Drupal AI Initiative – Intelligent digital experiences for all

Why an AI initiative?

Drupal already has more than 290 AI modules and integrations with 21 major AI providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Azure, Google Vertex and Hugging Face. The aim of the initiative is to transform these scattered developments into a strategic, open platform - with a clear vision, governance and product-oriented APIs.

Structure & Participation

• Leadership Team: Committed community members such as Jamie Abrahams (FreelyGive), Dominique De Cooman (Dropsolid), Kristen Pol (Salsa Digital) as well as Dries Buytaert (Drupal founder) and Baddý & Christoph Breidert (1xINTERNET) are leading the initiative.

  Advisory Board & Finance: Includes Drupal Association, sponsors such as Acquia, Dropsolid, 1xINTERNET - with a funding package of approximately $1.5 million including in-kind contributions until the end of 2025.

  Technical Implementation: A dedicated team (around 10 full-time employees) develops modules, UX design, releases and ensures transparency and governance.

Focus & Use Cases

1. AI‑Content Assistants

   • Intelligent editors and chatbots that build content structures, optimize texts and automatically suggest alt texts for images.

2. No‑Code AI Agents (Agentic Framework, Version 1.1.0)

   • Configurable AI agents for chatbots, APIs, widgets without code, linkable with models from OpenAI, Google Vertex, Anthropic and many more.

3. Governance & Compliance

   • Transparent audit trails, flexible model selection (“bring your own LLM”), auditing and data protection compliance - also ideal for public administrations.

4. Open‑Source‑First Principle

   • No vendor lock-in: open modules, interchangeability of models and community-led innovation.

First Initiatives & Community-Offerings

• Webinar Series (in cooperation with the EU Commission): Free training on architecture, ethics and practice.

  Tools in Drupal CMS 1.0: AI agents for no-code site building, recipes and automatic assistance functions.

Future Prospects - what's next?

1. Out-of-the-box KI‑Experience‑Builder
   The Experience Builder with AI support is to be integrated into Drupal CMS by summer 2025 - keyword for more no-code power for editors.

2. Industry-specific AI-Distributions
   Preconfigured Drupal distributions with an AI focus - e.g. for media, e-commerce, public administration or accessibility.

3. Adaptive Personalization & Data‑Driven Experiences
   Inline multichannel personalization in real time, dynamic content based on user profile and context.

4. AI-Security & Compliance Standards
   Automatic threat detection, policy check (e.g. GDPR), adaptive authentication with AI support.

5. Drupal as model-agnostic Open‑Source-AI-Player
   Promotion of local or self-hosted LLMs (e.g. Ollama) to decouple from large tech providers - also resulting from community debates.

6. Integration into the Drupal DevOps process
   Automated coding, testing, security checks and module updates using AI-supported tools - a clear community trend.

Conclusion

The Drupal AI Initiative is far more than just hype about generative AI: it structures the diverse developments in the Drupal ecosystem, establishes clear governance rules and promotes productively usable AI applications - from alt text to automated site building. Through open standards, diverse participation and strong funding, Drupal lays the foundation for an AI-supported, modern digital experience framework in 2025 and takes a pioneering position in the competition.

Outlook: The initiative will become visible in the coming months in the form of AI assistants for editors, experience builders with AI, specialized distributions and AI-first development workflows - ideal for agencies, government agencies and companies that want to build intelligent, human-centric Drupal experiences.

As a German community, we see the international participation in this initiative and are excited to see what further progress the community will make.