Jason St-CyrGenAI kicks off the Nashville Symposium
While I couldn’t be in Nashville for the big Symposium event this year, Sitecore did offer a virtual live stream for online attendees like me to hear the latest and greatest announcements about what Sitecore is doing to solve the problems of marketing teams in 2025. I want to thank my colleagues who went to Nashville for helping out with some great live shots at the event! Special shout out to Theresa Gutierrez who also has a great blog posted about Sitecore Stream based on what she learned at the MVP Summit that you should check out!
AI is going to be a big part of this.
The agenda for the week is littered with AI sessions and the big keynote, centered on the theme of "Power to Build", made AI take a front-and-center position on the stage.
Introducing Sitecore Stream
Right away, Dave O'Flanagan, took to the stage to announce Sitecore Stream, a new add-on for the composable DXP that is aimed squarely at the marketers in the audience. I'm paraphrasing a little, but Dave's words were essentially that this was a realization of an industry-first intelligent DXP. Not a "bolt-on" feature, but a re-imagined content lifecycle from an AI-first viewpoint. This is about creating intelligence in every point of the content lifecycle. Creating brand intelligence, campaign intelligence, marketing intelligence.
The Marketing Challenge
When Sitecore's CMO, Kathie Johnson, took the stage, she was quick to point out that this new product was built by the product team in close collaboration with real marketing teams. A product for marketers by marketers.
Kathie highlighted that marketing teams are facing three primary challenges:
- Do more with less. Teams need to show ROI for everything they do now, while also being asked to increase revenue, recognizing the squeeze on marketing budgets.
- Manage through complexity. Regardless of the team size, marketing organizations need to manage brand and campaigns through the complexity of distributed teams around the world and overlapping business needs and disparate brands. How do you know that everyone is aligned on the latest direction, consistently?
- Balance the strategic with the tactical. Marketing teams often lose time to work on the long-term strategy of the organization as the demand for short-term gains goes up. The complexity of that tactical work often eats away at any possibility to deliver over a longer strategic timeframe.
The promise from Sitecore is that their AI-powered Sitecore Stream will help folks get aligned on the brand. Nestle's brand assistant was showcased as an example of how content operations have evolved to be able to give a more natural interaction for marketers to align with the brand voice and direction.
What's in the box?
The announcement wrap-up was done by Chief Product Officer Roger Connolly who took to the stage to showcase what the product actually does. The ultimate goal of the product features seem to be aimed at guiding users to be more effective. It was explained that Sitecore Stream is intended to be delivered across the composable DXP portfolio, accessed in all the products (including Sitecore XP). There were three main segments of features highlighted in the keynote:
- Brand-aware AI
- Generative copilots
- AI-enhanced workflows
It seems the brand kit manager piece will let you upload all the information about a brand so that Sitecore Stream can understand the brand and be a trusted advisor to the user, rather than relying on generic models that don't understand the company voice, audience, or needs.
Roger made a specific call-out to appease those worried about data ownership and IP, making sure to state that Sitecore will never use your IP, that it is --YOUR- AI. Under the hood, Microsoft OpenAI Azure is being used and Roger again stated that the data is never used to train the model. This is a pretty key piece to getting AI adopted inside the enterprise, especially with how much data you would have to give it for it to understand your brand really well.
The Sitecore Campaign Copilot part of Sitecore Stream seems really intriguing. Roger Connolly stated that about 35% of marketing budgets are wasted due to poor briefs and having to go back to the board and start again. With Sitecore Stream the idea is that the Sitecore Campaign Copilot can guide a marketer to build a better brief from the start. It has the access to all the DAM assets, can suggest key activities/tasks for the campaign. The promise is that the team can focus on the execution while Sitecore Stream focuses on the campaign setup.
Roger also showed off a ''funnel view' that seems to give a dashboard where you can look at where your content is in the lifecycle. I've played with some of the views in Sitecore Content Hub's CMP before and it gave me the same sort of vibes, but I always found it very tricky to get working in Content Hub and often ignored. I'm hopeful this version in Sitecore Stream gets more love.
During the demos it was also shown that marketers could generate visual component drafts that will match the brand and campaign strategy. This could get you some quick visual drafts up and running for short-lived campaigns and I can see how this might leverage some of the out-of-the-box capabilities in XM Cloud to get you that one step closer to launched. The demo looks good, but I'd want to see how well this works in practice with the types of asset libraries I've seen before!
Do y'all remember Cortex?
I remember standing on the stage at Sitecore Symposium 2017 as we announced Sitecore Cortex and the digital assistant, a promise to bring the power of machine learning into the hands of marketers. Seven years later, the hype around generative AI has reached that point where the dreams of yesteryear are meeting with the power of today's technology and products can deliver on these promises in a way that simply wasn't possible back then.
I suspect that the experience with Sitecore Stream is going to be very much like our experiences with chat AIs today. There will be an initial amazement at what can be done with very little effort, and then a realization that we still need to do some actual tough work to bring about the results we actually want in the end.
My hope is that the promises by the Sitecore team hold true in that this will help most teams align and get started faster, allowing them to minimize the waste on initial startup and get to the hard marketing work at an earlier point.
Take the lead, Keep the lead
I tend to be more focused on the product announcements, so while it was great to hear from customers and Katie Ledecky, I'll admit that I didn't get as many 'wow' moments out of these pieces of the opening day stream.
That said, Katie Ledecky's grandfather's motto of "Take the Lead, Keep the Lead" did hit a chord with me. I feel like (at least in the business of marketing tools) there is a heavy importance to being ahead from a brand reputation and market share perspective. It is a lot more work for a company to come up from behind and truly disrupt the leaders in the space. Everyone wants to be #1 in the space, and it seems the latest trend is to draw the box of what space you are a leader in to exclude your competition from that box.
For a while, it feels like Sitecore has been trying to be disruptive, including disrupting themselves, racing to get to "where the puck is going to be" as the saying goes in hockey. This has given the room for others to try to close in on that lead that Sitecore had years ago, but the excitement around this year's announcements seemed firmly planted in an area that will speak to a lot of marketing teams right now:
- Put AI in the thing to meet the demands of executives to be more efficient
- Help the team get a bunch done with not enough time or people or budget
- Get people started faster without long onboarding to the brand
- Make sure Sitecore (and others) keep our data safe.
Sitecore Stream feels like a "Hold the Lead" play right now, but if they time this right and get the right adoption it could widen that lead, possibly even put some distance on those beloved Gartner and Forrester quadrants. Sitecore seems to be betting big on AI right now, but will people adopt it? It will be interesting to see what else comes out of the event!
Looking to read more about Sitecore Stream?
There is already quite a bit out there! Check out these addition resources that might be helpful!
