Unpacking Sitecore’s latest product update event: key takeaways

Sitecore’s strategy and product roadmap is firmly focused on AI and in a recent online event dedicated to Sitecore’s “latest innovation and roadmap”, several of the latest features were covered. While some of these have been unveiled before and are actually already available, the event provided a clear indication of what the more advanced AI features can achieve and the direction of travel that Sitecore wants to highlight. The recording of the event is available on-demand to watch.

In what was a generally a slick, pre-recorded piece of marketing, the product updates were presented as focusing on three core themes:

• Intelligent content, reflecting what AI brings to the table.
• The self-serve marketer, who needs to rely less and less on their colleagues in IT or developers.
• Optimisation and analytics, with “always-on intelligence” to optimise experiences.

New features were briefly demoed as part of an end-to-end case study featuring an imaginary marketing team from fictitious financial company Liora, who were looking to launch a new campaign microsite at speed to support a new product called Sprout.

Despite the emphasis on AI, actually quite a few features highlighted were not actually AI, and Sitecore continues to evolve in ways that help marketers extend the use of the platform and customise their own Sitecore experience.

In this post we’re going to explore some of the takeaways from the session and all of the features that were highlighted. Not every new innovation in Sitecore was included, but they were able to cover quite a few in a relatively short time. The session is about 35 minutes long, and it is worth a watch if you want to get a picture of where Sitecore is heading.

New leadership

Recently in early May there was an unexpected change in the Sitecore leadership with the appointment of Eric Stine as CEO, replacing Dave O’Flanagan who had only been in the position for just over a year. Beyond inevitable speculation about why the change occurred, there does not seem to have been any noticeable shift so far in Sitecore’s strategy and product evolution, particularly around the current focus on AI. Stine has a strong track record and plenty of experience, and so far, the transition appears relatively seamless to the outside world. Certainly, the change in leadership was not touched upon in the event.

The AI future is SaaS-based

After a relentless marketing focus on composability and the composable DXP, this messaging seems to have been vastly dialled down, although there is still an obvious push to want to get customers to switch to Sitecore’s SaaS products.

Near the beginning of the event there was a short section from Sitecore Chief Product Officer Roger Connolly, which mentioned two interesting points:

• Firstly, that Sitecore will never force anyone off Sitecore XP and move over to the set of SaaS products.
• However, the future of AI “lives in the cloud”, so unlocking the full power of AI is with SaaS.

While it was not explicitly stated, it felt like that this was an acknowledgement that the evolution of AI features will not be uniform across the product set, which is actually currently the case.

Launch of Sitecore.AI

Sitecore is relentlessly beating the AI drum and has just launched a new separate microsite at Sitecore.AI to focus on its AI features. This was positioned as a “new hub” where teams can learn about what has been released and what is on the horizon with more regular updates, hinting that the AI features – including new agents – will be coming thick and fast.

Smart Briefing

The first new product featured in the Liora scenario, was Smart Briefing, a new AI feature in Content Hub that designs an entire campaign in seconds based on adding details such as campaign objectives, with AI filling in the blanks, and even coming up with suggested assets to use. Smart Briefing is currently in early access.

The AI takes in historical campaigns, asset library, brand guidelines, audience insights and more to automatically build what is positioned as a “compelling brief” that saves days of time. In the case study the team approve the brief after making a few tweaks.

While the premise is impressive, it is hard to know how effective this will be without trying it, and we suspect that it requires quite a bit of material already there to come up with something meaningful. Many marketing teams will take it more as a starting point than a brief that is nearly complete. However, it is potentially something that gets better and better as it is used more often, and the team understand its strengths and weaknesses.

Guided Search and Bulk Ground Image Tagging

Guided search is another AI-powered feature in Content Hub that is also currently in early access. This allows teams to better use the Digital Asset Management (DAM) system that is built into Content Hub by finding the assets they want to use through intelligent suggestions, also supporting the thought process in figuring out the right assets to use.

This more intelligent search is underpinned by “Bulk Ground Image Tagging” which uses AI to add metadata to each image, so it is tagged with topics, context and image rights, a process which often gets skipped when it has to be done manually. This is a strong use case for AI. Sitecore has also opened up the opportunity to add additional tags from another AI service or LLM – for example one which identifies pictures of employees to support data privacy complaints – and points to future support for a “bring your own AI” model.

Custom dashboard

Sitecore is a complex platform and comes packed with a lot of features, and it can be overwhelming, so hiding unnecessary features for particular roles to drive ease of use and efficiency makes a lot of sense. The webinar highlighted the ability to configure Custom dashboards for particular roles – in this case a dashboard for the person building the actual experience. These can be tabbed – for example in the demo there was a main overview dashboard and then one focused on A/B/n testing.

Other XM Cloud improvements

There were also a number of other XM Cloud improvements highlighted including:

• New site templates with pre-built components act as a starting point to speed up the time to market.
• Embedded Fields meaning that all the metadata can be conveniently viewed without leaving the editing experience
• AI translation brings instant, highly accurate translation to pages, again all within the XM Cloud experience.

Marketplace SDK

This webinar was firmly aimed at an audience for digital marketers rather than IT teams. However, it did cover Sitecore’s Marketplace Software Development Kit (SDK) that supports custom development to build apps into the Sitecore XM Cloud UI which integrate with third-party systems. The example shown was a useful Google Analytics app that allowed a view of key web analytics without having to leave the platform. The Marketplace SDK is currently available.

Design Library

The webinar also covered a new Design Library feature that is already available within Sitecore XM Cloud. This provides marketers access to pre-configured templates at the component level and includes typical elements you would want to drop into a web page such as CTA blocks, hero banners, presentation of testimonials and pricing comparison tables.

Generative Insights

Generative Insights is an another one of Sitecore’s AI-powered features, but this time it provides a report with intelligent insights into trends and patterns in order to support optimisation, making suggestions to improve the experience and increase conversions. For example, it might spot that there is a lack of sign-ups to an event from a particular audience segment, and then suggest adding particular personalised content to attract this group.

Code Assistant

Another AI-powered feature to help with optimisation is the Code Assistant that allows a marketer to use a prompt to add a condition such as a new personalisation rule to support optimisation, rather than having to rely on a developer.

With this feature and Generative Insights, the webinar was effective at showing how Sitecore is enabling AI features that can be applied at every stage of a website build.

Generative Engine Optimiser

We also got a glimpse of at least one feature which is on the horizon. The Generative Engine Optimiser makes suggestions to improve content so it is ready for AI-powered experiences. This is becoming increasingly important as more people use ChatGPT and other services rather than traditional Google searches to find information and content.

AI Innovation Lab

Finally, the new AI Innovation Lab, a collaboration with Microsoft, was highlighted. The Lab is driving a number of projects that are helping to accelerate Sitecore’s AI roadmap, including a new capability that enables Sitecore’s AI features to be accessed within Microsoft Copilot.

Sitecore’s AI-focused product roadmap

Sitecore has a very active roadmap with new AI innovations that have either launched, are in early access or are further down the line. Many of these are on Content Hub and Sitecore XM Cloud. There are a range of other improvements that are also supporting marketing teams to get the best out of the platform. This event once again showed the level of investment that continues to go into Sitecore’s roadmap.

If you’d like to discuss Sitecore’s product roadmap and how AI is impacting the platform, then get in touch!