If there is one thing I walked away with from attending Sitecore Symposium in October and Optimizely’s Opticon in November it’s that the future is going to be intelligent. Or at least your DXP will be, at any rate.

In many ways it feels like we have heard this before – that AI is going to revolutionize the way we work in every way. In fact, Mark Stiles and I spoke on this very topic at Sitecore Symposium back in 2018, offering up tactical ways to automated repetitive content authoring tasks so that your teams can stop wrestling with the CMS and focus on work of higher value. We demonstrated ways to train bots on your business taxonomies to auto-tag content and image assets, how to use AI to search for and auto crop image assets, generate summary content, and define audiences. We even demoed a chatbot that could move content through workflows that you could use on a mobile device.

It seemed like we were teetering on the edge of an AI explosion that would streamline content authoring and reduce marketing complexity. But in reality, it took another half decade for the ChatGPTs of the world to really mature and open up new possibilities with widespread application. In retrospect we may have been at the peak of inflated expectations. There was a whole lot of innovation that still needed to brew before commercial tech teams really knew what to do with it and it seems that only now could we be moving up the first steps of the slope of enlightenment.

We are now in the midst of an arms race between major digital experience platform vendors like Sitecore, Adobe, Optimizely, Drupal/Acquia, and others to be the first to offer a truly pivotal set of AI tools that can kickstart marketing operations and accelerate content authoring.

At Sitecore Symposium, their leadership team debuted a new service called Sitecore Stream that pulls together a series of AI-copilot applications and assistants that accelerate all kinds of formerly time-consuming activities. One of the key examples they demoed was a brand copilot that can take large amounts of brand-specific guidelines from style guides, PDFs, documents, and other sources. This intelligence can then be used to ensure that AI-generated content aligns with the organization’s tone, voice, and other brand messaging guidelines. The assistants can help generate marketing briefs, suggest campaign ideas, and automate tedious workflows. The applications span several products including Content Hub DAM & CMP, CM Cloud, CDP, and Personalize. And because of the independent nature of the services as an add-on, they even have plans to bring some of these copilots to their traditional on prem product, Sitecore XP.

Likewise, Optimizely, has been hard at work competing for dominance in the AI space. Optimizely’s Opal AI agents are intended to eliminate silos across teams and functions, promote consistency, and integrate AI across the entire marketing process. Instead of each team using disparate AI services to speed their workflows, Opal aims to fill that void by encouraging cross communication and awareness. Like Sitecore, its goal is to be brand aware. The demoed seemingly advanced content generation copilots, auto-tagging of DAM assets, and strong AI chops in the CMP (marketing operations) suite where you can generate briefs and campaigns. Also interesting was the idea that you can bring your own AI, if you wish, which seems to run counter to the goal of consistency but cool just the same. Like Sitecore, Opal AI enhancements span multiple products.

It seems that AI is transitioning quickly from promise to reality, at least in the DXP space where it’s no longer a buzz word, but central part of how digital marketers, content authors, and developers are meant to use them. Can’t wait to see how far they can take AI-assisted AX in the coming year or two.