It's time to raise the bar for brand portals
In late 2024, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicted that business applications as we know them would collapse in the agent era, as their logic moves into AI agents. At CHILI publish, we agree. This shift will change the way people interact with technology, and the interfaces we build to support that interaction.
In our own field, we expect enterprise brand portals, marketing portals and campaign portals to undergo a major transformation over the coming years. That view shaped our product strategy for GraFx Experience and guided our merger with Kadanza, our long-time partner and specialists in portal technology. Most brand portals are still designed for a world of finished files, central libraries and manual downloads. Three trends are converging that make a far more ambitious kind of portal possible, and brands should start expecting it.
What a brand portal does today
A brand portal is a piece of software. It is the front door where employees, partners, dealers and franchisees find the information and assets they need. It is also where they trigger a workflow when they need a service, such as ordering business cards, requesting an approved logo file or downloading the latest version of the sales pitch deck. Frontify and Bynder are well-known examples of this model, and it has served brands well for years.
Some vendors offer templating alongside their portal, yet for most local teams the portal remains a place to download what already exists. When a store manager needs the campaign poster with a local price, or a dealer needs the brochure in their own language, the request usually goes back to a designer’s queue, or the user improvises with a workaround. That queue is longer than most brands realise. Our Brandwidth research shows that designers spend on average two days a week, 40% of their time, on versioning assets. We believe brands should expect far more of their portals, and three trends now make that realistic.
Trend 1: Building software has never been easier
With AI, building software has never been easier. A developer can now build a working front end in days. Once the portal itself is easy to build, its value moves away from the screens and towards what sits behind them: the content, the rules and the services the portal can actually deliver.
That does not make building your own portal the obvious answer. The front end is the easy part. The Design Systems that encode the brand rules, the governance that decides who may do what, and the connections into the DAM and the wider stack take years to build, and they decide whether a portal can do more than display files.
Trend 2: The way we work with enterprise systems is changing
Chat interfaces and agentic AI are changing how people interact with enterprise systems. You say what you want, and the system maps your request to the right service, team, workflow and queue. It then either raises the ticket for you or fulfils the request itself. For some requests, the user never enters the back-office system that logs and monitors the work, as they would have before. The agent goes in on their behalf and gets it done. Users will soon expect the same from their brand portal.
Trend 3: The stack is opening up
Open systems and APIs connect the marketing technology stack, and agents can move across it to carry out requests and jobs. As a result, there is less downloading from one system and uploading to the next. This challenges the old portal model, in which teams pulled content together into one place and put a portal in front of it. Today, content stays in its own system, together with the metadata structured there. When a user requests an asset through a portal, the asset travels with its metadata, and an audit trail records its history. A portal that depends on copying content into its own library is working against the direction the stack is moving in.
The new bar for brand portals
Put the three trends together and a new standard comes into view. A brand portal should let users:
Find information, such as brand guidelines, campaign briefs and product details.
Fetch ready-made assets from wherever they live, whether that is the DAM or another repository, with their metadata and history intact.
Generate new assets that are on brand by design, so the local variant is a self-service task instead of a designer’s request.
Work with other apps and workflows across the stack, without leaving the portal.
Ask in plain language, with an agent fulfilling the request on their behalf.
Most brand portals today meet the first two expectations. The first four are available in Experience Portals today, and the fifth is where we are taking them next.
How Experience Portals meet it
We launched Experience Portals in GraFx Experience on 8 October as part of the CHILI GraFx Brand Execution Platform.
In an Experience Portal, users find the information they need and download ready-made assets served from the connected DAM or any other asset repository. They generate new assets with Design Systems from GraFx Studio, in which the brand team has encoded the rules for what may change and what may not. The store manager adapts the campaign poster for their store and gets a correct, production-ready file in minutes, and the designer gets those two days a week back. Thanks to the open architecture of GraFx Experience and its Extension Framework, users can also work with third-party apps, assets and workflows in the same portal.
Experience Portals are included in CHILI GraFx packages and come fully documented, so putting one in front of your DAM is a straightforward project for any developer. If your team lacks the bandwidth, ours can set it up for you.
Next: users simply ask
Today, our GraFx Genie Design Agent works inside GraFx Studio, where designers use plain language to build Design Systems. In the next stage of Experience Portals, end users will be able to do the same. They will describe what they need in their own words, and GraFx Genie will go in and fulfil the request on their behalf.
For an enterprise to rely on this, three things have to hold. The agent works within the requester’s permissions, so it can only use the information, Design Systems, assets and destinations that user is allowed to use. The brand rules sit in the Design System, so the output is on brand by design and the agent has no guidelines to interpret. Lastly, AI does the work, humans make the call.
Questions to put to your portal vendor
If you run a brand portal today, these questions will help you understand how far it is from the new bar:
Can your portal generate a new, on-brand asset, or can it only hand out the ones that already exist?
Does it serve assets from where they live, with their metadata and history, or does it depend on copies in its own library?
Can users work with other apps and workflows from inside the portal?
Will your users be able to ask for what they need and have an agent deliver it?
Is all of this part of the platform, or does each step mean another add-on or integration project?
How do you see the future of your brand portal, especially if you run one for a dealer, franchise or partner network? Join the conversation on LinkedIn.
If you want to take GraFx Experience for a spin, request a free trial here.
Frequently asked questions
What should a modern brand portal do?
A modern brand portal should let users find brand information, fetch ready-made assets from wherever they live, and generate new on-brand assets themselves. It should also connect to other apps and workflows across the marketing technology stack, and increasingly let users ask for what they need in plain language. Experience Portals in CHILI GraFx are built around that standard.
How will AI agents change brand portals?
AI agents let users describe what they need in plain language, instead of navigating a portal to find it. The agent maps the request to the right service and fulfils it, within the user’s permissions and the brand rules encoded in the Design System. CHILI GraFx is bringing this to Experience Portals, where GraFx Genie will generate and deliver assets on the user’s behalf.
What is the best brand portal software for franchise and distributed marketing?
Franchise and distributed marketing need a brand portal where local teams can adapt assets for their own market, language and price without waiting for a designer. Experience Portals in CHILI GraFx let franchisees, dealers and local marketers find information, download ready-made assets from the connected DAM, and generate new on-brand assets from Design Systems, all in one governed portal.
How can global brands let local teams customise marketing materials without breaking brand guidelines?
The most reliable way is to encode the brand rules in the assets themselves. In CHILI GraFx, brand teams build Design Systems that define what local teams may change, such as copy, language, price or product, and what stays fixed. Local teams then adapt materials through an Experience Portal, and every result is on brand by design, without an approval loop.
Which creative automation platforms work with any DAM?
CHILI GraFx is a DAM-agnostic Brand Execution Platform. Experience Portals run on top of the DAM and data sources an organisation already uses, and assets are served from where they live, with their metadata and history intact. Its Extension Framework also connects third-party apps and workflows, so the portal works across an open marketing technology stack.
What is the difference between a brand execution platform and a DAM?
A DAM stores, organises and distributes approved brand assets. A Brand Execution Platform such as CHILI GraFx uses those assets to produce what each market and channel needs. It lets central and local teams generate on-brand variants at scale and deliver them into the systems where they are used. The two work together, with the DAM as the source of truth and the Brand Execution Platform as the place where the brand is put into action.
