Tom Cranstoun

Tom Cranstoun has been building content systems since 1977 — before the term "CMS" existed. He co-authored Superbase, one of the earliest database platforms. He worked on the BBC's electronic newsroom system. He led the world's largest Adobe Experience Manager implementation at Nissan-Renault.

In 2024, he wrote the CMS Critic piece that identified the tipping point — when designing for machines became as important as designing for humans. That insight became Machine Experience.

Tom is a long-standing member of Boye & Company's CMS Experts community.

Tom created The Gathering — an independent, open standards body for metadata that helps machines understand documents. Modelled on the W3C: the standards body governs the specification; commercial implementers build products on it.

The problem it solves: AI agents cannot share memory. Every agent starts from zero every time it encounters a document. The result is hallucination, wasted inference compute, and lost revenue — a river cruise priced at £2,030 misread as £203,000, NHS drug interactions lost, support articles contradicted.

The Gathering governs the COG metadata standard — a comprehensive specification covering document identity, governance, security, AI policy, provenance, and execution. Structured metadata that makes documents machine-readable from the start, so agents never have to guess.