How TinyMCE Is Bringing AI Directly Into The Content Creation Workflow

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[00:00:48] So if you've been trying to simplify your stack while improving visibility, please check it out at nordlayer.com slash browser. But now it's time for me to introduce you to today's guest. What happens when AI stops living in a separate tab and starts working exactly where the work is already happening?

[00:01:13] Well, today I'm joined by the Principal Product Manager at TinyMCE. And we're going to talk about a shift that many software teams are wrestling with right now. Because for the last couple of years, a lot of AI adoption has involved many people bouncing between tools. They write in one place, ask AI an assistant for help in another, copy that output back, fix the formatting, check the tone, then repeat the process again when something changes.

[00:01:43] And yet, that might feel normal now, but it's also creating friction everywhere. And content teams can quickly lose focus. Developers get asked to bolt AI features onto products without adding complexity. And business leaders want productivity gains, but they also want control, consistency and governance. Now, TinyMCE AI is taking a different approach by placing the AI inside the editor itself.

[00:02:12] And that means conversational AI, document-aware assistance, quick text actions, quality reviews, and custom prompts that can all sit inside the content creation workflow rather than outside of it. And my guest has a fascinating perspective because TinyMCE has been part of the web's hidden infrastructure for years. And that is something I want to talk about too, because many people use it without even knowing its name.

[00:02:41] So today, we're going to talk about rich text editing, developer experiences, AI inside workflows, governance, and what it really means to build tools that help people create better content. And do it in a way without pulling them away from the task in front of them. But enough for me. Let me introduce you to my guest now. So a massive warm welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me today.

[00:03:08] For everybody listening, can you tell them a little about who you are and what you do? Yes. So I'm Frederik Danielsson. I'm a product manager at TinyMCE. I'm living in Sweden. And I've been working on the internet from basically the very beginning. I made my first website before I even had an internet connection. I was using Photoshop version 2 and so on.

[00:03:37] So yeah, I'm pretty old in the game. Yeah. You and me both. I mean, those days of Photoshop 2 and Front Page Express. Do you remember those days? Oh, yes. So this is like, it's quite a fun segue into where I'm at today. Because like my history with Tiny and TinyMCE goes back to that very beginning. In those early days of 2000, we were doing Macromedia Flash. If you remember that.

[00:04:06] These amazing multimedia campaign websites. And I was working there with two colleagues, Joachim and Spocky, who co-founded TinyMCE. And we were back then like building these sites in Flash. And we needed some way, you know, to update those. Have the customer be able to go in and update. Because, you know, back then everything was, you hand-coded everything.

[00:04:33] So we were very early on building this CMS, a content management system for these Flash websites. And from that, probably 2002 or something like that, they were spun up and called Moxicode. And they created what they called Moxicode Content Editor. So the CMS did not survive. But the editor did. Because it turns out that was solving a really hard problem.

[00:05:02] Where you, like, you had, you know, you said front page and those tools. Like, and I don't recall the other one that they had. Very popular. But this one was, you know, you could embed this in your own tool as a developer. And, you know, let your users create Visivig, HTML, and so on. So that, and they were very believers of open source.

[00:05:28] So they were picking, they were creating this open source project. And it got picked up by many of the major CMSs pretty early on, including WordPress. You know, that was truly through, you know, WordPress most dominant period. So you can imagine, like, every WordPress site over the length of maybe 10 years.

[00:05:57] That has been used TinyMC and that editor to create the blog posts and websites, anything. So it's borderline half of the internet. The human-created content of it has been created by Tiny. And that's staggering numbers. It really is. It's such a cool story of how far we've come from, I don't know, front page and uploading through FileZilla or something like that.

[00:06:23] And I think now everything's made so easy for people that we almost take the tech behind it for granted. And your work touches a part of the web that many people listening will be taking for granted. And that is rich text editing. So how do you explain that hidden complexity behind something as simple as writing in a browser? And what problems are developers still trying to solve in this space here in 2026? It's a great question and a difficult one.

[00:06:51] Like, it's easy to do the basic stuff. To some extent, that's like if you just need the bold and the italic. Nowadays, that's pretty. But you're trying to build an experience, especially our customers. They are trying to solve problems. So it's not really about the rich text editor. It's the problem behind that. And we can talk more about that.

[00:07:21] Like, you have, for example, a person applying for a job. Yeah. And they're sitting there and they need to present themselves at their best. So there cannot be any spelling errors in that document. And it has to be formatted right and look good.

