(PIxabay)
It was a little over a year ago that then Sitecore Chief Product Officer, Dave O’Flanagan, shared Sitecore’s perspective on generative AI and the Sitecore DXP, stating:
When we think about generative AI and how we are implementing that in our solution, we’re really thinking about how do we introduce better efficiencies in the workflows of our marketers or in the interactions of our customers so that things become easier or more relevant or more simplified?
At the time, those efficiencies focused on content production, personalization, and search. O’Flanagan said AI should support a feature rather than be a feature itself, and they spent a lot of time deciding how to integrate generative AI into the platform.
A year later, O’Flanagan is stepping up as CEO of the company, taking on the role in March, unable to turn down the opportunity to step up and have a broader impact on the company. So what’s next on the journey for AI on the platform, delivering what he calls the fulfillment of Sitecore’s vision for an “intelligent DXP”?
Sitecore Stream
Sitecore’s mission is clear, both in terms of the product and technology it is building and on its customers. Along with continued investment in its products and a focus on composability, a crucial part of Sitecore’s success going forward will be its innovation around AI, said O’Flanagan. That’s why it has introduced Sitecore Stream, enterprise-ready AI built on Microsoft Azure OpenAI service.
O’Flanagan argues that Stream will help orchestrate a seamless marketer experience across all Sitecore Solutions, including XM Cloud, Content Hub, and the Experience Platform:
We felt the time was right to really rethink, you know, how marketers work with our platform. The value they can get from our platform. It’s not just about bolting AI onto the platform. It’s about kind of rethinking how marketers work and how we can help them be more productive in our tools and in our capabilities.
Sitecore wants to provide marketers with “unrivaled parallel productivity and growth gains.” What does that mean exactly? Well, to start, Sitecore announced three new AI capabilities.
Brand aware AI
O’Flanagan said companies will ask themselves why they should buy generative AI capabilities from Sitecore when they could just use ChatGPT. The answer is simple: domain-specific language models.
Sitecore believes in domain-specific language models, especially for enterprise customers. You take all the brand elements—look and feel, tone of voice, copy, content, and imagery—and train the model. It becomes the cornerstone of everything a marketer does across the Sitecore DXP.
Generative AI Co-pilots
Each product in the Sitecore DXP is now enriched with new AI capabilities.
For example, the Content Hub offers the following new AI capabilities:
- Generate content
- Manipulate images
- Work through a campaign brief
- Generate a brief
O’Flanagan explains that the AI technology and the content a co-pilot creates are designed to augment and assist marketers as they work through specific tasks.
Sitecore co-innovated with its customer, Nestlé. Together, the two companies considered how Sitecore could help Nestlé and other customers) leverage AI to be more productive in marketing operations. Two areas that surfaced included co-pilots for brand and briefs. These two areas were important for Nestlé because they helped onboard new marketers more effectively.
The Brief Co-pilot enables marketers to create briefs quickly, breaking them into specific tasks that are then shared with marketing and agents. Briefs are also shared with agencies, campaign teams, the web ops team, and others. Often, they aren’t written correctly, and there’s a lot of wasted time and effort, O’Flanagan says.
The Brief Co-pilot reduces the time it takes to create a brief from days or weeks to minutes. It leverages the Brand Co-pilot to ensure the brief adheres to the company’s brand and ensures everyone can work efficiently to deliver the campaign.
There are also co-pilots for DAM, XM Cloud, CDP, and personalization.
AI-assisted marketing workflow
The third AI announcement focuses on what Sitecore saw as a gap in the marketing stack. Coordinating and collaborating within marketing teams and with external parties (like an agency) can be challenging at the best of times. How can AI help marketers better manage their work? O’Flanagan argues:
If you think about a world where marketers are working in collaboration with agents, and we’ve got hybrid workflows, where humans and agents collaborate together to achieve goals. We’ve now created this layer in the Sitecore DXP that enables marketers to be able to do that. I don’t think we’re there in terms of AI being able to be – generative AI specifically – being able to fully automate some of these tasks. But with this new capability from Sitecore, you can confidently have a human in the loop as you look to address some of these tasks.
Sitecore now includes workflows that automate repetitive tasks to help accelerate execution. Some examples include creating content, building a web page, or AB testing a call to action.
Consider a marketer who needs to create a set of images and launch an AB test. AI can create the variants and push them through an approval process with marketers. Once approved, they can post the images to production.
O’Flanagan said Sitecore wants to be able to safely apply all of these next-generation capabilities and technology in a way that is compatible with the enterprises it wants to work with.
Agents or co-pilots?
I asked O’Flanagan why co-pilots and not agents. He posits that co-pilots work alongside the marketer. They suggest things, or the marketer can ask for suggestions. An agent takes action on a marketer’s behalf. The difference is augmentation versus automation, he says. As such, we are seeing a rapid evolution towards agentic workflows with humans in the loop, he suggests:
I would say there were first-generation LLM capabilities that we all added, and all of our products have those capabilities integrated deeply now. So, if you want to translate some content, rewrite the content, generate some content based on a prompt, all of that is already natively integrated into the Sitecore portfolio. We see this as the next iteration, or the next evolution, where you take the AI, you wrap domain-specific capabilities, and then allow that to be provided to the marketer in an integrated workflow. Ultimately, the AI shouldn’t be as dominant in the workflow. It’s just going to be there assisting the marketer when and where they need it. I think the best examples of leveraging this type of advanced technology is where it’s just seamlessly assisting and guiding the user along the journey.
It’s about more than tech, more than AI
As CEO, O’Flanagan sees the bigger picture. He said technology is part of the solution, but it’s also about Sitecore’s services and support proposition. How do you set expectations in the sales process so that customers are comfortable they will get the ROI they need from a partner/vendor like Sitecore?
O’Flanagan sees his role as being to help customers succeed. And the company is doing something right. It just passed US$500 million in annual recurring revenue, suggesting:
We’re at meaningful scale in the market.
Along with the AI announcements, Sitecore also announced that most of the products in the Cloud DXP are HIPPA-ready (Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act). These solutions include XM Cloud, Content Hub, Customer Data Platform, and Personalize solutions, he says:
It’s a build on all the work we’ve been doing from a compliance perspective internally, which means we can cater to heavily regulated industries. We can bring the best technology to these industries, which, sometimes, there’s compromises to be made. If you have to deal with such heavily regulated industries, they might not get the newest tech, with the newest hosting, with the newest capabilities. I think we can solve that.
My take
According to Gartner, by the end of 2025, 30% of generative AI projects will be abandoned after a proof of concept. The reasons? Poor data quality, inadequate risk controls, escalating costs, or unclear business value. If a company doesn’t have a clear roadmap and plan for implementing genAI technologies, this makes sense.
Sitecore seems thoughtful about integrating generative AI capabilities into the platform. I appreciate that we didn’t hear about a number of new standalone agents working with each product in the portfolio. Instead, we are seeing co-pilots who are brand-aware and help marketers perform their work more efficiently.
This approach will be the right way to move forward for many because it allows marketers to slowly learn how to adapt AI capabilities in their processes.
But at some point, and probably not too far in the future, marketers will need to look closer at automation and agents or co-pilots that do much of the work for them, allowing them to do the work only humans can do. And there’s plenty of that to go around.
