A little over a year ago, Dave O’Flanagan, then Sitecore’s chief product officer, shares Sitecore’s point of view on Generative AI and Sitecore DXP, stating:

When we think about generative AI and how we implement it in our solution, we’re really thinking about how to introduce greater efficiency into the workflows of our marketers or the interactions of our customers so that things become easier or more relevant or more simplified?

At the time, these efficiencies focused on content production, personalization, and search. O’Flanagan said AI should support a feature rather than being a feature itself, and they spent a lot of time deciding how to integrate generative AI into the platform.

A year later, O’Flanagan becomes CEO of the company, who took over in March, unable to turn down the opportunity to step up his efforts and make a broader impact on the company. So what’s next in the platform’s AI journey, delivering what he calls the realization of Sitecore’s vision for “intelligent DXP”?

Sitecore Feed

Sitecore’s mission is clear, both in terms of the product and technology it develops and in terms of its customers. Along with continued investment in its products and focus on composability, a crucial part of Sitecore’s future success will be its innovation around AI, O’Flanagan said. That’s why the company introduced Sitecore Stream, an enterprise-ready AI based on the Microsoft Azure OpenAI service.

O’Flanagan says Stream will help orchestrate a seamless marketing experience across all Sitecore solutions, including XM Cloud, Content Hub and Experience Platform:

We thought it was time to really rethink, you know, how marketers work with our platform. The value they can get from our platform. It’s not just about integrating AI into the platform. It’s kind of rethinking how marketers work and how we can help them be more productive in our tools and in our capabilities.

Sitecore aims to provide marketers with “unparalleled parallel productivity and growth gains.” What does that mean exactly? Well, for starters, Sitecore announced three new AI features.

Brand Aware AI

O’Flanagan said companies will wonder why they should buy generative AI capabilities from Sitecore when they could just use ChatGPT. The answer is simple: domain-specific linguistic models.

Sitecore believes in domain-specific language models, especially for enterprise clients. You take all the elements of the brand (look and feel, tone of voice, copy, content, and images) and train the model. It becomes the cornerstone of everything a marketer does on Sitecore DXP.

Generative AI co-pilots

Every Sitecore DXP product is now enriched with new AI capabilities.

For example, Content Hub offers the following new AI capabilities:

• Generate content
• Manipulate images
• Write a campaign brief
• Generate a brief

O’Flanagan explains that AI technology and content created by a co-pilot are designed to augment and assist marketers in completing specific tasks.

Sitecore co-innovated with its client Nestlé. Together, the two companies brainstormed how Sitecore could help Nestlé and other clients leverage AI to be more productive in their marketing operations. Two areas that surfaced included co-pilots for branding and briefs. These two areas were important to Nestlé because they helped onboard new marketers more effectively.

The Brief Co-pilot allows marketers to quickly create briefs, breaking them down into specific tasks which are then shared with marketing and agents. Briefs are also shared with agencies, campaign teams, the web operations team and others. Often they are not written properly, resulting in wasted time and effort, says O’Flanagan.

The Brief Co-pilot reduces the time it takes to create a brief from days or weeks to minutes. It relies on the Brand Co-pilot to ensure that the brief adheres to the company brand and that everyone can work effectively 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 sees as a gap in the marketing stack. Coordination and collaboration within marketing teams and with external parties (like an agency) can be difficult at the best of times. How can AI help marketers manage their work better? O’Flanagan argues:

If you think about a world where marketers work collaboratively with agents and we have hybrid workflows, where humans and agents collaborate together to achieve their goals. We’ve now created this layer in Sitecore DXP that allows marketers to be able to do this. I don’t think we’re there yet in terms of the ability of AI – generative AI in particular – to fully automate some of these tasks. But with this new Sitecore feature, you can confidently have a human in the know when you’re looking to do some of these tasks.

Sitecore now includes workflows that automate repetitive tasks to speed up execution. Some examples include creating content, creating a web page, or AB testing a call to action.

Let’s take the example of a marketer who needs to create a set of images and run an AB test. AI can create the variations and run them through an approval process with marketers. Once approved, they can release the images to production.

O’Flanagan said Sitecore wants to be able to securely apply all of these next-generation capabilities and technologies in a way that’s compatible with the companies it wants to work with.

Agents or co-pilots?

I asked O’Flanagan why the co-pilots and not agents. It posits that the co-pilots work alongside the marketer. They suggest things, or the marketer may ask for suggestions. An agent acts on behalf of a marketer. The difference is between augmentation and automation, he says. As such, we are seeing a rapid shift towards agentic workflows with humans involved, he suggests:

I would say that we have all added first generation LLM capabilities, and all of our products now have those capabilities in depth. So if you want to translate content, rewrite content, generate 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 AI, you wrap domain-specific functionality, and then allow it to be delivered to the marketer in an integrated workflow. Ultimately, AI shouldn’t be so dominant in the workflow. It will simply be there to help the marketer whenever and wherever they need it. I think the best example of leveraging this type of advanced technology is where it’s simply about seamlessly assisting and guiding the user through their journey.

It’s about more than technology, more than AI

As CEO, O’Flanagan has a broader vision. He said technology is part of the solution, but it also depends on Sitecore’s services and support proposition. How do you set expectations in the sales process so customers can be confident they will get the ROI they need from a partner/vendor like Sitecore?

O’Flanagan sees his role as helping clients succeed. And the company is doing something right. It just passed $500 million in annual recurring revenue, which suggests:

We are at a significant scale in the market.

Along with the AI ​​announcements, Sitecore also announced that most DXP Cloud products are Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act (HIPPA) ready. These solutions include XM Cloud, Content Hub, Customer Data Platform and Personalize, he says:

This builds on all the work we have done internally from a compliance perspective, meaning we can meet the needs of heavily regulated industries. We can bring the best technology to these industries, which sometimes requires compromise. If you have to deal with such heavily regulated industries, they may not have the latest technology, the latest hosting, and the latest capabilities. I think we can solve this problem.

My opinion

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, increasing costs, or unclear business value. If a company does not have a clear roadmap and plan for implementing genAI technologies, this makes sense.

Sitecore appears thoughtful about integrating generative AI capabilities into the platform. I appreciate that we haven’t heard about a number of new standalone agents working with every product in the portfolio. Instead, we see co-pilots who know the brand and help marketers do their jobs more effectively.

This approach will be the right way forward for many, as it allows marketers to slowly learn how to adapt AI capabilities into their processes.

But at some point, and probably not too far in the future, marketers will need to take a closer look automation and agents or co-pilots who do much of the work for them, allowing them to do the work that only humans can do. And there is a lot to do.