T3CON25: AI is eating your servers... and your CMS

Two years ago, I thought that whole AI thing was just a passing fad. Turns out, it’s not. AI has changed how we interact with the web and enables a completely new approach on automation, built on emerging standards like MCP that allow us to build autonomous (and vendor-independent!) AI agents. In this talk, I’ll present my own journey through the world of AI — not just from a user perspective, but also how we built our own AI products like the TYPO3 Smart Extension Builder, our own MCP servers, our own LLM hosting platform — and how all of this fits together and into a larger ecosystem like the TYPO3 world.

Transcript

1. MARTIN HELMICH @mittwald AI IS EATING YOUR SERVERS ( AND YOUR CMS )
2. I WAS TALKING TO A COLLEAGUE THE OTHER DAY…
4. “CAN YOU BUILD ME AN AI ASSISTANT THAT HELPS ME DO <random-business-thing>?”
5. “HOLD MY BEER” “CAN YOU BUILD ME AN AI ASSISTANT THAT HELPS ME DO <random-business-thing>?”
7. M Greetings, fellow robot! Can you help me solve <random enterprisey business problem> for customer <customernumber>? Why yes, of course I can! TOOL CALL martin_test_retrieve_customer_details Looks like customer <customernumber>’s issue is that their foo doesn’t have enough bars. Would you like me to fix that?
8. Looks like customer <customernumber>’s issue is that their foo doesn’t have enough bars. Would you like me to fix that? M Why do you even need to ask, stupid machine? Happily! Let’s fix the customer’s issue, then! TOOL CALL martin_test_bar_the_foo Looks like the customer’s foo is now sufficiently bar’ed. Anything else?
9. “NICE. BUT WHERE’S THE UI?”
10. “NICE. BUT WHERE’S THE UI?” “WHAT UI?”
11. mittwald Chief Technology Evangelist Head of Developer Relations TYPO3 Association Board Member PHWT Lecturer, Software Engineering & Cloud Computing MARTIN HELMICH
12. Y A A ET NOTHER ALK WELCOME TO I T
13. mittwald’s first L40S NVIDIA cards in production PRESENTING
14. LEADFYNDR AI-powered lead generation that finds German companies needing website work—perfectly matched to your agency's expertise.
15. SMART EXTENSION BUILDER AI-powered TYPO3 extension generator that creates complete boilerplate code in 15 minutes—skip the repetitive work, focus on the logic.
18. HOSTING MY OWN AI MODELS SINCE 2025 https://www.mittwald.de/mstudio/ai-hosting
19. THINGS I’VE SEEN PEOPLE DO WITH AI
20. WHAT’S HAPPENING IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD?
22. SIDE NOTE (for Drupal users) $ composer require mittwald/drupal-ai-provider $ drush en ai_provider_mittwald https://packagist.org/packages/mittwald/drupal-ai-provider
24. HOT TAKE : Does your CMS still need a basic text editing AI, when your OS offers that, anyway?
26. PRESENTING : THE AI AGENT agents take specialized jobs within a complex workflow complex WORKFLOWS are implemented by DIVISION OF LABOUR across multiple agents agents can use TOOLS AUTONOMOUSLY
28. BRINGING THE AI INTO YOUR CMS… BRINGING YOUR CMS INTO THE AI? OR
29. M C P ODEL ONTEXT ROTOCOL SEE MORE https://modelcontextprotocol.io/ composer require hn/typo3-mcp-server SHOUT OUT @ MARCO PFEIFFER : https://github.com/hauptsacheNet/typo3-mcp-server
32. HOW DOES THIS CHANGE… …how we interact with such systems? …whether we even need a backend any longer? …our products and business models?
33. OWN YOUR AI
34. API ENDPOINT https://api.openai.com/v1 https://llm.aihosting.mittwald.de/v1 http://localhost:11434/v1 https://ollama.com/ https://api.whatever-ai-provider.example/v1
35. READ : “How agencies can build smart chatbots with n8n and mittwald AI hosting” (german) https://www.mittwald.de/blog/hosting/wie-agenturen-mit-container-hosting-und-ai-hosting-smarte-chatbots-bauen
36. READ : “Let’s build an AI-driven Search on our website” SHOUT - OUT @ FRANK https://code711.de/talks/lets-build-an-ai-driven-search-on-our-website
37. SEMANTIC/VECTOR SEARCH VECTOR STORE Redis, PostgreSQL, qdrant, … CONTENT QUERY EMBEDDING MODEL SEARCH RESULT Embeddings (for chunks) Embeddings (for query) Content
38. I WAS TALKING TO A COLLEAGUE THE OTHER DAY…
39. “I WANT TO FEED ALL MY DATA INTO THE AI AND HAVE IT SOLVE MY PROBLEMS”
40. “I WANT TO FEED ALL MY DATA INTO THE AI AND HAVE IT SOLVE MY PROBLEMS” “UHMM…”
41. RETRIEVAL - AUGMENTED GENERATION VECTOR STORE Redis, PostgreSQL, qdrant, … CONTENT QUERY EMBEDDING MODEL CHAT MODEL Embeddings (for chunks) Embeddings (for query) Content RESPONSE (in natural language)
42. DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY WHAT DOES MEAN, ANYWAY?
43. Own work CAVEAT OR : “WHAT PEOPLE TEND TO GET WRONG ABOUT DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY”
44. DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY IS NOT… swapping dependency to an US vendor for dependency to an EU vendor DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY IS… …not being dependent on any one single vendor …being able to control where your data doen(n’t) go
45. https://www.mittwald.de/karriere WE’RE HIRING Infrastructure Engineer CMS Support Engineer Product Owner CMS Hosting CMS Product Marketing Manager (all genders, on-site) MARTIN HELMICH m.helmich@mittwald.de martin.helmich@typo3.org