Steve Shaw, Storyteq’s chief product and technology officer, discusses the new updates embedding AI into customer workflows, and why Storyteq is preparing for an agentic future today.
Marketing is a dynamic practice and with rapid changes enabled by new AI technology, service providers are working hard behind the scenes to pass innovations and updates onto customers. That’s one of the reasons why Storyteq’s AI-powered content marketing platform (CMP), moved onto a quarterly updates release cycle in January and is better enabling teams and customers to access new features faster. “This creates a more predictable rhythm – they’ll know when to expect updates and new functionality,” says Steve Shaw, Storyteq’s chief product and technology officer.
Being customer-centric is a priority for Storyteq and this is reflected in the newly introduced preview cycles that see customers get early access to features, provide feedback, and “help shape functionality before full release; it’s a more collaborative approach that ensures we’re adding real value,” adds Steve.
The move comes after Storyteq was named a leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Content Marketing Platforms, the fourth consecutive year the platform has been recognized as a leader acknowledging the platform’s current performance and future projected strength.
The newly launched April release is focused on helping brands manage, adapt, and activate content faster by reducing manual input. It’s about giving users more creative control, all under a broader vision of creative operations that scale without compromise. The release addresses multiple key update areas, with AI playing a major role.
“A big focus is integrating content adaptations across the full lifecycle,” Steve explains. “This includes improvements that allow customers to publish adaptations directly into the DAM, share assets more easily across teams and agencies, and enable global marketers to distribute content across the entire stack.” It’s a shift towards a fully orchestrated workflow system, vital “in environments where multiple agencies and teams are involved”.
Steve, who’s been with Storyteq for over four months but has worked in the technology sector for nearly 25 years, notes that the industry is in a transition period “similar to digital transformation 10–15 years ago but now it’s about AI transformation.”
An Expanded AI-Powered Workflow
Storyteq’s priority right now is embedding AI directly into the customer workflow. “The goal is to help customers infuse AI into their day-to-day processes, including capabilities like AI background expansion and AI background generation for images, allowing users to perform tasks instantly that would previously have required a designer.”
The need for a designer is of course not completely eliminated but marketers will now be empowered to make even more of the simple adaptations on specific assets without outside help, therefore saving time.
Support has been further expanded for Adobe After Effects 26.0. “A lot of our users, particularly marketers, want to use After Effects for design, then create adaptations from those original files. We’re quite unique in offering that level of integration and support, and having access to the latest versions is what customers have been asking for,” says Steve of how Storyteq directly incorporated customers’ needs into its service. Of course the new update is equipped with features to ensure consistency across assets when adapted, what Storyteq terms ‘content-aware positioning’.
With the aid of AI, objects are identified within an asset and a focal point is determined. Steve explains: “It effectively selects the key frame or subject and ensures that any adaptations remain centered around that object,” meaning when content is resized or adapted, “the most important visual element stays in focus automatically, which significantly improves quality and consistency.”
It’s another feature aimed at reducing friction and saving time while doubling down on consistency with marketers having more control at their fingertips though, crucially, it doesn’t eliminate the need for designers – their role is and will remain essential in creating foundational, templated assets for marketers to adapt. “The goal is to increase speed to market without always needing to go back to designers, while still retaining the creative input where it’s needed,” he adds.
More Adaptations with More Control
The integration of AI into the platform empowers marketers to make a bigger range of changes and adaptations through structured form fields via guided, structured control within the platform ensuring that nothing strays from the predefined brand and design rules.
Steve highlights that a key theme in this release includes “how brands can create activation pages faster, natively within our platform. Marketers can copy and paste widgets across CMS pages in their brand portals, using ready‑made widget templates to quickly build brand and campaign guidelines,” he explains. “We’re excited about this because we now have quite a few customers actively using portals at scale.”
