By pdjohnson on

By the Drupal AI Initiative

Following our announcement last week introducing Inside AI and Outside AI, we are excited to share how we are scaling our leadership and organizational structure to support these two parallel workstreams.

What started as an ambitious vision originally founded by Jamie Abrahams from FreelyGive quickly gained community-wide momentum. In June 2025, our founding partners – 1xINTERNET, Acquia, Dropsolid, FreelyGive, and Salsa Digital – came together to establish the official Drupal AI Initiative, providing a cohesive strategy, baseline funding, and dedicated staff. Since then, the initiative has grown rapidly to encompass over 30 partner organizations, with many of their team members stepping directly into key leadership and execution roles.

To support our rapid growth and ensure effective daily coordination, we are evolving our structure into a more robust, three-tier governance model comprising a Drupal AI Board, a Drupal AI Leadership Team, and our existing community of AI Partners.

The Drupal AI Leadership Team

The purpose of the Drupal AI Leadership Team is to coordinate day-to-day project execution, align technical and cross-functional work streams, and ensure all initiative activities successfully deliver on our strategic goals. 

At the center of this governance evolution, this team formalizes leadership roles that have organically emerged and evolved over the past year. Rather than introducing a brand-new operational layer, this structure officially empowers the individual contributors who have already been actively driving the initiative's day-to-day work.

By having dedicated, individual leads taking ownership of specific subject-matter areas, we ensure that every key aspect of the initiative has focused guidance. This structure also provides a natural avenue for our partner organizations to showcase their technical talent and gain visibility within the ecosystem, while placing experienced contributors in charge of critical technical and horizontal areas.

Leadership structure
 

The Leadership Team's execution is divided into two distinct, cooperative disciplines:

  • Functional Leads: Individuals who maintain direct ownership of specific functional modules or recipes (such as Agents, Search, or the Context Control Center) and align development roadmaps with the broader goals of the initiative.
  • Cross-Functional Leads: Leads who provide horizontal support across the entire initiative for critical non-feature disciplines like UX, QA, Marketing, Documentation, and Community coordination.

This division ensures that technical teams can focus on delivering robust functionality, while cross-functional leads act as an internal agency to validate, test, document, and promote those features before they reach users.

In an upcoming post, we will share more details about the leadership team structure, introduce our current domain leads, and outline vacant positions.

The Drupal AI Board

Our founding partners, who previously made up the initiative's core steering group, are transitioning to become the members of the Drupal AI Board.

The Board serves as the strategic and supporting foundation for the Leadership Team, establishing a strong, predictable operational environment. Rather than individual developers having to balance ecosystem coordination, funding allocations, and administrative hurdles alongside daily coding, the Board takes on these responsibilities.

Composed of our founding partner companies, the Board is responsible for setting the high-level strategy, defining the general initiative direction, and prioritizing our long-term roadmap. In addition to guiding this overarching strategy, the Board provides baseline initiative funding and staff, manages overall ecosystem alignment, and secures ongoing partner resource commitments. This structural backing ensures a stable operational runway, allowing the Board to focus on defining leadership functions, appointing execution leads, and securing the necessary resource allocations so developers can focus strictly on build and delivery.

What Changes? (And What Stays the Same)

For the developers, builders, and content creators actively contributing to the initiative, the day-to-day experience will feel familiar, but with clearer support structures.

Our established sprinting procedures remain completely unchanged. The community and partner teams will continue to collaborate on their scheduled sprints.

However, we are introducing two key improvements:

  1. Clear Authority and Direction: Our leads now have clear authority over their respective subject-matter areas. They will provide structured guidance and continuously groomed, public backlogs of issues for the contributors to Drupal AI.
  2. Improved Delivery and Speed: With structured coordination, individual contributions will integrate more seamlessly into the broader roadmap. Distributing this responsibility across more shoulders allows us to increase our overall delivery speed and execute on more complex strategic goals simultaneously.

This structural evolution ensures that everything built by both Inside AI and Outside AI integrates seamlessly with the broader Drupal AI roadmap and aligns directly with our collective short term and long-term goals.

How to Get Involved

As we step into this new phase of growth, we are looking for dedicated partners and brilliant minds to help execute our goals.

  • Become a Lead: If you have proven leadership within the Drupal AI ecosystem and want to actively guide a subject area (committing 1–2 days per week), we want to hear from you. Board-appointed lead positions are open to active, dedicated contributors.
  • Contribute to the Initiative: You can get involved with the initiative's next phase by:

Our AI Partners

The Drupal AI Initiative is made possible by the generous funding, resources, and technical contributions of our partner network. We are incredibly grateful to these companies for driving the future of open-source AI:

Founding Partners

Gold Partners

Silver Partners

You can view the full list and status of our contributing sponsors on the official Drupal AI Partners directory.