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The future, thought through

How companies use digitalisation and AI in a human-centered way — analyses, field reports and insights from the arocom workshop. RSS

AI & Strategy Axel Roth · 31 October 2026

Digital sovereignty: Cutting SaaS lock-in

In mid-sized companies, digital sovereignty is rarely a matter of principle and almost always a matter of risk. What happens when a vendor triples the price, drops a feature or shuts the service down? This opinion piece shows four practical levers for reducing SaaS dependencies, without lapsing into self-sufficiency romance.

AI & Strategy

Making business processes AI-ready

AI amplifies your processes, it does not repair them. Automate an unclear workflow and you get a faster unclear workflow. This guide shows how to make business processes AI-ready: document them, clarify data flows, check the interfaces and improve in small steps instead of one big rebuild.

Axel Roth · 17 October 2026 · 13 minutes

AI & Strategy

What does an AI integration really cost?

Ask what an AI integration costs and you often get an "it depends". That is true, but it helps no one. This guide breaks the cost into five blocks, names solid ballpark figures, points out the hidden items, and says when the investment pays off and when it does not.

Axel Roth · 03 October 2026 · 12 minutes

From Practice

On an equal footing with IT: Translation guide

Many bad decisions in web projects do not start in the technology, they start in the translation. Words like sprint, lead or story point sound familiar but mean something specific. A guide for decision-makers: the key terms explained, the right follow-up questions, and the anti-patterns that quietly sink projects.

Axel Roth · 19 September 2026 · 11 minutes

AI & Strategy

Agent-ready websites for B2B companies

A growing share of your website visitors is not human but an AI agent researching, comparing and preparing on behalf of a person. What that means for B2B websites, why pretty pages are not enough here and where mid-sized companies should sensibly start.

Axel Roth · 05 September 2026 · 8 minutes

From Practice

AI workflow in a client project: Real numbers

AI time savings get claimed often and measured rarely. In one client project we rebuilt a content workflow and wrote down the numbers: what actually changed, where the AI slipped up, and what was left once we honestly counted the rework.

Axel Roth · 22 August 2026 · 9 minutes

From Practice

Drupal hosting 2026: Criteria and costs

The hosting decision looks technical but is above all a business decision about costs, responsibility, and where data lives. Whoever looks only at the monthly price buys the most expensive mistake. Managed versus self-hosted, EU data location, the honest cost model, and a checklist for the choice.

Axel Roth · 08 August 2026 · 12 minutes

Binders with contracts on a desk next to a laptop showing a contract overview

AI & Strategy

Your own assistants, interchangeable models: what an AI platform is for

An AI platform gets bought so that departments can build their own assistants and the model behind them stays interchangeable. What holds up contractually is what we work through against Langdock: how to tell whether a data processing agreement is solid, what bundling onto one provider actually saves, and which EU AI Act obligation hits every organisation that switches AI on.

Axel Roth · 07 August 2026 · 8 minutes

Small team in an office discussing the rollout of an AI platform around a meeting table

From Practice

Six decisions before an AI platform

An AI platform is set up in a morning. What takes longer are six decisions that have to be made first: controllership, permitted data, purpose, ownership, seats, exit. This piece describes them and names, for each one, the sign in daily work that tells you it is still open in your organisation.

Axel Roth · 07 August 2026 · 7 minutes

AI & Strategy

Drupal's strategy for 2026: AI everywhere, decisions with people

Drupal has revised its product strategy through 2028. AI is a design principle in it: every step of work should be operable by agents, while approval stays with people. The strategy also names a budget range that clearly means the mid-market. What follows from that for your next web project.

Axel Roth · 27 July 2026 · 8 minutes

AI & Strategy

AI adoption: Bringing the team along

Technology is rarely the problem when you introduce AI. The problem is the quiet reservations no one voices. How to guide a team through the rollout without creating a culture of fear: pilot groups, transparency, training, and the mistakes that cost trust.

Axel Roth · 25 July 2026 · 11 minutes

Marketing & Visibility

Content that convinces humans AND machines

Good web copy has always had to work for two readers: the human who buys and the machine that ranks. In the AI era the two move closer together. What an AI likes to cite usually convinces the human as well. How to write copy that serves both readers without sliding into keyword prose.

Laura Murgia · 11 July 2026 · 12 minutes

Marketing & Visibility

llms.txt, schema & co.: Making your website readable for AI assistants

AI assistants read your website differently than a human does. They look for the spot that answers a question, not for the nice layout. This guide shows what AI crawlers actually evaluate, which schema types give you the biggest lever, and why llms.txt is a sensible bet but not a must.