On the adaptations side, a vital update to this release is the ability to sync template updates directly from Figma helping designers, builders, and marketers “speed up their workflow and ensure Figma changes are continuously synchronized without manual exports.” Once more, it’s about improving speed and reducing friction in the creative process.
Richer styling controls are deliberately part of this update, “things like text backgrounds, padding, and rounded corners. This reflects customer feedback: users want more control when adapting templates, but not complete freedom, because designers still need to maintain consistency and brand governance,” says Steve, adding “we now support custom brand fonts in After Effects templates, which has been a strong customer request. There’s also support for animated GIF thumbnails, video adaptations, and instant visual previews to improve engagement and accuracy.”
A Future-Facing AI Approach
“From a strategy perspective, we see this AI transition or transformation period playing out over several years,” Steve says. It’s a multi-tiered approach that sees the platform embed AI into its core operations while concurrently preparing for what the future holds: agentic AI.
The first part, as discussed above, embeds AI directly into customer workflows while the next stage is Storyteq’s evolution, reveals Steve, “an agentic layer for marketers”.
“This includes agent builders, orchestration capabilities, and domain-specific agents connected to brand and campaign context. We’ve been running a lot of prototypes with customers in this space already, exploring how agent builders can reduce workload, increase speed, and automate repetitive tasks.”
What Storyteq has seen customers want is the ability to automate more work and use agents such as a copywriting agent or a brand assistant agent to support them in the flow.
“The underlying architecture we’re building, which is a key part of our vision, is designed to support this. Customers may want to build their own agents outside of our platform, but still connect into us as the source of truth for brand, campaign, and asset information,” he explains. “In that sense, we become the AI-powered backbone for content production workflows.”
Eventually, a higher level of control will be possible through these agents, allowing marketers to automate work they previously couldn’t, supported by the brand information and context available within the Storyteq platform, including brand and campaign information. “We already have tools like an AI chatbot, where users can interact with the brand directly, asking for brand identity guidelines or checking whether a piece of copy is brand compliant for a given campaign. Some of this AI capability is already embedded in the flow.”
The key right now is helping marketers build skills and confidence to understand what AI can do and how it can be used effectively. “What we’re seeing, and where we want to take this next, is that once that confidence is established, agents begin to automate more of the work and operate more continuously for the marketer,” says Steve. “At that point, marketers can connect into a wider ecosystem of products, but they will rely on our agents as the single source of truth for brand, assets, and campaign data.”
Storyteq is also embedding these agents across its products so they can be accessed directly, helping to build trust, skills, and governance as marketers transition toward a more agent-driven future.
Supporting Customers Through the AI Transformation
Though Steve is quite new to his role, he’s laser focused on “making sure we’re building toward an AI-powered future for our customers” as he says he “absolutely” believes in a “product- and customer-centric set of solutions that we’re building.”
He joined with a vision and hopes that when he looks back at his first year in the post that he’d addressed a few crucial questions. “Are we getting strong customer feedback; are we seeing increased adoption of the features we’re delivering; and are we continuing to lead in analyst recognition, whether that’s Gartner or Forrester?”
“Ultimately, success means enabling customers to move through an AI transformation, where workflows become more automated, teams can work faster than before, and they can fully harness the agentic capabilities emerging in the market,” he adds.
The explosion in the volume of content produced means the main challenge for Storyteq to address is to enable its customers to manage that complexity with ease, including “how content is created, stored, governed, and distributed. That includes compliance considerations too,” Steve adds, “such as ensuring proper usage rights, talent constraints, and alignment with legislation and contractual obligations.”
With every update, Storyteq is addressing the growing complexity fueled by the content volume boom, giving customers answers to the questions of today while building for the tasks of the future.
In conclusion, Steve says: “With this content explosion, having an AI-powered backbone becomes more important than ever. You need strong control over assets, the ability to reuse them effectively, and a clear content production strategy that is efficient while still meeting the needs of all channels,” and it’s what Storyteq is more than prepared to take on.
This article was originally published by Little Black Book. The original article can be read here.