[00:07:44] You might have a team of lawyers collaborating to make this contract for this $100 million deal. A company merger, for example. That contract just has to be accurate. You cannot simply have a wrong clause slip into the document and so on. It would be devastating.

[00:08:09] Or that you have the big pharma or, you know, government having these people coming in with this word, word documents. And you're going to upload those medicine, what's it called? The slips that tells you what the medicine is. And you have this word document that they bring you. And you have to get that into a database and format it in a standard way.

[00:08:35] And, you know, like, you can't have errors in those tools, medicine leaflets. You just have to be right. So I think that is remembering, like, that is the problems that we're solving with the rich text editor. It's not just a rich text editor. It's the content creation that the problem, the content creation problems that companies and end users are trying to solve.

[00:09:01] And that sort of, we have been around for so long that we have so many of those pieces. So that any content problem someone has on the internet, they can come to Tiny and they can piece together the editor that they need and solve those problems. So I think that's solving the right questions.

[00:09:29] And you do have a long history with open source and cloud native communities. What does healthy participation look like today? And how can companies contribute without falling into that trap of treating open source as a free resource rather than a shared responsibility? Have you seen many big changes there? I mean, it has declined a little bit, to be honest. Like, open source isn't really what it was before.

[00:09:57] The sort of old open source were very much about the community. And you had those more restrictive licenses so that where you were using it open source, you were supposed to contribute everything back.

[00:10:10] But nowadays, and it has been for 10 years or so, with MIT licenses, and it has shifted almost to these big companies outputting their technology as open source, almost as a marketing tactic. And a lot of those projects get a lot of traction.

[00:10:33] You have, you know, the huge one, you know, the React from Facebook, you have the Angular from Google and so on. And then there is a bunch of smaller ones that gets a lot of traction. But it's quite hard, frankly, to get the community to contribute and build that type of stuff around this code itself.

[00:10:57] It's easier to build a community around the product and the solutions that you make and have a discussion about that. But with such a complex and big code base that we have today, it's quite hard to contribute and work with that if you're not familiar with all the tooling and all of it. I hope there will be more, more that this will change, actually.

[00:11:23] Tiny MCE AI has recently been launched, especially at a time where there's so many conversations around AI assistants sitting outside the workflow. Whether that's a separate chat window or standalone co-pilot. Now, Tiny MCE, what you're doing here, you seem to be taking a very different path by embedding AI directly inside the editor itself. So what shifts are you seeing in how developers and product teams are thinking about where AI should actually live?

[00:11:52] We believe that AI should be where you create the content. We are now copying and pasting through, like between all these apps. And most of the tools, they work with plain text or, you know, basic formatting and markdown and so on. But it's, you're kind of trading one benefit, like one time saving for another time sink.

[00:12:20] Like if you have to sit there and format what the AI wrote, like you copy it from, from Claude or ChatGPT app and into your enterprise system or your CMS or, or your SaaS app and that you're working on. And then you have to sort of recreate the document there. And if you want to have the AI work with it, you have to sort of copy it out and then into the chat app.

[00:12:50] And that could be a little bit, it's big companies are frowning a little bit, like you copying, pasting important information back and forth through different things.

[00:13:00] And if you can have all of that, right where you're editing your document inside of your app as an owner of a tool that you can have your users stay there while still have access to the leading edge, the bleeding edge and top of the line AI and LLMs and agents right inside of TineMZ.

[00:13:26] There's the real boost of productivity and quality and all of that. You raise such an important point there, because I think one of the biggest frustrations for any content team is that constant switching, copy pasting between writing, researching, editing, summarizing and formatting tools, et cetera. How much productivity do you think was really being lost through that fragmented experience?

[00:13:49] And if you look at that way of doing things and now with an embedded AI inside the editor, what kind of changes are you seeing and what kind of measurable difference are you seeing there? It is one of these things is actually hard to quantify. Like how do you value, you know, you get into a car and you shut down the door and it sounds nice. It sounds solid.

[00:14:16] How do you value a good painting in the office or like a nice office? I think it's the holistic idea of respecting the time of users and giving length. Like it's almost like an ergonomy problem. Like I don't know if I got that word right, but you have to have the right tools for your knowledge workers.

[00:14:42] And if they have to context switch between apps and, you know, suddenly you switch to another app, suddenly you expose your desktop and there is, you know, Facebook and then or your email program probably more likely or Slack and you see that message. Oh, I need to answer that. And suddenly you're multitasking and you're back.

[00:15:08] So it's better to just, you know, if you're in your system and you're writing that proposal, stay there and have the AI be there and work on that in a concentrated fashion. And that will like it's employee happiness, basically. A big thank you to Denodo for helping me make more than 60 monthly interviews possible across the Tech Talks network.

