Kentico Legacy to Xperience by Kentico: How We Use Personalised AI Agents to Cut Migration Time and Cost

We pair Kentico and .NET engineers with purpose-built AI agents and automation bots, and every output goes through human review. The agents take the repetitive, pattern-heavy work: inventory, mapping, transformation scripts, comparison and documentation. The engineers take everything that needs judgment: architecture, business logic, integrations, security, performance and sign-off.

The principle we work to:

Kentico has stated that Xperience 13 support ends on December 31, 2026. During 2026, support is limited to technical support and security hotfixes. After that date, you're running a platform without normal maintenance.

But a deadline isn't the only reason to move. Anyone who has inherited a decade-old Kentico solution knows what's in there:

• Custom page types and module classes that nobody remembers writing
• Widgets and Page Builder sections with undocumented assumptions
• Event handlers wired into the content lifecycle
• Scheduled tasks, custom data providers and search integrations
• Years of media, metadata and redirect rules
• Third-party connections (CRM, ERP, payment, analytics) held together by tribal knowledge

Rebuilding all of that by hand is slow, and the cost comes from the volume of repetitive work, not from the hard problems.

The classic flow looks like this:

The bigger the site, the worse it gets. And every hour spent on repetitive review is an hour not spent on the parts that carry risk.

Our agents are not a generic chatbot sitting next to the dev team. Each one is scoped to a specific migration task, with defined inputs, outputs and review points. Think of them as a digital migration crew working alongside the human team.

What each agent actually does

1. Discovery Agent: a technical inventory, not a blank spreadsheet

The first agent analyses the existing solution and the live site to build a structured inventory of:

• Site tree, page types and content relationships
• Custom modules, widgets, form components and Page Builder usage
• Media libraries and attachments
• Multilingual structure and culture variants
• Integration points and external dependencies
• Patterns that are likely to be migration risks (heavy custom classes, Portal Engine-era logic, deprecated APIs)

Engineers start the project knowing what's actually in the solution, instead of finding out in week six.

2. Content & Data Mapping Bot: the repetitive middle

Content migration is the most repetitive part of any CMS move. The bot proposes and maintains the mapping between your existing structure and the target Xperience by Kentico model:

It flags mismatches (a field type with no clean equivalent, a relationship that needs restructuring, content that's better reused than duplicated), prepares transformation rules and keeps the mapping documented as it evolves.

Kentico's own Migration Toolkit supports data migration and custom transformations, and Kentico's developer documentation now describes AI-assisted migration with KentiCopilot. We build on these capabilities and add project-specific automation around them.

3. Personalised Code Migration Agent

Custom code is where migrations get hard. Legacy sites rarely run on standard CMS features alone. You'll find custom modules, widgets, business rules, APIs, data providers, scheduled tasks, authentication logic and search implementations.

Our code agent helps engineers to:

• Identify migration candidates and group similar patterns
• Surface deprecated APIs and architectural differences early
• Generate transformation suggestions for repeatable patterns
• Highlight code that needs a human rewrite rather than a port

It does not blindly convert code. It cuts the time engineers spend reading and classifying it, so they can spend that time on design decisions. Kentico documents agent-assisted code migration workflows for Xperience 13 solutions, and we apply the same thinking with project-specific context.

4. SEO Migration Agent

SEO is easy to damage and slow to recover. A site can launch looking perfect and still lose organic traffic because of:

• Changed URLs or missing 301s
• Dropped or rewritten metadata
• Broken internal links
• Incorrect canonicals
• Lost structured data
• Indexation problems
• Changed image URLs

The agent crawls the legacy site and the new build, compares them and reports the differences, so we catch them in staging, not in Search Console.
 

Zenesys' Xperience migration offering includes content, media and metadata migration, URL mapping, 301 redirect management, SEO audits, phased rollout and parallel testing.

5. Validation Agent

Checking every migrated page by hand isn't realistic. The validation agent runs page-level comparisons (content, metadata, URLs, links, components, images) between the legacy page and its Xperience counterpart, then hands anomalies to QA with context.

The agent does the comparing. QA makes the call.

It's a simple chain:

AI doesn't replace Kentico engineers. It makes them more productive. A migration team that would otherwise spend thousands of hours reviewing, mapping, documenting and validating can hand a meaningful share of that to automation, and put the budget into work that moves the project forward.

