI model.

The challenge

Kontent.ai is a headless CMS built for organizations that operate under strict regulatory scrutiny. Matej Zachar, CIO and CISO at Kontent.ai, leads a team that gives customers in banking, insurance, government, and healthcare a single platform to manage and orchestrate content — from articles and images to translations across tens of thousands of assets. For many of these customers, compliance obligations reach beyond their own operations and into the content itself: a pharmaceutical company publishing drug information, or a healthcare provider offering medical guidance, each carries its own regulatory weight.

Kontent.ai also serves high-profile customers whose traffic can shift dramatically based on real-world events. During the last football championship, sports websites running on the platform saw heavy loads as millions of viewers pulled up content during key matches — without a single complaint. "None of those customers actually complained about any of the delivery in those cases, and that is what makes the partnership so valuable," Zachar said. "It's the ability to actually serve those customers and not have any outages or any particular issues with delivering the content in these big scenarios."

As Kontent.ai expanded its Agentic CMS capabilities — using AI agents to create, manage, translate, and scale content — the demands on the platform grew right alongside it. Zachar needed infrastructure that could keep pace with both kinds of pressure at once: unpredictable traffic surges and the security and availability expectations of enterprise customers in regulated industries.

That growth is already happening at scale. More than 60 enterprise customers are actively using Kontent.ai’s Agentic CMS today, executing more than 90,000 AI-powered actions in the last 30 days alone. Those actions span hundreds of different use cases, from bulk editing and content updates to legal and regulatory changes, translation and localization, content modeling and restructuring, version creation, derivative content generation, and quality and grammar checks.

The business potential of those workflows is significant. Based on benchmark customer volumes, Kontent.ai’s Agentic CMS ROI model estimates that automating recurring content operations can free up approximately 14,900 hours of repetitive work annually and deliver an estimated 28x return on the AI credits used to execute those operations.

That reliability extends to the end users of Kontent.ai's customers, whether they're checking match results, reading health advice, or reviewing product information from any region in the world. "Fastly definitely plays a role in how our customers perceive our platform, but not only our customers," Zachar said. "Even more importantly, the customers of our customers, the end users where the content is actually delivered, because those are the users that actually matter."

The solution

Fastly has been part of the Kontent.ai platform from the early days, providing the underlying layer for content speed and delivery on a global scale. 

"Partnering with Fastly enabled us to deliver that scale in quality, on time, and essentially by growing with growing demand to our offering," Zachar said. 

As AI agents drive increasing levels of activity across the platform, having a partner that can reliably support that growth frees Kontent.ai’s engineering teams to focus on advancing the CMS rather than building and operating a global delivery layer.

"It has been a collaboration that enabled us to focus on things that we are proficient in, especially managing and scaling our content platform, and then using a reliable partner for delivery of that content," Zachar added.

Supporting compliance in regulated industries

Security is central to how Kontent.ai operates and how it wins business. Zachar's team pursued and achieved a series of assurances that put them ahead of the market — becoming the first headless CMS vendor to provide HIPAA compliance and the first CMS to earn ISO/IEC 42001 certification for AI governance. "Having Fastly as a partner that can actually support that with technical means, with features that support the level of assurance our customers require, is really important," Zachar said.

Fastly's edge security is one part of how that compliance posture is maintained. The Next-Gen WAF sits at the edge of the Kontent.ai product, applying rate limiting, geolocation-based blocking, and rule sets that automatically shut down entire classes of attacks. "We obviously apply defense in depth and a layered security approach, but at the same time, having Fastly at the edge is essential for us to basically just easily defeat whole classes of attacks," Zachar said.

For customers storing protected health information on the platform, that layered protection extends to how the content is delivered, not just how it's stored.

Cutting complexity with one platform for delivery and security

Consolidating delivery and security on Fastly has practical benefits for how Kontent.ai's technical teams work. "You have one platform to manage everything, teams that are very capable of managing that, whether through infrastructure as code or through knowledge about that platform and architecture," Zachar said. "It saves time and improves the knowledge of the teams working with the platform."

Kontent.ai is continuing to look at where Fastly can support its AI initiatives, from automating maintenance tasks to exploring new integrations that fit the agentic CMS direction of the product.

Key takeaway

Kontent.ai has built its reputation on delivering market-leading governance, compliance, and infrastructure for enterprise customers in regulated industries, often being the first vendor to meet a new standard. 

As Agentic CMS adoption grows — with more than 60 enterprise customers already executing tens of thousands of AI-powered actions every month — the infrastructure supporting those operations becomes increasingly important. Fastly gives the team a delivery and security foundation that scales with that ambition, whether Kontent.ai is onboarding a new enterprise customer with a massive content repository or supporting sports websites during a championship weekend.

"What makes me proud of the work of my team has been being able to deliver and maintain market-leading governance, compliance, and infrastructure that our enterprise customers require, and being able to do that in a very agile way," Zachar said.