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[00:16:06] And I think TinyMCA AI is arriving at a time when so many organizations are struggling with AI sprawl, employees jumping from chat GPT, clawed internal tools, editing platforms. Do you see embedded AI inside the editor as a productivity improvement, a governance play or both? Because it feels like it ticks so many boxes here. I think it's both. Yeah.

[00:16:30] It's, I think at some point, like, like we are, like, we're in this beautiful world, like situation right now where, you know, this amazing technology just opened up and it's flooding us. And we're just enjoying it. We're taking it in. We're, we're, it's wild west.

[00:16:52] And it's, people are incredibly creative and we see incredible gains all over the place and people are doing amazing stuff with it.

[00:17:05] But it's, but it also, it's also a little bit like, like we know, like every technology that had come before that, it will, it will, I wouldn't say it will slow down, but it will be more controlled and reined in and sort of more formalized.

[00:17:25] I think like, like there will be, like there will be a need for accountability, not long from now, like about what parts of this, this content has been created by AI and in what shape or form. If not, you know, like the, all the copyright discussions that's going on right now, like, like how these LLMs were created and how they were training and like not much of that has been settled in court.

[00:17:53] Like they are doing deals with each other, but eventually someone will start to have a real serious argument with someone else. And there will be these rules and regulations and laws around how this can be used and what data you can be able to use to train these things. So I think we'll see quite soon more, more rules around AI and that will inform how, how companies can use and should use them.

[00:18:23] And if you're early on the embeddable track and you're like, like not just implementing AI in your app, but for example, have what we have with TinyMC is that, well, you, you integrate it into something like track changes that we've got.

[00:18:39] And then, and then you know, who's, who made what, and you, you bring it into something like revision history and you can have an audit trail so that you know, which part of this, this content that has been produced has been AI assisted and so on. So I, I think we'll like with, there will be still a lot of creativity, but it has to be, it will be in more controlled fashions in the coming five, five years or so.

[00:19:09] And I think one of the interesting aspects of what you've created here is this balance between flexibility and control because you're supporting multiple AI providers while also giving enterprise tools to enterprises, the tools they need to enforce their brand voice, review standards, governance policies, et cetera. How important is that model agnostic approach to becoming for companies that don't want to be locked into a single AI ecosystem? Are you seeing a lot of that too? Yes. Yeah.

[00:19:39] Like the models, like in lack of a better word, like it's almost like they are becoming people. Like it's strange to say, but remember, you know, you had open AI and they, like a year ago or so, they, they introduced a new version of it. And everyone freaked out because it didn't talk the same way anymore. People will have their AI and they will have like, it, it, it, it will be tailored to them.

[00:20:07] So it almost becomes a virtual colleague. And that is what, what I see in a lot. It's not just, you know, the way that companies talk to us and, and how we, we see the abuse. It's not, they give them names. It might not be like human names that they have, like all of them have names. You have Claude, you have, I can't think of them, but if they have an AI, they call it something. Yeah.

[00:20:36] They have a name for it. And it's almost like it becomes that virtual colleague that is co-creating with you. It's not, it's not merely just a tool that I'm using. It, it becomes almost human-like in, in the gym. Like we interact it with as human. We even say thank you to it.

[00:20:58] So I think that flexibility that an organization will sort of settle on a certain, certain AI that they will like to use that across the board. So that is being really important for us that we can, you can use more or less any model with the TinyMZ AI,

[00:21:20] but we just take care of making that quality layer, that, that rich text layer that is pretty hard to do. And we just take care of all of that so that you get your LLM right in the rich text editor or content creation experience in virtually no time.

[00:21:42] And I also love the, this idea of AI understanding the full document context rather than acting like a disconnected chatbot of sorts. So how important is that contextual awareness becoming in, in modern AI powered productivity tools? Because it's a word I keep hearing again and again at tech conferences this year. Context is everything. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it really is like, like you talk to a person and like you turn away.

[00:22:10] And then two minutes later, you, you talk to that person again and it has no regulation that we ever met. Yeah. That, that is no context. And it's, and the early tools, they didn't have much context because it, it wasn't really technically possible to have much more than, you know, a few, how to say an hour's worth of work in like chatting with it.

[00:22:38] So, but that has virtually exploded now. Like that, that's one thing that has gone so, so incredibly fast. So now it's almost like the, through various techniques and so on, the AI almost remembers everything that we ever talked about. And that is really key. When, for example, when I use AI myself that I can just pick up a conversation and start a new one.

