The Benefits of KentiCopilot: What Digital Agencies are Experiencing
Key Takeaways
- KentiCopilot is turning development into a commodity, pushing agencies toward outcome-based pricing and higher margins.
- BlueModus cut a $300,000 LivaNova migration to under half the cost using KentiCopilot.
- PortalGrup's KentiCopilot use cut effort by 28% across 21 projects, saving 147 dev days.
- Luminary rebuilt a 192-component site in one week, a job that once took six months.
- KentiCopilot cut PortalGrup's QA prep from 5 days to 1 and bug analysis from 4 hours to 1.
- Agencies now price for outcomes, with PortalGrup targeting 45% productivity gains by 2026.
It's no secret that AI is transforming software development, and built-in AI tools like KentiCopilot are pushing this evolution even further. Productivity and innovation are now front and center for every project, with the ability to meet project deadlines faster opening new doors for growth and creative problem-solving.
From fast onboarding to streamlined QA, digital agencies are finding new ways to boost developer productivity and improve outcomes for their clients with KentiCopilot. Here's a look at the results our partners are seeing across migrations, productivity, modernization, and more.
1. Faster (and cheaper) migrations with built-in AI workflows
Migrations used to be seen as projects that quickly eat up time and cost. Content mapping and re-platforming involved unavoidable (and lengthy) manual work on top of costs at risk of increasing as the project progresses and roadblocks are discovered.
BlueModus has figured out how to leverage KentiCopilot to eliminate two common migration problems at once; shortening the time it takes to deliver a migration project and decreasing the cost. Their team took on the migration of LivaNova, a project that under their old delivery model would have carried a price tag north of $300,000, and used KentiCopilot's agentic workflows to compress the timeline dramatically without cutting corners on quality. The result was a fundamentally different cost structure for the entire category of work.
"We've commoditized migrations effectively. $200,000 migrations done in a couple of weeks. A site like LivaNova would normally be a $300,000 migration, we did it for less than half."
PortalGrup reported similar benefits, and shared numbers from a full portfolio of projects:
"Across 21 development and project engagements, AI-assisted delivery with KentiCopilot cut our total effort by 28 percent, saving 147 days of development days. Work that used to compress our margins now runs profitably."
2. Increased productivity with the same development team
Agencies can be limited with team capacity, as demands increase and time becomes scarce. This caps revenue, regardless of how much client demand is sitting in the pipeline. KentiCopilot makes it possible to get more done without needing to hire additional development support for time-consuming projects. Because KentiCopilot understands Kentico-specific architectural best practices directly into the tooling, guardrails are already built into how the AI assistant generates and structures code.
"Our first build on Xperience by Kentico delivered a 60 percent productivity gain, the highest in our entire portfolio. With agentic development and KentiCopilot tooling, boilerplate and standard components came together 2 to 3 times faster, and because Kentico best practices are built in, our .NET developers new to the platform reached senior-level output almost immediately."
Luminary put that same dynamic to the test on a project with real personal stakes: rebuilding their own decade-old production website, spanning more than 70 content types and 192 components, off a headless CMS and onto Xperience by Kentico. Perhaps one of the most impressive aspects of this project was completed in a single week, outside normal working hours, by one person.
Andy Thompson described what that would have looked like before KentiCopilot:
"To build an entire website like this manually, it would probably take six months and consume a lot of internal resources, and we'd end up with something that looks exactly the same."
The widget-building process in particular stands out, making the difference between estimating effort in hours per component and watching dozens of components materialize in the time it takes to get coffee.
"In the past, you might have estimated hours per widget, but it just built 80 distinct widgets in 5 minutes. Incredibly, incredibly good.
3. Easier modernization for legacy platforms
Modernizing old .NET and jQuery applications, upgrading, and migrating to entirely new platforms used to intimidate clients under pressure with time. Code often goes undocumented, and the time and effort required to manually untangle years of accumulated technical issues rarely lines up with what a client is willing to pay for what looks like "just an upgrade."
PortalGrup's experience suggests that has changed. With repetitive untangling and re-implementation work now assisted by KentiCopilot's agentic tooling, projects that would have been considered too time consuming are back on the table, and making profit.
