Tom Cranstoun, The MX Guy.

About

Digital Domain Technologies is the engagement vehicle for Tom Cranstoun, independent CMS architect, and member of Boye & Company's CMS Experts Group. Known in CMS circles as The AEM Guy for over a decade. Now The MX Guy.

I have been solving content distribution problems across every generation of technology since 1977. I co-authored Superbase, a database and content management system that predated the CMS category. I worked on the BBC's electronic newsroom system. I spent over a decade with Adobe Experience Manager, and recent years with Edge Delivery Services.

My current focus is Machine Experience (MX), the practice of making documents and digital assets readable by every machine that consumes them — so no machine has to guess. Working with EDS taught me that the patterns which break for machines (hidden state, ephemeral notifications, incomplete information) also break for humans with disabilities, cognitive load, or non-ideal conditions. Design for machines, benefit humans.

Your website is a fraction of your content estate. Contracts, policy documents, product specifications, and technical reports don't live on the web — but AI agents inside enterprise tools are already reading them, inferring what they can, guessing the rest. Being on the web and being machine-readable are not the same thing: web accessibility solves discoverability, but MX solves comprehension.

Track record

Strategic content architecture for organisations including:

• BBC News — electronic newsroom
• Twitter (now X) — AEM strategy
• Nissan-Renault — global rollout, hundreds of websites
• EE — UK telecom AEM strategy
• Ford
• MediaMonks

I have established AEM practices from scratch. Strategic decisions have prevented platform crashes and delivered significant cost savings. Teams gain capabilities to maintain and evolve solutions independently.

What I offer

I take on interim consultancy roles and advisory engagements where strategic experience makes the difference. I am not seeking full-time positions.

If you are weighing whether the work is worth doing, the case for an MX audit is laid out at Why an MX audit pays for itself. Three vectors of return: reduced inference cost across every machine read, fewer hallucinated citations, lower regulatory exposure under the European Accessibility Act.

Plan reviews

Identifying gaps between intention and reality before implementation begins, particularly around agent compatibility.

Architecture strategy

Frameworks that balance corporate control with team flexibility while building agent-ready foundations.

AI integration

Helping automation simplify workflows rather than complicate them, with focus on clarity infrastructure: explicit state, persistent feedback, complete information.

Team mentoring

Building strategic thinking capabilities that outlast any single project.

Audit

Where things went well, and where they could be improved, with concrete next steps. Websites, document estates, and PDFs covered together — because AI agents don't stop at your homepage.

PDF accessibility audits

Independent assessment of PDFs against PDF/UA (ISO 14289), WCAG 2.1, and the European Accessibility Act. Covers tagging, reading order, alt text, language, and document metadata, with a remediation plan and prioritised fixes. The EAA has been in force since 28 June 2025 and applies to public-facing PDFs published by in-scope businesses.

Machine Experience

Machine Experience is the strategic foundation for everything I now build. It is published under CogNovaMX (the trading name Digital Domain Technologies uses for MX work) and lives at mx.allabout.network.

• The MX bookshop — all MX books, samples, and pricing.
• MX: The Handbook — the practical implementation guide. Published 2026.
• MX: The Protocols — the full reference. Publishing 1 July 2026.
• MX blog — ongoing essays on AI agent compatibility, semantic structure, and content systems.
• The Gathering — the MX community at tg.community. Manifesto, resources, and people building agent-ready systems together.
• MX-Gathering on GitHub — open-source community resources repository.

Contact

I work exclusively through Digital Domain Technologies, focusing on engagements where experience and objectivity matter most. If you are evaluating Edge Delivery Services for agent readiness, planning major AEM changes in an AI-native world, or need architectural guidance that prevents problems before they are expensive to solve, let's talk.

• Phone: +44 7575 295845
• Email: tom.cranstoun@gmail.com
• LinkedIn: tom-cranstoun
• X / Twitter: @ddttomtom
• MX work: allabout.network
• Professional profile: mx.allabout.network