[00:23:07] And it sort of remembers just like who I am, what I'm working with, what we were like, what's the, what's the task at hand right now. And you, we, we, we have so that you can feed it the document. So it becomes, you know, I just, I just tell it like, can you summarize what this is and put that on top? It's virtually literally, I'm just conversing.

[00:23:29] Like I would sitting down with a colleague next to me and we're just having a conversation about the document that we are looking at. And that context is what makes the AI like really stand out. I think to the, like compared to just, just being a tool. And if we were to have this conversation again, a year from now, what would success look like for tiny MCE AI?

[00:23:58] And what changes do you hope developers and content teams will have made in the way they work with AI? Anything that you hope will change from people using this and making the most of the tool? Just looking back what it was a year ago, like it's so hard to predict. And, but I hope like what I think is it's, it becomes more natural for people to, to use these tools.

[00:24:25] There's a little bit of a hesitance. Like it's, it was like in the early days of social media, like you had like that, like you have that text box that you were supposed to type in and you like people type like, well, what they ate for breakfast and they just figured it out and so on. And now like with the, with the AI is kind of the same thing. It's like, what do I type?

[00:24:54] And the early adopters has long got past that. So now we're in, in sort of the, where, where the general, general person, like my parents are sitting there and chatting with, with, with the AI asking, asking questions or conversing how to do stuff or what things mean. Or how to solve problems. So it becomes more natural to, to use this tool.

[00:25:23] And that becomes, that drives the adoption because like, if it's not scary anymore, then it is more approachable. I think the big difference is it will be much more integrated than it is today.

[00:25:39] We're just starting with that integration across tools and what the AI can access and what it can understand in terms of knowing my email, knowing, getting access to the company data, knowing about all the, you know, the, the Google docs that you have written and so on. There is rightfully so a lot of concerns, like who ultimately sees this data and get access to it.

[00:26:06] But that will mature because the companies that succeed today, they will lead the way for everyone else because it just happened. Like if someone is making this incredible advances, the competition just has to answer and move along. So it's like a stream. You can't fight it. You have to follow with the technology development and like the genius out of the bottle. It really is out of the bottle.

[00:26:36] And I think it's a great moment to end on, but for anybody listening, wanting to learn more about TinyMCE AI, how these built-in AI writing tools in TinyMCE, what it could mean for them, how they can get up and running. Where would you like to point everyone listening? And do you have a community as well there that maybe they can learn what other people are doing with it too? I think that you go to Tiny.Cloud is where we're at. And we'll very soon have a Slack community.

[00:27:05] It's more or less built, but people can come and talk to us and have a conversation about AI and content creation. That will launch very soon. And it will be all over our website and our social media once that is on. So yeah, pay attention to Tiny.Cloud. Awesome. I will include links to everything and I'll update those links as the Slack community is launched as well. And I'd love people to check it out.

[00:27:32] Let me know your thoughts at techtalksnetwork.com. I'll also include a link to your LinkedIn as well so people can get hold of you there. But more than anything, thank you for just sharing a little about your career, the announcement, what it means. And it sounds like we need to get you back on in 12 months' time when everything's up and running in the Slack community. All the lessons have been learned and see where we're heading next. So I will book you in for next year. But thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. And it was a pleasure.

[00:28:03] For me, this conversation today highlighted something that often gets lost in the noise around AI features. And that is the real value that comes from removing friction. Because when AI sits outside the workflow, it can be useful. But it also has uses to carry context between systems. And this creates distractions, formatting problems, governance concerns, and a whole lot of invisible work.

[00:28:30] And Frederick made a strong case for embedding AI into the editor today where it can understand the document, support the user, and help maintain quality without forcing people to ever leave their working environment. And he also reminded us that even something as familiar as typing into a browser carries huge complexities behind the scenes. Especially when content involves contracts, medicine leaflets, job applications, policies, or customer communications.

[00:29:00] And I think the lesson here is that AI adoption is becoming a product design question as much as a technology question. So where does the AI live? What context does it have? How much control can the organization apply? And does it make work feel easier? Or does it create just another thing for people to manage? Well, I'll include links to TinyMCE in the show notes along with details of where you can learn more. But I'd love to hear from you.

[00:29:29] Should AI assistants remain separate tools? Or should they be built directly into the software where the work already happens? As always, let me know. TechTalksNetwork.com. Love to hear from you. But that's it for today. I'll be back again tomorrow with another guest. And hopefully, I'll get to speak with you all again. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.