"Modernizing legacy .NET and jQuery applications onto Kentico used to be too costly to pitch. With AI and KentiCopilot agentic development tooling, our legacy modernization work now runs 33 percent more efficiently. On a single project alone, we saved about 66 man-days. Projects we once walked away from are now viable."
iMedia is applying that same foundation to a more specific and time-sensitive task: upgrades to Xperience by Kentico from Kentico Xperience 13 ahead of its end of support deadline. They've built KentiCopilot directly into the core of their migration process for support, alongside their own internal tooling.
"At iMedia, we use KentiCopilot as a foundation for our Kentico Xperience 13 migration process. Combined with our own tooling, built on the skills and capabilities Kentico has provided, it helps our teams accelerate page and component migrations, maintain consistency across large implementations, and reduce the time spent on repetitive development tasks. This allows our experts to focus more of their attention on architecture, quality assurance, performance, and delivering better digital experiences for our clients."
4. AI-assisted QA that pays for itself
Quality assurance is usually the first thing to get squeezed on a tight project budget (even though everyone agrees it's important). But writing thorough test scenarios and tracking down the root cause of a reported bug is detail-heavy work that's tough to shorten without cutting corners, which is why agencies infrequently offer it as a standalone service rather than as a part of the cost of a project as a whole.
PortalGrup found that AI-assisted QA changes it into something clients seek out on their own, without worrying about stretching out the timeline to go live.
"AI and KentiCopilot let us productize QA work we could never offer profitably before. Test scenario preparation dropped from 5 days to 1, and bug root-cause analysis from 4 hours to 1. QA is now a high-margin, repeatable service we bring to every client, not an afterthought."
5. Reusable solutions built with AI coding
Not every win shows up as a percentage. Sometimes the more durable value is the tools that are created once that prove to be useful over and over again, in any project. TrueLime kept running into the same request across their Xperience by Kentico projects: every client needed a consistent way to manage global settings alongside channel-specific overrides, and without a standard approach, the logic was often reinvented (slightly differently, and slightly less reliably) on every new engagement.
Rather than solving it once per client, TrueLime used KentiCopilot to build the solution a single time as a proper, reusable package, and then released it publicly so other agencies in the Kentico ecosystem wouldn't have to solve the same problem from scratch.
"We repeatedly needed a consistent way to manage global and channel-specific settings across our Xperience by Kentico projects. With the help of KentiCopilot, we turned this recurring requirement into XperienceCommunity.ProjectSettings, a reusable community package. This allowed us to accelerate development, standardize our approach, and share the solution with the wider Kentico community."
The biggest impact? Higher margins with outcome-based pricing
Beyond numbers, the most interesting story is what agencies are choosing to do with the time and margin they've won back since the introduction of KentiCopilot. It would be easy to just take on more of the same work and call it a win. Instead, the partners we talked to are treating this as a moment to redefine what they're offering. BlueModus took a direct approach. If development is being commoditized, it's an opportunity to embrace a new strategy.
"We realized and we've embraced that development is no longer the value-add that we bring. Development is now a commodity. So as an agency, we're shifting to a strategic consultancy that does development."
PortalGrup is framing this change to development by specifically pricing for productivity:
"We are not doing the same work faster; we are changing what we sell. With consistent gains from AI and the KentiCopilot toolset across new builds, legacy modernization, and QA, we price for outcomes instead of hours, and we are targeting a 45 percent productivity gain by the end of 2026."
What KentiCopilot means for your agency
Migrations now turn a larger profit, developers new to the platform get a jump start almost immediately, and QA is now something clients are willing to include in their project timelines.
The agencies quoted here are using their newfound speed and extra productivity from KentiCopilot to bring their business model to the future. If you're building on Xperience by Kentico and haven't put KentiCopilot to work yet, this is the perfect moment to give it a try for your next project. It's available to every partner developer at no additional cost, and it plugs directly into the tools your team already uses: GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and Cursor.
Get into the details and discover what developers are building by exploring our blog, What Developers Are Building with KentiCopilot. There's a good chance you'll walk away from the blog with new inspiration for speeding up (and innovating) the projects you're already working on.
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