We know this story well: an organization has a Drupal site that’s been kept alive through upgrade after upgrade, 8 to 9 to 10 to 11, without anyone ever giving it a proper scrubbing. It works. It’s also carrying years of accumulated overhead, and everyone knows a real modernization (a full clean-up, refractor and removal of technical debt) is a scary, expensive, slow thing to take on.
That last part is changing. We asked our Director or Development, Iarla O’Halloran where AI tooling actually helps here, and just as importantly, where it doesn’t. The following excerpts of our conversation are lightly edited for readability.
What does AI actually change about maintaining a Drupal site?
It cuts down the hours. That’s the plain truth of it. The basic day-to-day grind (update this module, update core, all of those things) takes less time now. And because that overhead is much lower, it frees up time for the work that actually moves the needle: AEO optimization, new content components, custom campaigns, the user-focused stuff.
There’s also a big architectural fit. Some of the newer AI tools and models understand the Drupal API really well, and they can draw on years of community issue queues and contributions. So they can get you most of the way there on a lot of repetitive tasks, and they’re genuinely good at writing functions for content refactoring and in-place migration.
The thing that used to make this a year-long project, with content editors re-entering everything by hand, is the thing that's gotten faster.
In-place migration: say more about that, because that's a term some may not be familiar with.
There’s no reason a site that started life back in the Drupal 8 or 9 world, before Layout Builder was even a thing, can’t be modernized and refactored along current best practices without a mountain of work landing on the content editors.
AI tooling lets us do content transformation in place (taking content from one content type and transforming it into another) far more efficiently than before. The thing that used to make this a year-long project, with content editors re-entering everything by hand, is the thing that’s gotten faster. It becomes a weeks-long project that needs much less work from the content team.
Is that theoretical, or are people actually doing it?
People are doing it. I’ll tell you about two recent examples. First, Acquia demoed an AI-assisted rebuild that took a project from months down to weeks. And in a Drupal AI learners group I’m part of, we watched Angie Byron, one of the longest-tenured contributors in the whole Drupal community, take a Drupal 6 site all the way to Drupal CMS in a handful of sessions. Drupal 6 to Drupal CMS is normally a ground-up rebuild. She did it in a few sittings.
That tracks with what we’re seeing in our own work. It’s the grinding parts of a migration, the really time-consuming parts, that become faster.
It's the grinding parts of a migration, the really time-consuming parts, that become faster.
So is this a "push a button and the AI rebuilds your site" story?
No. An architect is still required. Experienced Drupal architects are needed to design the site restructuring according to best practices. That judgment is not replaced by AI. It merely eliminates the repetitive manual grind of the work.
What we’ve found about everything in AI, not just Drupal, employing these tools to create accurate code and development structures requires an experienced architect or developer. If someone can’t drive the tool with the correct, appropriate context, what you get is a confident hot mess. Confident being the operative word.
If someone can't drive the tool with the correct, appropriate context, what you get is a confident hot mess.
That lines up with what we say about AI generally. The tool is only as good as the person steering it.
Exactly. It makes things faster when you bring it in. It doesn’t make things good on its own. In experienced hands, thinking about security and maintainability and quality the whole way through, it’s now possible to do well-thought-out maintenance work on a Drupal site with a lot less investment of hours. That’s the win. Not “faster and cheaper because we cut corners.” Rather, faster because repetitive tasks need less effort while essential critical thinking stays a priority.
What would you say to a team with an aging Drupal site right now.
The message is just that it’s a lot less expensive and a lot less hassle to modernize a Drupal site than it used to be. If you’ve got a design system you like and a user experience you like, but the back end has drifted and it’s painful for your content editors, you can now make it far more usable for them without touching or compromising the front-end experience at all. And you can do it without signing up for a year-long ordeal.
That used to be the kind of thing where your dev team or IT department would say “great idea, but it’ll take forever.” It doesn’t take forever anymore.
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