On a traditional project, complexity adds sequential effort: more pages mean more mapping, more integrations mean more analysis, more languages mean more validation.

With agents, those workstreams can run in parallel.

• Traditional: 1 task → 1 engineer → 1 sequence
• Zenesys: 1 migration program → multiple specialised agents + an engineering team

Repetitive work stops being the bottleneck, and humans can focus on the critical path.

Plenty of companies can build a website. Fewer combine Kentico expertise, .NET engineering, migration experience and AI automation.

Zenesys is a Kentico Gold Partner, with more than 20+ Kentico projects and more than 380+ .NET projects delivered. A Kentico migration is a software engineering project that happens to involve a CMS, so the partner you choose needs both skill sets.

AI as process, not a label

Plenty of vendors say "we use AI." What matters is whether the delivery process is built around it.

Our agents are configured around each project. One client's hardest problem might be content mapping. Another's might be custom code, multilingual content, SEO or integrations. We shape the automation layer to fit rather than forcing every project through the same pipeline. That's what we mean by personalised.

These use publicly documented Zenesys project information. Not every migration client is publicly named, so we've kept the direct Xperience migration case separate from the other named Kentico projects.

Case study 1: Enterprise watch e-commerce platform

Kentico 13 → Xperience by Kentico

A multi-region e-commerce business, selling online and offline, was running Kentico 13 and struggling with scalability, personalisation, complex integrations and high maintenance costs.

Zenesys migrated the solution to Xperience by Kentico, covering content, customer data, product information, media, custom modules and third-party integrations. The project also introduced personalisation and marketing automation.

The case study also reports Power BI integration for deeper analytics, plus continued post-launch support.

Why it matters: with large content volumes, commerce data, customer data, integrations and custom code, rebuilding by hand gets expensive quickly. This is where structured automation pays off.

Not from cutting corners. From removing unnecessary manual labour.

Instead of adding headcount every time page counts, components or data records go up, automation absorbs much of the repetitive load.

What you get

• Lower migration cost: less repetitive engineering effort
• Faster delivery: parallel workstreams instead of a single sequence
• Lower risk: automated comparison surfaces issues earlier
• Better use of senior engineers: more time on architecture, less on spreadsheets
• Better documentation: consistent inventories, mappings and technical docs
• Scalability: the same framework adapts to larger sites, multiple regions and complex content structures

A good migration still depends on experienced engineers. AI should not decide:

• Whether a business rule should change
• Whether an integration should be redesigned
• How critical functionality is architected
• Whether a security risk is acceptable
• Whether an SEO change is safe
• Whether a page should be rebuilt rather than migrated

Those decisions belong to people.

For a CTO, it's a modernisation project. For a CMO, it's a content and experience project. For an e-commerce leader, it's about revenue and conversion. For an investor, it's platform risk and long-term operating cost.

A good Xperience platform should help you reduce technical debt, improve digital agility, protect SEO, improve performance, support personalisation, modernise integrations, cut maintenance overhead and leave room for AI and automation.

Don't just migrate. Rethink.

A migration is often the best chance you'll get to question your architecture. Instead of moving old problems into a new CMS, ask:

• What should we keep?
• What should we improve?
• What should we automate?
• What should we remove?
• What should we redesign?
• What should become AI-driven?

That's where the long-term value is.

• Kentico expertise: a Kentico-focused delivery team and Gold Partner status
• AI-powered automation: personalised agents and bots that reduce repetitive manual work
• .NET engineering: experience with complex .NET applications and enterprise integrations
• Migration experience: publicly documented Kentico migration and modernisation work
• SEO protection: URL mapping, redirects, metadata, auditing and validation built into the plan
• End-to-end support: discovery and architecture through migration, testing, launch and ongoing optimisation

Your legacy Kentico site holds years of investment: content, SEO authority, integrations, customer journeys, business logic and brand. A migration should protect that and make the platform easier and cheaper to evolve.

So, the goal isn't "move our Kentico website."

It's: modernise our digital platform with less manual effort, lower migration risk and a faster path to Xperience by Kentico.

The best time to plan a migration is before the legacy platform turns into an operational problem. With Xperience 13 support ending on December 31, 2026, now is the time to build your strategy.