Xperience by Kentico’s September update brings new AIRA translation features, flexible image variants, and SecOps-ready Azure managed identities - plus more enhancements you won’t want to miss.

Faster content localization with AIRA linked item and bulk localization

We've released a number of AIRA-based features recently because we know how impactful in-product AI-driven actions and insights are for marketers managing customer experiences across channels and languages.

The latest feature, focused on faster content translation, has been improved this month with linked item and bulk content translations, and a new Translations queue application.

Linked item translations

Marketers don’t launch campaigns in isolation. Campaigns are group efforts, crossing team boundaries and combining people and content. AIRA's new linked item translation supports that content composition publishing story for a multi-lingual audience.

When a marketer translates a website article, landing page, or reusable FAQ item in the Content hub they can use AIRA to create the localized draft in seconds. AIRA translates the structured text fields of the content item and the Page Builder content of web pages.

A content item can also link to other content. AIRA now offers to translate all those linked content items, and the items they link to. This is very similar to cascade publishing, which we released in December 2023.

In the video above, translating an article with AIRA leads to a dialog showing all the linked content items that can also be translated as part of this translation operation. All untranslated items are selected by default, but marketers can opt-in or out of including each linked item as needed.

Once confirmed, AIRA begins the translation process and a "translation in progress" message is displayed to the marketer.

These translations can complete in seconds, but if many linked items are being translated the operation will take a bit longer. To give marketers observability into the translation tasks AIRA is currently working on, we added a new Translation queue application accessible from Xperience's dashboard.

Once the translation of the page is complete, the page refreshes, the new content item language variant is set to a Draft publishing state, and the marketer can review the current item and all linked translated items before finishing their publishing workflow.

Bulk item translations in the Content hub

Sometimes a marketer isn't working on a specific campaign but instead they're creating reusable content for existing pages or multiple channels.

After authoring and crafting that messaging and assets in their customer's primary language, it can be daunting to imagine translating it all, never mind doing it for multiple languages.

Thankfully, the Content hub now supports bulk translations!

Taking advantage of the same Translation queue feature used by linked items translations, marketers can select multiple items in the Content hub, and click the "Translate using AIRA" quick action.

This reveals a dialog showing the selected items and any linked items ready for translation, which the marketer can again opt-in and out of.

Confirmed translations head off to the queue, at which point the marketer can move on to other tasks as the five (or fifty) content items are translated in the background by AI, following the marketing team's specific translation guidance and tone-of-voice instructions.

Improved image asset control with scaled images variants

AIRA focal point detection for image assets go hand-in-hand with image asset variants, which let teams define how image cropping works in Xperience by Kentico channels.

These crop variants are great for grid layouts, galleries, and any visual experience where consistent image dimensions are important.

But, what about images that need to be optimized for their container, shrinking the max image width or height based on the screen size or location within some other UI element? We don't want to crop these images, we just want to intelligently and dynamically shrink them to speed up the experience for customers.

The image variant feature for image assets in the Content hub has been updated to support a new type of variant - the scaled variant.

Scaling lets the user specify which image dimension(s) needs to be optimized, ensuring the aspect ratio stays the same without any cropping. This type of image optimization is key for fast experiences on mobile or low-powered devices and for ranking well in search engines..

What if you've already adopted smart cropping for image assets and you want to take advantage of scaled variants?

Thankfully, updating the variants settings for your application will trigger the Update asset variants scheduled task, ensuring all image assets support the new scale variants you add. You can adopt scale variants where it makes sense for your team and digital experiences.

With AIRA driven smart cropping and scale variants based on visual designs, marketers can rely on Xperience to deliver the best image to every customer for every experience.

Simple, secured infrastructure and managed identities

Customers using Xperience by Kentico's Azure Storage support for persisting and securing digital assets rely on a set of predefined shared access key credentials that give Xperience access to the assets in an Azure storage container.

These security credentials need to be managed by DevOps or SecOps teams responsible for updating and securing applications.

If the storage infrastructure is accessed by multiple applications or users, auditing that access can be difficult because of the shared nature of those credentials.

We now support managed identities as an alternative authentication mechanism for Azure Storage infrastructure. How is this different than the shared key approach? Managed identities offer the following security benefits and best practices..

  • Automatic key rotation

  • Explicit access assignment through Azure RBAC (role-based access control)

  • No user-stored or user-accessible access keys

Both authentication techniques are supported in Xperience, so you can adopt whichever fits your team's cloud hosting experience and security requirements.

If your team is unfamiliar with cloud deployment, hosting, and security best practices for Xperience by Kentico, rely on our offering with Xperience by Kentico SaaS.

What's next?

As always, check out our documentation Changelog for the full Refresh feature and technical details.

We hope these new capabilities and API improvements unlock new solutions for you. Try them out, let us know 👋 what you think.

The October 2025 Refresh looks exciting, covering a wide range of product capabilities.

These updates will, as always, arrive alongside additional UX refinements and developer-focused enhancements.

Check back next month for another Xperience by Kentico Refresh review!

For the technical audience, this Refresh is represented by v30.10.0 of Xperience by Kentico.