Sitecore update: SitecoreAI launch and other takeaways from Symposium

Symposium, Sitecore’s annual flagship event and conference, always features a mix of product announcements, roadmap reveals, strategic keynotes and customer case studies. This year’s Symposium was held in Florida and it was a well organised and polished event. There is always an opportunity to attend some events virtually, and also catch up on some of the keynotes.

Here's our take on the big product Sitecore announcements at this year’s event. You can also view our review of the announcements from the 2024 Symposium.

1. The big reveal was the launch of Sitecore AI

The 2025 Symposium was Eric Stine’s first Symposium keynote as CEO, so to some extent his speech was an introduction to his background and personal philosophy. He referenced personal events during his life where “digital experiences” had had a profound impact and also reflected on the power of brands to change lives.

Stine is a polished speaker and built up to the main “reveal” of the event, the launch of “SitecoreAI” as a single, integrated platform that encompasses the entire portfolio of Sitecore’s products and services, with AI at the centre, all underpinned by a common user experience, security model, data platform and series of AI agents.

Stine emphasised that the focus of SitecoreAI was on “simplicity” – with it being simple to use, simple to buy and simple to unlock value. To a certain extent, SitecoreAI is more of a rebranding of existing services and a new licensing tier, than a completely new platform, but Stine positioned it as the pinnacle of Sitecore’s evolution, with everything leading up to this point.

2. The composable era appears to be over

For many years Sitecore went to market emphasising its strength as a highly integrated platform with a wide breadth of features, effectively an all-in-one solution that could meet many needs. However, three years ago or so this message changed quite sharply, with more messaging around Sitecore’s ability to support a “best-of-breed” set up with composable architecture.

The “composable DXP” is where an organisation can build its own digital experience ecosystem by stitching together different solutions that talk to each other through APIs. This mirrored Sitecore’s reinvention of its core platform as a series of different SaaS products that while all working together, could all be purchased independently.

However, it appears the composable model has failed to set the market alight, and in the past year marketing messages around composability have been significantly dialled down. Now, with the launch of SitecoreAI we have gone full circle back to the idea of there being just one overarching integrated solution based around the strapline “One platform. Unlimited Possibilities,” with “one intuitive interface with a simplified, connective UX.”  Stine even referred to Sitecore going from “composable” to “composed.”  

The positioning around one platform with AI at the centre strongly echoes the messaging coming out of the Optimizely Opticon conference and it appears that the “composable era” at least reflected in CMS and DXP marketing may be at its end. 

3. Agentic capabilities bring contextual awareness across workflows

After Stine’s keynote, Roger Connolly, Sitecore’s Chief Product Officer, ran a session which walked through some of the “AI agents” which are embedded into SitecoreAI and:

• work across different workflows and aspect of the product.
• bring contextual awareness to each task, based on previous interactions, brand governance and more.
• aim to keep marketers in control, for example with approvals and opportunities to tweak content, so there are “humans in the loop.”
• can be joined together as part of “Flows” for more complex operations.
• have the potential to save hours and even days of time.

Some of the agents covered in Conolly’s keynote, include:

• a brief agent, to generate a complete campaign brief.
• a brand agent, checking for brand compliance.
• a governance agent, logging everything.
• an optimisation agent, fine tuning content for better results
• an AEO / SEO agent
• and more!

Conolly also talked about the launch of Sitecore’s “Agentic Studio”, which is a core part of SitecoreAI, and comes with all the pre-built agents, but is also an interface to orchestrate, customise, manage and create AI agents. 

4. The wider Sitecore Studio packages all the extendable options together

The new Agentic Studio is now presented together as part of a wider package of Sitecore’s customisation and extensibility channels and tools, now branded as “Sitecore Studio.”  While Sitecore present this as a new “innovation layer” it is effectively more of a positioning piece, bringing together the new Agentic Studio, with existing capabilities:

• App Studio: Facilities for developers to customise and extend Sitecore with APIs, SDKs and more.
• Marketplace: The existing marketplace facility to access extensions and third-party solutions
• Sitecore Connect: The existing library of connectors to systems like Salesforce to drive integrations.

While overall, the new branding makes sense and emphasises the integrated, joined-up nature of the platform, the transition to these rebranded capabilities may cause confusion for existing customers.

5. Subscribers get access to all the capabilities 

One of aspects of SitecoreAI emphasised across the event is that subscribers to SitecoreAI get access to all the features, with no hidden extras such as add-ons. While the ability to access the entire product suite is welcome and reduces barriers to taking advantage of SitecoreAI across the whole content lifecycle, or through a campaign that goes from “idea” to “impact”, the pricing is still unclear, which will likely be the critical factor in driving adoption.

6. There is an easier migration path to SitecoreAI

Upgrading Sitecore or moving to a new version can be an expensive and intense project, so ensuring there is an easier and cheaper migration path to the new SitecoreAI suite benefits everybody. At Symposium, Sitecore also announced SitecoreAI Pathway, a branded “AI-powered migration tool” that helps to move a customer from Sitecore XP to Sitecore XM and then to SitecoreAI and claims to reduce the migration time by 70%.

There are two notable elements to SitecoreAI Pathway. Perhaps most significantly, it also works with other DXP solutions including Adobe, Optimizely and Contentful so is trying to draw in other customers. Secondly, the tool involves a widespread use of generative AI to “map, transform, and migrate thousands of pages”, which could be a concern for some customers in wanting to keep firm control over their pages, so the solution will need to ensure that “humans are in the loop”.

Sitecore Symposium: another year of change

Given Sitecore's pace of innovation, it can be a fulltime job keeping up with the changes at Sitecore, and this time there is a fundamental repositioning of the platform, some new AI-powered capabilities and more. If you’d like to discuss any of the new Sitecore announcements and how they might impact you, get in touch!