Laura Murgia · 27 June 2026 · 13 minutes

AI & Strategy

The EU AI Act for mid-sized companies: What applies from 2026

The EU AI Act is here, and most mid-sized companies are far less affected than the headlines suggest. One question decides almost everything: are you a provider or a deployer of an AI system? This guide sorts out the duties, with a view to the timeline through 2028.

Axel Roth · 13 June 2026 · 11 minutes

From Practice

Empathy Maps: Understand users before the AI starts

AI produces text, layouts and code in minutes today. That makes an old question more important, not less: are we even building the right thing? Empathy maps are a simple tool for aligning digital projects with real user needs before the first budget is spent.

Laura Murgia · 12 June 2026 · 9 minutes

Marketing & Visibility

Cookieless tracking 2026: why we rely on Umami

Third-party cookies are gone, and consent banners cost both data and trust. That is why we moved our web analytics to Umami: cookieless, self-hosted, no banner. A comparison of the common tracking tools from the perspective of a mid-sized website operator, as of 2026.

Laura Murgia · 10 June 2026 · 11 minutes

AI & Strategy

AI terms for decision-makers: what you need to know in 2026

In AI meetings, knowing the vocabulary often decides who shapes the outcome. This guide explains the ten terms you will encounter in proposals, pitches and strategy papers in 2026: what they mean, what they cost and which question you should ask about each one.

Axel Roth · 05 June 2026 · 10 minutes

AI & Strategy

Human centered. AI first. What we mean by that

For us, "AI first" does not mean replacing people with AI. It means we check every task first to see whether AI can do it better, faster or more thoroughly. Responsibility and judgement stay with people. This article describes what that means in practice.

Axel Roth · 02 June 2026 · 9 minutes

From Practice

Why web projects fail: 5 mistakes from 14 years of agency practice

Web projects rarely fail because of the technology. They fail because of unclear budgets, missing decision-makers and the time after launch. Five mistakes we have seen again and again since 2012, and what has changed about them since AI entered project work.

Axel Roth · 28 May 2026 · 12 minutes

Marketing & Visibility

AI referrals: Who actually comes from ChatGPT to your website?

Visitors coming from ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews show up as "Direct" in many statistics and stay invisible. Yet they are the fastest-growing source of qualified inquiries. Here is how to make AI referrals visible and read the numbers correctly.

Laura Murgia · 20 May 2026 · 9 minutes

AI & Strategy

AI strategy for mid-sized companies: From pilots to execution

2024 was for experimenting, 2025 for piloting. 2026 separates the companies that bring AI into running processes from those stuck in the demo loop. A roadmap for mid-sized companies: four steps, typical dead ends, and the role your own website plays in it.

Axel Roth · 12 May 2026 · 12 minutes

AI & Strategy

Make or buy for AI solutions: A decision guide for mid-sized companies

Subscribe to a ready-made AI tool or have your own solution built? The question decides years of costs and dependencies. A decision guide with four criteria and the three hybrid approaches that win most often in practice.

Axel Roth · 28 April 2026 · 11 minutes

From Practice

AI workflows in Drupal 11: What really relieves editorial teams

In our projects, editorial teams spend up to a third of their time on tasks that are not editorial decisions: metadata, teaser variants, alt texts, raw translation drafts. A field report on how we delegate such tasks to AI in Drupal 11 and where the line runs.

Axel Roth · 21 April 2026 · 10 minutes

Inside arocom

How we run SEO audits today: Human plus pipeline

An SEO audit used to mean two weeks of grunt work: crawling, building spreadsheets, typing up findings. Today a tool pipeline handles the data work in minutes. What that has really changed about our work, and what clients get out of it. A report from our workshop.

Laura Murgia · 15 April 2026 · 8 minutes

Marketing & Visibility

GEO: Staying visible when AI gives the answers

In our consulting practice we see it more and more: buying decisions no longer start with ten blue links but with an AI answer. If you are not cited there, you do not exist, even with a number one position in the classic ranking. What changes with GEO compared to SEO, what stays the same, and where to start.

Laura Murgia · 30 March 2026 · 11 minutes

From Practice

One year of BFSG: Accessibility as a quality feature

One year of BFSG obligations for private companies: some ticked off checklists. Others understood that accessibility is a quality feature that helps all users, and AI search along the way. Learnings from our accessibility projects of the past year.

Axel Roth · 17 February 2026 · 10 minutes

Inside arocom

Inside arocom: How we work with AI ourselves

We advise companies on AI, so we show how we use it ourselves: in development, content work, SEO analysis and on our own website. A workshop report with numbers, failures and the things we abolished again.

Axel Roth · 20 January 2026 · 8 minutes

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